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Impossible Movie Stunts?
ThousandStars asks: "After watching Spider-Man, I noticed some miraculous physics like Spider-Man falling faster than a girl to save her and the girl catching the cable car at the end. It reminded me of a list of 12 problems with the plot and science of Independence Day, which brings me to my question: What are the most implausible, impossible and sheerly rediculous science-related things you have seen in movies?"
The Open University in the UK had a series of short programmes called "Hollywood Science", which checks out the scientific credibility of scenes from films, presented by Robert Llewelyn (of "Scrapheap Challenge" aka "Junkyard Wars" fame).
They have a website here with information from the shows.
The simulation of Paul Newmans stomach in "Cool Hand Luke" was particularly gruesome...
-Baz
And not just because it was a dodgy film, either. There was one sequence where they had brought some freshly-cast gold bars from the 1800's into the generic-near-future era where all the time travelling was taking place from.
All very well and good, but during the debriefing sequence, a scientist type person proudly exclaimed that they had determined the age of the bars by carbon dating them.
Ignoring the fact that the gold bars were inorganic, and thus unable to be carbon dated, (I'm not entirely sure about the process, so I'll let them get away with that one), they screwed up big time...
The gold bars DIDN'T AGE when they were brought into the future, so how could it have been dated as 100+ years old when it had technically only existed for a couple of days?
And while I'm at it... Terminator 2. (Electric Boogaloo?) How the HELL did the T-1000, being made of molten metal alloy, get through the time displacement unit, when it was previously established that only organics could pass through? They could at least have had the T-1000 appear in a ball of synthetic flesh, then ooze out to become Robert Patrick. Would have spoilt the 'surprise' that Arnie was the good guy this time, but there's still undiscovered tribes in the Peruvian rainforests that know about THAT clever plotting device.
Disclaimer: Yes, I know they're just movies. And I'm prepared to accept Time Travel paradoxes at face value, as long as they're consistent.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Well, the light was so amazingly bright, that it even reflected off the almost non-reflective sewer walls...Theoretically that would be possible - given the light would be strong enough. Now tell me how to make such a small object emit so much light?
But then again, how possible is it that vampires roam the earth?
Movies aren't supposed to be real. As someone pointed out allready, "isn't the fact that Peter Parker was bit by a radioactive spider and turned into spider man impossible?"
Movies only attempt to reflect reality when convenient and/or feasible. Lets look at the X-Men. A great film. Are any of the stunts possible if you're not some kind of a mutant?
Now, I get really pissed off every time I see a computer in a hollywood movie and it looks like they just made up some wierdo TV-like screen and pretend its a computer, if only to satisfy some director's need for artistic clarity. I yearn to see real PC's be they linux or windows or whatever, just because it is so easy to represent PC's accurately, and hollywood never does.
But my favorite physics challenged stunt? That would be how they managed to the lovely rewrite Lt. Yar in STTNG back into the script by having her killed, sent back in time through a portal in an alternate universe, and having her half-romulan daughter who some how is in the present time the same age that Yar would have been and looks exactly like Yar even though she is half-romulan. Man, that's a stretch.
But looking for reality amongst the tale-spinners is at best a nebulous task. It is better to look for reasons that a movie makes us want to look the other way at those cheezy comuter screens, the conveniant plot devices, and even something obvious like how fast an object will fall to the groud.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
My favorite Hollywood cliche is the huge Nixie tube countdown clock, usually on a bomb so we can have the tension as the hero does whatever he has to do before the clock hits 00:00.
In "Daylight" Stallone goes deep into the tunnel ventilation system and through the temporily stopped huge fan to find the clock mounted on the wall ON THE INSIDE telling him how much time he has before the fan starts spinning again. WHO would EVER see that clock where it is?
In "Broken Arrow" and "True Lies" and countless James Bond movies we have the H-bombs which have the clock timer/display and a key pad/key switch to arm/disarm ON THE BOMB which is, of course, usually carried way down in the bomb bay of a bomber. Who is supposed to see the clock, insert the key, and punch in the codes? The crew is some distance away when the bomb is launched and they will want be a LOT further away when the clock hits 00:00.
And the only way you can outrun the blast from a huge explosion is if you can put the blast in slow motion while you're in the foreground running at double speed and even then it's a good idea if you're in a studio far from the blast.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I always liked how any person that needed to do something sneaky had a perfectly made, totally lifelike mask of whatever other person they needed. It's especially good how at the end, while being shot at and with glass and whatnot flying all over the place, Tom Cruise manages to apply a mask to himself such that it fools the bad guys. I mean, it's not like it's just some halloween mask here.
I felt like the movie hated me.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
The movie Barbarella is my favorite.
First, of course, it's fun to watch Jane Fonda cavort around in skimpy outfits, especially given how "serious" she got later in life about various causes.
One of the best parts of the entire movie occurs when she's cruising around in some kind of pirate ship that sails across a frozen ocean of ice.
Propped amid cushions and pillows below decks, she questions her lover about how they are going to go anywhere now that the wind has died down. He indicates that he has a solution to that problem: they can make their own wind!
Cut to camera showing the ships sails puffing out and the ship moving forward.
Meanwhile, firmly planted in the stern of the boat is a large fan blowing into the sails and they are moving forward!
I watched this movie with a bunch of nerds who couldn't get into the romanticism of the moment; they were heard muttering something about Newton's 3rd Law.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Thank you.
"Oh, hey, this asteroid the size of Texas is less than 8 days from Earth, which in cosmic terms is like saying that a baseball thrown at 90 mph is about 3 cm from hitting your face. But we still believe that a force less than that of a supernova has a hope of detracting it from hitting the Earth. In fact, we think that we can blow it up from the inside and split it in two, and the two halves will just come within 5 miles of the Earth's atmosphere and continue right out into space, no problem whatsoever."
Armageddon makes Isaac Newton cry.
The simple fact that they've always refered to it as "warp" speed and not "light" speed is testamount to a potential loophole in general relativity, that a bubble of space could potentially move faster than light, even though no object in that space can, relative to the bubble itself.
The only problem with this is, assuming that its possible, and it might be, the numerous plot elements involved that allow weapons fire, transporting, and other fun activities while in warp.
At least the new Enterprise show has a possibility of correcting some bad errors since most of these magical technologies either don't exist yet, or are in their infant stages. They don't yet have shields, force fields were just introduced last episode and are a buggy contraption at this point. Everyone except Malcolm is too scared to use the transporter, so we don't have any transporter based plot elements to screw up yet. They seem to be spending a lot less time on the technical aspects of interstellar space travel and more on the social and politcal aspects of it. Which really isn't a bad thing. Its a lot harder to screw that up.
Of course, in the pilot they go the Klingon homeworld's location all wrong. But they gotta screw up SOMETHING... hehe
-Restil
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