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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 need to explain everything with fake science.
I'd much rather the quick-and-glib-and-then-ignore it science of how spiderman or the hulk etc got their powers than, for example wait for the fourth movie and then decide that the force is a microbe.
Get the EULA T-shirt
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
Geeks throwing a party and getting laid.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Anything in this movie .... Total disregard for the laws of physics - that motorcyle scene was ridiculous.
Favorite generic one: Explosions have no shrapnel, they only hurl the hero to where he needs to be.
Uber-geeks all use macs...
If you drop a hammer and a feather in an atmosphere, the hammer will win. Also note in the movie, when Spider-Man (don't forget the dash (tm)!) dove after Mary Jane, he did so in a nice Olympic-approved diving form - Mary Jane was falling in a nice frat-party-got-her-drunk type crouch. He probably had a much lower coefficient of drag. Plus, didn't he shoot her with webbing and pull her to him, then shoot webbing above to divert their fall? I can't remember if he did both web shots or just the latter one. Too fast, too many action scenes for me to remember the picky details of each one. And I missed Lucy Lawless in the movie - but didn't know she was in it until afterwards, so wasn't looking. *shrug*
:) Plus, let's face it, Kirsten Dunst has it all over realistic physics, any day of the week.
Still, much more realistic than M&M's floating in a nice double helix!
He falls faster than MJ because she's laying flat, and he's in a diving posture, causing less air resistance. Also, if neither had hit terminal velocity, and when he jumped he did something to push himself downwards, he could be able to move downwards faster than her, initially, until they both reached terminal velocity and stopped accellerating. Like if I were to drop a call and fire a gun into the ground. The bullet would reach first, because it started moving downwards faster.
At least that's how I want to think of it, I liked the movie.
`Lex - Find Me Here: Text Appeal
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!"
On a second thought, there might be a tiny, winy bit of unbelievable things in there, like the Heisenberg compensators making the transporters work. There is your neighbourhood dysons-sphere conveniently built around a sun to harvest energy (Next generation episode: Relics).
We shouldn't really get into discussing warp speed, everybody knows that Stephen Hawking is working on it. There are smaller things in Trek that go by hardly recognized. E.g. the weather control systems that are only mentioned when failing.
Force fields are mentioned so often in Scfi-Fi we just have to believe in the possiblity. There seem to be working experiments with magnetic "shields". Metaphasic shields on the other hand are something completely different, although they have become as common as cloaking devices in the Star Trek universe.
Let's face it, fellow trekkers: Most of this stuff is unreachable and will remain so for a long time, if not forever. ;(
Now off for a cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot, freshly converted from dilithium generated energy to matter by a food replicator ...
Line 9: Argument of type SIGNATURE expected.
Like, nobody who knew both of them could figure out that Clark Kent and Superman are the same guy?
That's not bad science - that's totally re-inventing human powers of observation!
If you noticed, spidey had his arms pulled in and his legs straight to achieve a low drag coefficient. MJ was flailing about with her extremedies all over the place. Spidey would fall faster. Skydivers use this to make formations. Now would spider-man have fallen fast enough to catch her? No. Would the plot have sucked if she died? Probably.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Large parts of the story. I realised this was going to be a "switch your brain off and enjoy" type of flick when the helicopter was in exactly the right place to catch the ejecting pair from a Jumbo jet flying at mumble miles per hour. After that, I quit analysing science and stuck to analysing the angels in order to be able to enjoy the film.
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?
Cool film, but anyone remember the intro sequence? How Bond escapes from the base?
:-)
Essentially, to get away from a fight, he tries to take off in a light aircraft but has to jump out. Plane keeps on going down the runway and off the end and over a cliff into a pretty fast vertical dive. Meanwhile, Bond has stopped the problem, jumped onto a motorbike, charged down the runway after the plane and gone over the end. He then skydives at the plane, climbs into it, pulls it out of a vertical dive and flys off to safety.
Something in that doesn't seem quite right
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
...has to be the single most atrocious movie in this respect. (Not to mention the completely farcical characters in the first place)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The bus jumping over the gap in the freeway? Bucking up like that from a flat piece of road?
;-) it would have dropped 7-8m in that gap.
Last time I watched that film (good fun, bad science) I did some quick mental maths. Memory says that, assuming no air resistance and no invisible ramp to make it kick up like that
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
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
Deep space = No air -> No sound
( in case you didn't know
RFC1925
Enemy of the State. 'nuff said.
I agree.
And for light reading, here is a Science Review.
This site is dedicaterd to the topic of infamously bad science in movies.
Look no further for humorous reading.
Me.
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
If you're *really* interested in this, go out and buy a copy of The Physics of Star Trek from your local bookstore. The best $10 I ever spent.
Just how fast would his webs have to fire to catch the top of New York's tallest buildings while he is falling and only ~40 feet from the ground?
Steve Austin (Lee Majors) a.k.a. the $6m man, prevents a helicopter from taking off by pulling it down. It's clear that it isn't his extra weight that's holding the chopper back, because they play the cheesy "using all his bionic strength" music, and show the chopper being pulled down "in the kind of slow motion that we use to suggest, that yes, he is moving at 60 mph".
That was so implausable that I laughed myself silly when I saw that.
You could've hired me.
But the fact that he manages to snatch a girl out of the air by falling faster in a nice tuck position in a latex body suit than the girl fully clothed in a spread eagle position, that bothers you.
Just Checking.
As for me, I'd have to go with Harry Potter, because everyone knows that brooms can't fly.
Where I learned that light flows like water....
Uh, hello???!! anybody here ever see The Matrix?
What I found more interesting was that the "web goo" seemed pretty thick and substantive, and it seems pretty clear that Spidey is expelling more than his entire body volume in goo in some scenes. [Insert porn-movie joke here.] Maybe he chugs protein shakes or something? Or maybe the goo expands a LOT as it is expelled from his body (accept, of course, that the goo is super-stong and super-sticky). (And of course, the properties of the web goo change from scene to scene and sometimes even within a single scene.)
Of course, we are supposed to suspend disbelief, and accept that the laws of physics can vary around our super-hero and super-villain.
It's a silly movie. Let's get over it.
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
I liked the scene in I think Tommorrow Never Dies when Bond is being chased down a road by a helicopter. The kicker is that the helicopter is pitched about 45 degrees forward, so its blades are tearing up the little market stands lining the road, and yet the helicopter is going about 10 mph. No broken blades, no acceleration, weird.
Spencer Ogden
As to hair. I think he uses the same stuff Charlies Angles use.
:-)
I don't no what it's called but it allows you to come through a fight without a hair out of place.
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
Despite being a bad movie, I was shocked to see a blatant disregard for even basic physics in that scene where the double helix of M&M's is spinning in a circle. (I guess if the M&M's had sufficient gravity then such motion is possible....) Anyway, nice "science" fiction guys.
-Derek
If you were fast/strong enough, you could pull down a helicopter using only your own mass. You'd have to be moving "a little" faster than 60mph though...
Of course by jerking downwards so fast you'd also launch yourself. Depending on the mass difference between you and the helicopter, you'd perhaps have to put yourself into orbit.
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Let's not stir that bag of worms...
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
Actually, just to nitpick, he used a Macintosh. A "MAC" is an Ethernet address. I suppose this plot element would have been somewhat feasable had they worked in scenes showing how he figured out how to make his computer interface with the alien tech. and then spent several weeks learning to code for it.
;-)
The fact he gets drunk one morning and then suddenly has the answer is pretty fucking stupid though.
Still, I wonder what kind of licencing deal Apple gave those aliens for their servers to run AppleShare IP
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
My favourite from that movie was when the not-so-nice scientist (you know, the same guy who was Newman in Seinfeld) was cought on a live camera, which in the movie of course was nothing more than a quicktime file running.
Hell they didn't even bother hiding the progress bar.
Everybody knows that you'd need to use ftp to do that. Or scp/sftp if you didn't want random people nicking your cash en route!
Independence Day
Hackers
Tomb Raider
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
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."
Well no, but there is a literary technique called Suspension of Disbelief. Authors create a self-consistent universe in which we accept the fact that certain things happen. In Star Trek they have transporters, in X-Men they have mutant powers, and in Star Wars Luke can use the Force. But in the case of a good movie/book, these things are clearly delineated, and have limits. Storm cannot, for instance, shoot lasers from her eyeballs because that's not one of her powers. Captain Picard can't transport the entire Enterprise across the galaxy because their transporters just can't do that.
On the other hand, a bad movie will violate their own rules (and/or other accepted rules like physics) when convenient to advance the plot. Tom Cruise jumping off the nose of a helicopter, which happens to be flying in a tunnel, and landing on the nose of a 200MPH train is my favorite example. Prior to this, we are not presented with a self-consistent universe in which Tom Cruise is part superman. He is just a regular guy. We are not told that he has adamantium bones, and therefore will not break every bone in his body when hitting a 200MPH train. We are not told that this is a special magical helicopter that can fly in tunnels without being sucked up to the ceiling. The scene was created solely for the purpose of advancing the plot, and is inconsistent, and sucks.
Many of the greatest novels/movies of all time have created a self-consistent universe, and then explored the limits of that universe. No, it doesn't match with our universe. Yes, they can do things that when taken out of context in and of themselves are incompatible with what we know. But, in general, we know about these "powers" before they are used, and new "powers" are not invented on the spot. When some new "power" is introduced, it is well explained, and becomes part of the universe. For example, using EMP pulses to kill the squiddies in The Matrix. The device has become part of the Matrix universe, and I imagine will be used in future movies with little explanation. Some examples of great universes: Dune, The Matrix, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Asimov's Robot novels (3 laws of robotics).
If you're going to violate laws of physics in particular, authors had better be prepared to create an entire universe with different laws of physics. Because as far as I know, you just can't do it. Physics is an accepted, implied characteristic of a universe, whether the author spells it out or not. There are only a handful of exceptions that we as audiences have come to accept. Namely: faster-than-light-travel and/or wormholes/hyperspace/stargates. But hey, I am a physicist, so maybe I'm biased. ;)
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Wow, rather him than me and I'd love to see an explanation of that. Doesn't sound at all possible but hey, if they did it...
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Without the twist, the car would have had to have landed either on its roof, or if it completed a 360 degree flip, it would have landed on its tires facing the same direction it had originally been heading.
Which is not what happened.
Somehow without twisting this car is facing one direction, does a backflip and lands on its tires facing the opposite direction. This clearly violates the laws of physics.
For me, this impossibility ruined what was an otherwise well-researched and accurate film.
Lasers Controlled Games!
In one of the James bond (sorry, don't recall which one), James has a watch with a "magnetic beam" which he uses to move a car, and to undress a woman :) The first time is the more difficult to pass by, as he holds his watch with only 2 fingers and is still able to move (at distance) a car.
Nitpickers. More than enough nitpicking for all of you.
(spider-man)
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Well, light actually *can* bend if the gravitational force is strong enough... for example, a black hole causes light to bend. I'm sure that's not what they had in mind though :)
Intercarve Networks, LLC
I've always wondered about Terminator 2 - ok, accepting all the time-travel-is-possible stuff: at the point right at the end where the original Terminator arm was dropped in the molten steel (or whatever), shouldn't Arnie have disappeared right then? Since he wouldn't have been possible to "invent"?
P.S. Oh, and in 24, how is it that a terrorist mastermind can get access to all of the "national security" internal cameras, even with inside help, and no-one noticed? Nothing strange in the logs there? Hmm?
Technically, Dilithium just focuses the energy from the M/AM reaction chamber. Basically, instead of blowing off a wild range of heat, kinetic, light in various spectrum, etc, Dilithium focuses it into a (afaik, undefined) beam of energy. That's used for various purposes (since it's undefined, that makes it easy).
And you're right - the guy you were quoting was listing a whole bunch of very realistic tech (Dyson sphere, which SETI is searching for), and weather control, that is just way down the road from where we are, but not impossible. After that, there are a series of postulates (subspace, dilithium, the Originators) that build up to rational extensions if you accept the original postulates (warp drive, intelligent life being 99% humanoid). Sure, a massive chunk of it is retcon... but it's good retcon, done by intelligent people who put quite a bit of thought into it.
I told a friend the other day during a non-Trek related conversation: "Well, it all depends on if FTL travel is possible". "I think it is". "Why?" "Because the alternative terrifies the hell out of me".
I don't think we know enough about physics to state anything authoritatively about the future four centuries from now.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Not true, these movies took place a "long long time ago" when all of the hydrogen in between the planets and such had not completely dispersed. It's why you can see the laser blasts too.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The tornadoes could suck up fences, cars, semis, houses and trees, but couldn't suck the tank-top off of Helen Hunt. WTF?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
If he thought of it after banging his head on the crapper, wouldn't he be more likely to come up with a nuclear-powered low-flow toilet that can actually empty the entire bowl?
"You see, Marty, the secret is the Flush Capacitor."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
So, given that these people are trying to tell stories, and that stories are always About Things, and that the people telling these stories are more interested in Telling than the Getting Details Right, there is always going to be glitches like this.
I would suggest that every movie ever made -- and for that matter, every other work of fiction ever told -- is going to have technical glitches that pisses off some Expert In The Field.
Hell, look hard enough and you can even fine people that think cinematic typography is offensive. :)
Anyway, there are two solutions to this. You can either enforce that storytellers have to get the details right, keeping in mind that this involves myriad areas of learning, that most people won't notice or care, and that hell its can get pretty damned subjective anyway. Not too many stories get told that way -- Kubrick and who else? (And look how long it took him to finish off each film...). The alternative is a little literary device we like to call "suspension of disbelief." The point is, ignore the details, the story isn't about those details, and you're not going to see the forest if you keep focusing on the fact that the trees are just cardboard cutouts. We know that already, please keep moving along with us anyway.
Not that this kind of deconstruction can't be fun or anything -- that fontography site cracks me up, and half the fun in damn near all scifi movies is the fundamental implausibility of it all. As another commenter noted, you don't have a problem with spiders granting superhuman powers, but you want to quibble over aerodynamics? Come on.... :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
It is somewhat plausible though that the amount of energy that the engines on the various craft had was enough to perhaps vibrate the craft that is hearing the noise in some way, right? I mean, why go so far as to having problems with the sound, when we can't yet approach engineering a craft that can: land on planet, take off from planet, fly faster than light, land on new planet... Or maybe each craft has a little speaker in it that helps the pilots fly by making noises that represent other craft and thier laser fire. The sound is easy to account for, the physics ain't so.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
This article is pretty funny.
And not only does it have links to the bionic noise, but also to the elusive "bionic eye noise" which you may have forgotten.
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Let's not stir that bag of worms...
"Hey, Arnold, how was your trip to Mars?"
"I forget."
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Not to mention the problem of conservation of mass in such classics as "Innerspace" and "Fantastic Voyage"
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
You never met the UNIX chick!
HI MEL!
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Apple gains another 5% of the market share as Jupiter begins the switch from oeø?® to OS XVI, galacticaly this puts Apple at roughly 45%, with Linux holding another 45% and Windows holding only 10%. Odly enough, Windows remains dominant on earth.
Apple discovered to have stolen code from Martian OS as well as the old Xerox OS.
Humans gain ability to hold their breath for extended periods of time.
New virus tears through the galactic systems, leaving system admins everywhere baffled. Called the Disk Muncher, the only way to stop it appear to be putting a disk into your computer.
In other news, helium breast implants now availible for those of you with some gravity to contend with.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
The mysterious part is that my wife has problems opening the jelly jars that closes tightly, yet can crush my arm, hand or knee with no trouble during a movie. Almost makes me wonder...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
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?
Yes, but the physics model of a fictional universe has to be internally consistent, and if it's not it's usually a symptom of the writers being lazy, and that shows up in the quality of the rest of the movie, or show. Star Trek is the classical example of this. Some piece of technology which worked one day will not the next - the transporters will always fail (or be repaired) in a situation to advance the story, sometimes the sensors will penetrate enemy shields, sometimes not. That's just sloppy writing, using a Deus Ex Machina to dig the plot out of a hole.
When writers violate the physics model - that they created in the first place, don't forget, so they could have had it any way they wanted - it stops being a story and starts being a CGI showreel, and that is why a bad movie won't be rescued by special effects (Ref: The Phantom Menace).
XML causes global warming.
its not the light that bends, its space-time that is bent by gravity. the light still travels in a "straight line", just the space it travels through bends.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Smith's wife hid in a side closet which had a storm drain or vent or something in it, if memory serves. She had access to more air than was in the little closet.
As of Jolie's chest, there are any number of bras designed for the express purpose of keeping boobs upright and perky. Not an issue, provided you accept Jolie's character is wearing such a bra.
I'm the stranger...posting to
That chick was hot, gentlemen.
I'm the stranger...posting to
An annoying and ever-present piece of bad science is seeing a person out-run a large explosion. Jerry Pournelle pointed this out in one of his columns not long ago, but spend some time reading a DOD explosives manual and you'll see that explosions travel VERY fast, and you can't out-run them or drive faster than them.