Movies really are full of falsehoods big and small. Scenes showing car interiors usually involve matte effects so that they don't actually have to drive the car

Movies really are full of falsehoods big and small. Scenes showing car interiors usually involve matte effects so that they don't actually have to drive the car in natural light settings. Fight scenes are dance choreography with foley "thwack" sounds. Daytime scenes are shot at dawn or dusk, where the lighting is most forgiving. Nighttime scenes are shot with ample additional lighting so that the actors show clearly. Dialogue is unnatural and written around plot conveniences according to the strict "three-act" structure. Scenes containing dialogue are typically composed of dozens of different cuts, with long takes and ensemble performances being the exceptional cases. Characters walk through doors that are apparently part of the same location, but are actually completely different sets. And that's describing movies as they were made 40 years ago, before Star Wars renewed film's direction towards pure spectacle. Since "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" it's been possible to make a production that is essentially a live-action cartoon, with actors and a few props superimposed on an otherwise fully CGI world. This is the route that every new blockbuster movie has taken. Even the shots in "Fury Road", which are based on a lot of real vehicles and people doing real stuntwork, have undergone a massive amount of post-processing. Also worth noting is that the particular ways in which "realistic" things are represented change over time as our understanding of the world shifts: Films depicting war scenes in the 50's or 60's might use WWII or Korean War footage as the inspiration, with large units rappelling or parachuting in, adopting a slightly hunched stance and shooting bursts from the hip to liberate(or oppress) a place or people. Films after the Vietnam war are more likely to focus on small groups engaged in wilderness survival, maintaining communications or finding hidden enemies. The two types of film use different effects and foley, and that isn't purely a matter of budget or technology! The whole aesthetic changed, in a more complex way, to reflect the new design goals. When you watch films that are very low budget and keep things simple, they tend to look ordinary, because they don't have all this production gloss put on top; their falsehoods, where they show up, are more the ones inherent to film and to storytelling, and not visibly designed effects.