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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.
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.
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?
...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
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.
Actually, Clark Kent learned the Reality Distortion Field technique from Steve Jobs.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
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.
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
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.
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.