Top 10 Scientifically Inaccurate Movies
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Allie @ Gone Hollywood | Thursday, July 24, 2008 |
If movies were completely scientifically accurate, they’d probably be as interesting as a Physics 101 lecture.
In real life, there are no explosions in space, gas usually doesn’t explode from a lit cigarette.
Some movies, though, put science front and center in the story and more often than not the science proves to be head-slappingly bad. Here are the top 10 offenders:
Armageddon
We could put together a long list of all the things wrong with Michael Bay’s feel-good ode to global destruction, but NASA has already and they counted at least 168 mistakes. But perhaps the biggest problem is that the plot itself — splitting a Texas-sized rock in two with a single nuke — has a Texas-sized hole in it. We don’t have a nuclear bomb anywhere near powerful enough to do the job. As strange as it might seem, this is a case of a Michael Bay movie not having a big enough explosion.
Independence Day
That mammoth mothership hovering over the earth in geostationary orbit would be doing more than just freaking out the world’s population. Because of its close proximity and mass — 1/4th that of the moon, according to the film — the flying saucer’s gravitational pull would cause massive tidal waves, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The aliens wouldn’t even have to roll out their anti-matter ray to blow up the White House — it would already be underwater.
Starship Troopers
Could a band of cave-dwelling, preverbal giant insects really have the sophisticated mathematics and technology to hurl a rock millions of miles through space to crash into Earth? Plus, 70% of the planet’s surface is covered in water, so they only had a 3 out of 10 chance at even hitting solid ground, let alone a major city like Buenos Aires.
The Day After Tomorrow
Roland Emmerich brought his trademark academic rigor to the realm of climatology and the result proved to be so silly that NASA refused to help with the filming of the movie. For one thing, it would require most of Antarctica to melt in order to submerge New York City to the level it is in the movie. If all the rays of the sun were directed at the South Pole, its ice would melt in about two and half years. This ridiculousness drove Duke University paleoclimatologist William Hyde to publicly state, “This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery.”
The Core
In the movie, the Earth’s inner core — a nickel-iron mass about 1500 miles in diameter — stops rotating, causing the planet’s magnetic field to collapse and microwave radiation from space to blast through the atmosphere. But microwaves aren’t affected by magnetism, and the radiation that comes from space is too weak to damage anything here. What’s more, if the core did stop rotating for whatever reason, we’d have more to worry about than that. The energy stored in the core would have to go somewhere, and the effect on the planet would be equivalent to five trillion nuclear bombs going off at once.
The Matrix
Much in the way of physics in the Matrix — like dodging bullets and running up walls — gets a pass because it’s all within a massive virtual world. But in reality, our supposed robot overlords are a bit dim. Humans are a remarkably inefficient energy source. Instead of turning the human race into Duracells, the machines would probably get more energy just setting those goopy people pods on fire.
Jurassic Park
Having a wildlife park full of dinosaurs would be a really cool idea if it weren’t for a few problems. No, not imperfect security or the possibility of spontaneous lizard sex changes. The problem is that it would be almost impossible to clone the dinosaurs based on DNA pulled from the guts of a 25 million-year-old mosquito. The dinosaur DNA’s double helix most certainly would have been broken down into individual chunks, mixing together with whatever else the mosquitoes might have eaten along with some of the insect’s own genetic material. Any creature constructed from that mess might be the stuff of nightmares, but probably wouldn’t look like a T. Rex.
Total Recall
The red planet’s gravitational pull is roughly 1/3rd that of the Earth’s. So if, for example, an Austrian bodybuilder were to visit Mars, he would be bounding across the room like Michael Jordan. Another problem: when exposed to the thin atmosphere of Mars, like bad guy Cohaagen at the end of the movie, you would likely suffer from a raging case of the bends and you would asphyxiate — both of which are plenty lethal — but your head wouldn’t bulge out and explode like an overused stress toy.
Outbreak
A monkey threatens a small town with a virus that kills everybody in less time than your average DMV visit, and only Dustin Hoffman can stop it. The trouble with a disease that virulent is it kills the host too fast to spread. Otherwise, we would be dead from the Ebola virus. Also, it generally takes longer to make a cure from monkey serum than it does to make a latte. Dustin Hoffman does look great in a hazmat suit, though.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Indiana Jones has survived a lot of improbable adventures, be it fleeing ancient spherical boulders or fighting off cult members while dangling off a rope bridge. But few scrapes have tested the bounds of believability more than Indy’s escape from a nuclear bomb blast thanks to a lead-lined fridge. The problem is that, even if he didn’t get flattened, horribly burned or suffocated (kids, don’t hide in refrigerators), Indy almost certainly would have gotten a lethal dose of radiation from the fallout. And that’s a lot scarier than snakes.
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Psh. Indy can do pirouettes inside the fridge next time, just to prove how awesome he is. And Starship Troopers, I think the point there is that there are smart bugs out there too ;)
I could be wrong, but I think the point of Total Recall is that the entire thing was actually his ‘Vacation’, starting from when the vacation machine allegedly breaks. Everything after that point is what he was hoping for in his ‘vacation’. So really, that complaint would go under the same pass as the matrix physics
In Total recall, the audience is never really told if Quaid ever actually ‘got his ass to mars.’ When Arnold went to the virtual vacation company, they told him everything that was going to happen. The whole story could have been in his head. Perhaps the laws of physics were inaccurate at the vacation company, but not the movie itself.
The Core
“the radiation that comes from space is too weak to damage anything here.”
Read up on gamma ray bursts.
isn’t that why it’s called science fiction?
I’d like to add Ocean’s Eleven to this list. The EMP device would have the opposite effect of that portrayed in the movie: the radiation blast would fry cell phones and anything else made with semiconductors *permanently*, and the power and lights would be completely unaffected.
This is so completely stupid.
Everyone always ignores the fact that in STAR WARS the space ships or fighters can do these nice rolling loops and tight curves in the vacuum of space with NO GRAVITY!!!!!!!!!!!!.
Excuse me, but where is the air resistance coming from that will allow you to do this?
In the televison series ‘Babylon Five’ the attack fighters had engines in all possible angles so they could just flip around any which way in zero gravity !!!
What about “Signs” a movie about supposed, technically advanced aliens invading Earth. Problem is that water has the effect of acid to these aliens and they decide to roam around earth butt naked during their attack. Come on!!! If these aliens could build space craft to fly light years to Earth, you would have thought they would have the technology to make water proof suits?
You think?
I refuse any M. Night Shyamalan related movie.
BTW. The Sixth Sense was a great movie. Not sure what happened to all the others.
Independence Day-: The mothership weighed 1/4 of the moon, remember the “little” saucers that broke off the mothership, over 10 if i remember correctly. They weigh much less…
Independence Day… forget the gravitational forces of a floating continent… they infected an alien computer system with a computer virus developed on our technologies with our programing codes and used an earth lap-top to connect it to thier system!
I mean, holy freaking christ….
Also, as for starship troopers… basic earthworms perform advanced calculus in order to correctly direct themselves towards food sources they can only faintly detect through feet of soil so a giant intergalactic race of deep space bugs with gargantuan brains running the “hive mind” isn’t all that much of a suspension of disbelief.
As for indy…. well thats just… he survived is…. anyway, the lead lining would have prevented the radiation (if thick enough) while in the fridge… so I wouldnt have made that the coup de grace… maybe the fact that lead melts at less than 1000F and nukes produce temperatures that are hotter than surface of the Sun and would have burned him to death as you said should have been it. but hey, it’s your blog, just my opinion.
Jurassic Park is a movie about developing the technology to isolate dinosaur DNA and create clones from it. It is the basic premise of the film. If you say it is “almost impossible” to do this, you are really saying it may be possible. That is like saying 2001 is scientifically inaccurate because it would be almost impossible to make a computer as advanced as HAL. The movie is about what might happen if it was done.
Also, you wouldn’t create a clone by mashing up DNA from a bunch of species and creating some sort of crossbreed of all of them. You would isolate specific DNA.
I think I’m the only one that doesn’t expect fictional movies to always follow every single scientific rule. I mean, some elements of reality should be there, yes. But these are FICTIONAL movies. Technically, they could completely bypass all these rules if they wanted to.
So the huge diamond fields near the Core were accurate?
You are all missing the point. The genre is Science Fiction.
Re: Starship Troopers. I always felt that it was suggested that the asteroid in that movie was not actually sent by the bugs, but rather a “convenient” accident that allowed the world leaders to rally support for a massive assault against the bugs. Perhaps a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as justification for the Vietnam war even though details later emerged that suggested that it didn’t really happen.
Yea, its science fiction and I love the genre dearly. However sometimes they really butcher the science part. The key to good science fiction is good science and good fiction, not just one. Also the bit about The Core? Microwaves are ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES. This means that yes they do in fact get affected by the earths magnetic field. Thank you to fred@lamasrus.com for the space flight issue. Im a huge fan of both star wars and babylon 5 and its good to see im not the only one who noticed that.
Your list is getting pwnd, and now I will add my $.02
Outbreak. They had the serum from the original outbreak in the ’60s, so it’s not like they were working from scratch. Also, the virus had a long enough incubation time to be transferred. Your semi-witty comment about the lines at the DMV is patently wrong, as is much of this entire post. You have taken science fiction, judged it based on science fact, and somehow, managed to prove most of these films’ plausibility.
That takes a special breed of flame-bait.
Comments are Closed
Re: Day After Tomorrow.
The Flooding of New York was not a result of sudden sea level rise. It was due to a massive low pressure system over North-Eastern USA that caused a rather large storm surge.
The real stupid stuff in the film was avgas freezing in helicopters which required temperatures a LOT colder than what they were.
Also problematic was the idea that the cyclonic low pressure system was sucking super-cold air from the stratosphere down to the surface. The air pressure up there is exceptionally low so it would be very difficult to replace warm air at normal air pressure with cold air of a much lower pressure.