Movie Science . . .Revealed!

As the old Hollywood saying goes, the bigger the blockbuster, the most unlikely the plot. Filmmakers work hard to cultivate our suspension of disbelief–that is, as long as we’re entertained, we’re willing to overlook huge, unrealistic flaws in the film. Hollywood continues to abuse this tacit agreement in everything from low-budget productions to blockbusters. But apart from the obvious real-world discrepancies–guns that never run out of bullets, impossibly good-looking people, and the fact that you can always get a parking spot right next to the city building you’re headed for–Hollywood also relies on our ignorance of science to construct some seemingly-plausible contrivance to move the plot along. Below are some of the biggest movies that have made the least scientific sense.

Jurassic Park

The B.S. Theory: We can clone dinosaurs.

How they sold us: You have to remember that Jurassic Park was cutting edge for its time, and even more than fifteen years later the computer-generated dinosaurs were still cutting edge. For moviegoers back in the day, they were willing to put up with whatever concocted excuse the filmmakers could pull out of their story grab bag in order to see dinosaurs completely trash a metropolis.

As it stands, both the film and the Michael Crichton novel it was based upon start off on solid and rather ingenious grounds. Dinosaurs aren’t around today, but we can find their DNA in bones and (most importantly) inside blood-sucking mosquitoes and bugs long since fossilized in tree sap and turned into amber. From there, gaps in the genetic code were filled in with frog DNA, and aside from the whole dinosaurs-running-amok-and-eating-everyone part, everything worked out pretty swimmingly.

Why it’s wrong: The main problem with the cloning dinosaurs (or any extinct animal) is that DNA is frighteningly fragile. X-rays, gamma rays (Dinosaur Hulk smash!), toxins, viruses, and the good old sun all cause cumulative damage over our lifetimes. But add to that millions of years and the fossilization process (you know, turning organic matter into solid rock) does a number on DNA. The best locations for finding more intact DNA is from amber or bones found in certain favorable conditions (like the La Brea tar pits). Problem is, you’ve still got massive gaps. Finding enough material to get reasonably close to making not one but multiple species of dinosaurs would be damned near impossible, money nonwithstanding. Adding to the difficulty is that so few remains can be fossilized, or survive long enough to even be candidates for the process. Only about 1% of species alive on the earth are represented in the fossil record, and many species (including dinosaurs) are only known by fragments of bone or a handful of specimens. The odds are heavily against you. On the plus side, scientists managed to clone an extinct goat. That went extinct four years ago. And which died almost immediately after birth. Way to go, science!

Spider-Man/Superman/and almost every other superhero movie ever

The B.S. theory: The flying/web-slinging/rocket-propelled hero saves a person in mid-fall from making an awful mess on the busy street below.

How they sold us: Pure repetition. We like our comely heroines to survive, but also want action and danger. “Tell a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth”, the saying goes, so the modern equivalent would be “Throw a hot chick off a skyscraper a thousand times and people will believe a spandex-clad hero will save her.”

Why it’s wrong: Because physics is a cruel mistress that won’t let up, no matter how many times you scream the safety word. It’s also generally quite reliable. Drop something off a building, and it accelerates at roughly 10 meters per second every second, drag notwithstanding. Thus in the five or six seconds you’ve let your imperiled person drop, they’ll have picked up a fair amount of steam. So much steam, in fact, that abruptly stopping them is liable to do almost as much damage as just letting them turn into a ketchup-colored stain on the ground. Most of the time, the hero manages to snatch the person and they suffer not so much as whiplash from having their momentum suddenly arrested. One of the few times physics ever caught up to a hero was when Spider-Man’s web-line snapped the falling Gwen Stacey’s neck: tough luck, champ, if you’d merely dove down and grabbed her yourself she’d be alive and well today!

The Dark Knight

The B.S. Theory: Batman is going to China to grab a man who controls the mob’s money (evidently in the East if you want to be protected you sit in huge glass-and-steel skyscrapers with floor-to-ceiling windows instead of bunkers. Hitler had it wrong.) To aid his quest he uses a cellphone he’s turned into portable sonar. Later in the movie he applies the same technique on a massive scale to find the Joker.

How they sold us: Batman outfitter and whizman Lucius Fox describes it a custom cell phone that sends out high frequency pulses and maps the response time. It plays into the fact that half of us think the government’s listening in to our phone calls anyhow, and after all, it wouldn’t take much work to make the phone emit the frequencies needed to create bouncing pulses, right?

Why it’s wrong: Fact is few of us actually know the technology that goes into our portable devices, and when you get to a fundamental level the speaker and microphone of your average phone are pretty simple. You probably couldn’t send the burst to the phone, because of the extremely narrow range of frequencies cell phones use. That would mean you’d have to produce the pulse on the phone itself. You’re going to need a better microphone on that custom phone too, Mr. Fox, because even our iPhone’s mic is pretty bad at registering direction–which you know, when you’re trying to figure out where a sound is bouncing back from, would be pretty crucial.

So all the above problems are hypothetical, yes, but it’s more an engineering problem than anything else, and considering the amount of money Bruce Wayne has thrown into his crime-fighting money pit, we’ll just accept that he can create a high-tech sonar cell phone. But what about turning every other cell phone in the city into a similar device? That’s assuming that every cell phone from your Palm Pre to Jitterbug would be capable of producing the same ultrasonic frequencies and recording the direction of bounced waves. Not likely. Unless everyone in Gotham has super-sweet smartphones and killer 3G connectivity.

The Core/Sunshine/Armageddon

The B.S. Theory: Asteroid heading to wipe us off the map? Nuke it. Earth’s rotation out of whack? Nuke it. Sun’s fusion slowly dying? …Wow, you’re a quick learner, aren’t you.

How they sold us: Deep down, we’d all like to think that the atom is our friend–why do you think all those ’50s and ’60s comic books had every Joe Six-Pack living on Main Street get superpowers from so much as looking at a radioactive flea the right way? And considering the nuke is pretty much the most catastrophic weapon conceived by mankind, it would be nice to think that we can use our stockpile for saving ourselves, rather than blowing everyone up. Plus, all that power’s good for something, right?

Why it’s wrong: People might have nagging concerns about the actual science behind some of these movies from the get-go. Drilling to the center of the earth seems rather hard; you would wonder why someone hadn’t done that before if it was possible to drill through the molten mantle of the earth. That’s the premise of The Core; Sunshine, meanwhile, has a crew riding a massive bomb the size of Manhattan to the sun in order to somehow blow it up and get it working again. Accepting the fact that they’ve managed to create shielding sufficient to protect humans from the massive dose of radiation they’d be soaking up on their trip to the merry ole’ fireball (actually, not as far-fetched as you may think), they still have someone touch the sun with his hand.

Ok, so The Core and Sunshine manage to turn themselves into laughing stock; what about blowing up that threatening space rock a la Armageddon? Assuming NASA and their contractors actually managed to get a crew into space to confront the extraterrestrial threat in time after somehow missing the space rock for months beforehand (remember these are the people who lost $125 million in an instant because someone forgot to check if they were measuring in inches or centimeters), blowing the asteroid up into two optimal pieces still would cause tremendous damage. While the asteroid pieces would be a lot less massive than the moon (you know, that thing that causes the tides and makes people crazy during certain times of the month), the fragments would also be much, much closer than the moon, with correspondingly scaled effects. The massive tidal forces created would cause global hurricane-force winds and mega-tsunamis. By the time the space rocks had disappeared into the cosmos, we’d be looking at the disruption of the global food chain and low-lying areas completely covered in water. In Armageddon, they simply return home as if nothing had happened. (Well, except Paris bit it, but the filmmakers don’t treat that as much of a loss.)

From this small selection of movies, the moral of the story is clear: if your science is bad, pretend it isn’t.