Considering the dismissal of a movie's content with the remark that "It's only a movie" it seems to me that, aside from the essential flippancy of the remark toward the other person who committed the crime of speaking there is a particular dismissal of anything resembling artistic aspiration and critical standards as we know them--especially when it is the answer to somebody's pointing out a movie's lack of realism.
The plain and simple truth is that as is generally the case with modern art forms those making movies endeavor to achieve the
illusion of reality, in part because audiences have to be made to "believe" in what they are seeing to become emotionally involved in it in that conventional "dramatic" way most storytelling, and most movies, aim for, all as the same effect matters even in light entertainment. ("It's funny because it's true!" goes the common explanation of something that the person in question finds funny.)
Of course, there is such a thing as artistic license--in part because transforming the stuff of life into a 90-minute or 2-hour or 3-hour dramatic presentation requires a good deal of selection and compression and combination and distillation. (Hence such innovations as
the montage.) Yet their makers generally do not aspire to get things
wrong, and their doing so is not generally thought to their credit. It is therefore far from illegitimate to point the fact out--no matter what the idiots who blow off any observation with "It's only a movie!" say.
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