When it comes to scientific accuracy in sci-fi movies, it’s no secret that most filmmakers play it fast and loose, with audience entertainment being the ultimate goal.
Luckily, a lot of moviegoers are quite adept at suspending their disbelief for the sake of preserving their fantasy, (and getting their money’s worth out of movie ticket prices) but when you add up all the scientific faux pas -even in films we consider to be groundbreaking – you start to realize why it’s named science “fiction”.
Bad Science: Jurassic Park
Source: Drafthouse
Jurassic Park is a lovable piece of cinema that has a place in the hearts of sci-fi lovers everywhere, but it is ripe with implausibility, as the fact stands that extinction is permanent. Take that out of the equation, and we’d still be fighting to find the dinosaurs’ DNA INTACT.
If that fairy tale did indeed come to light, then we’d be taking on the severe improbability of successfully extracting, sequencing, assembling genomes into chromosomes, and finally- the cherry on top of this inconceivable sundae- injecting these chromosomes into a compatible, living egg.
So unless someone has an unhatched dinosaur egg lying around, forget it, guys. Also, the species of mosquito shown here in the amber (Toxorhynchites rutilusis) is the only kind in its species that doesn’t actually suck blood. Oops.
Source: Business Insider
Independence Day
Source: Flick Sided
“Hey Mr. Goldblum, we are in quite a pickle here; turns out sophisticated aliens want to destroy us all and live here on Earth. We’re going to need you to write some malware code to bring down an entire alien computer system.
Yeah, we’ve had access to their scout craft for 50-some-odd years, and our top scientists couldn’t figure the darn thing out! Think we can get that virus delivered in about an hour? Wow, thanks! The Earth owes you one.” …and lo, Earth was saved because aliens were thoughtful enough to install USB or parallel ports on their computers to grant Earthlings access.
Transformers
Source: Blogspot
There are plenty of movies that employ this next inaccuracy, but the Transformers films seem to rely heavily on it. Whether a human being is falling from a tall building, bridge, or any other structure to which the laws of Newtonian physics apply, no Transformer robot can simply “catch” one and expect it to retain its human shape and general state of alive-ness.
Traveling from terminal velocity to a dead stop via giant robot hug will have the same effect as letting the same poor human land with a splat on the sidewalk. As they say, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the stop.
Bad Hollywood Science: X-Men
Source: Science Fiction
The X-men franchise could have concocted any other reasoning as to why these characters have superpowers, and it would probably be more believable than calling it “evolution”.
No random gene mutations exist that could accelerate at the pace needed to produce any X-men character in the time frame they present. Even if you subscribe to the theory of Punctuated equilibrium -rapid (on a geologic time scale) events of genetic branching out- you’re not likely to end up gaining awesome super powers, or looking anything like Wolverine.
Armageddon
Source: Alpha Coders
While this 1998 film about an asteroid the size of Texas hurling its way toward Earth has many improbabilities, it’s also known for its impossibilities – so much so that the film is actually shown to NASA trainees to see if they are able to spot all 168 of them.
To start off the list of the improbable, there is absolutely no way we would only be able to spot an asteroid like this at the last minute. We would know about it, and we’d have been tracking it; with a supposed diameter of 870 miles, the asteroid wouldn’t have many places to hide.
The movie would also have us believe that drilling 800 feet into an 870 mile wide asteroid would do anything at all, as that depth would be akin to barely scratching the surface of a soccer ball. The film’s “experts” try explaining away only drilling this far down with some other bit of fake science, but that only exists to provide a Deus Ex Machina for the plot.
Bad Science: Titanic
Source: CBS Local
Titanic is certainly one of the most beloved films of the 1990s, and while director James Cameron is known for being a high-paying stickler for details, one definitely escaped him while making Titanic – much to the chagrin of physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
It seems that Cameron’s star-crossed lovers Jack and Rose were floating on driftwood under the wrong sky. Given the longitude, latitude and the time of day that the Titanic sank in 1912, the stars were so glaringly misaligned (and mirrored from the center!) that Tyson felt compelled to let Cameron know, writing a letter outlining how the acclaimed director’s post-production star field was “Not only wrong, but lazy.”
As his response, Cameron says: “And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that, and I should have put the right star field in. So I said ‘All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I’ll put it in the movie.'” And with that, we get to imagine Neil deGrasse Tyson sitting in on his couch, watching Titanic in 3D with a historically correct view of the sky, munching on a giant tub of popcorn.
Hear Neil talk about it below, and how there may or may not have been a nod to the flub in the first episode of Cosmos:
