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Sci-Fi Movies and 'Bad Science'
Roland Piquepaille writes "Science fiction movies can be fun, and sometimes boring, when Hollywood producers want to show us a 2 1/2 hour film when 90 minutes would be enough. But what about the 'science' behind them? BBC News says it's pretty bad in 'When sci-fi forgets the science.' For example, the metamorphosis of Bruce Banner into The Hulk, based on work of marine biologist Greg Szulgit from Hiram College, Ohio, about sea cucumbers, is qualified by himself as "really awful"." The Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics website, which we've previously mentioned, is referenced in this article, and is now freshly updated to deal with movies like The Hulk.
Law of conservation of mass and energy. Apearently, they can conjure up matter from no where. If they repected that law, then 99% of movies are out the window.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Thus, I feel that films about the realms of magic fall into the same catagory. There are so many inconsistencies in the Harry Potter stories, for example, they make me wince. My girlfriend laughs and reminds me that it's just a story, but it's often not about the magic or science (as the case may be). It's often just an issue of consistency. I mean, if those kids can cast a spell to keep their faces dry in the rain, why can't they cast it on their whole bodies?
OK, I guess I've got better things to do than rant about Harry Potter... Or do I?
The CB App. What's your 20?
/stating the obvious
Goo goo g'joob.
A few years back I worked as an animator (Lightwave 3D) for a production company pitching a pilot to Universal.
It was a space scene and I was told "make it look real". I did, physics and all.
Then the producer looked at it and asked why the stars didn't move ala Star Trek. I explained that will the ship was moving fast, there are no know little glowing dots in space to zip by and smack the camera. Stars are big and very, very far away.
He said "fix it, and do it right this time!"
Sigh...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
At the end of the movie, Arnie and the generic love interest end up out on the Martian surface without suits, gasping, their eyes bulging like tennis balls, and the "airmaker" gets going, venting out precious oxygen. A wave of wind washes over them, and suddenly they're back to normal, no worse for the wear. The "wind wave" slams into the colony and windows explode inward.
Okay, first off, if your skin and eyes are stretched like that, you would have serious damage to contend with. Just to make some sort of nod toward this, they might have shown them with bruises and bloodshot eyes, but no...
Second, as presented, there's no way that air machine could have created a breatheable atmosphere in the time shown. At the rough rate of production shown, it'd be hours before a noticeable air pressure had built up.
But you could even save this scene. Imagine the scene exactly as presented, except suddenly, around the mountain, some shimmering globe of energy forms, trapping the air. As more air comes in, it expands, maintaining a constant pressure. This would save our heroes (well, except for the eyes-the-size-of-tennis-balls thing) and you could have a neat effect of the globe expanding, sweeping past windows that blow in sequentially as the 'force-field' passed by.
Sure, we don't know how such a 'force-field' could possibly work, but aliens can get away with a certain amount of magic. For a science fiction movie done right, see The Abyss. All the human tech is plausible or at least not inconceivable. Sure, the aliens do magic things, but hey, they're supposed to be more advanced than us.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Lois Lane falls from top of tall building, reaches terminal velocity of about 200 mph. Superman flies up from ground to meet her halfway, resulting in a 400mph relative speed. Superman catches Lois, and she's unhurt! Yes, it's no wonder schoolchildren don't understand physics, when what passes for everyday experience violates it on a regular basis, and nobody tells them that what they see on telivision and in the movies isn't real. From what I've seen of movie representations of computers, I have no doubt that an expert in ANY field must be appalled by how that field is depicted in the movies...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Actually, the science in that movie was pretty much dead-on. Remember, the book was written by Arthur C. Clarke, the guy who first described Geostationary Orbits in a sci-fi story before the first satellites were even launched.
Clarke took great pains to work out the science in his stories to be as real as possible.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Main Entry: giga-
Pronunciation: 'ji-g&, 'gi-
Function: combining form
Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary, from Greek gigas giant
: billion
there is nothing wrong with his pronunciation; it is infact the first (ie preferred) one.
Sometimes, things get blurred based on who the author is. I suppose anything that Arthur C. Clarke ever wrote gets called sci-fi, while anything Stephen King writes is horror. The Dark Tower books are as sci-fi as it gets, IMO, but betcha you'll find 'em lurking over in the monsters-under-the-bed section.
But back to the topic: If I want to see "bad science," I don't go to a theatre. I go to the undergrad labs ;-)
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I happen to like this film quite a bit. But opinion seems to be fairly divided on whether its good science or bad. Consider - NASA cuts funding on a mars mission, so the "bad scientist" decides to fake the space mission by staging it in an unused air-force facility, disguised to look like mars, and then transmitting the footage to the audience. NASA "good guy" looks at transmission lag, compares it to what the real lag should be if the transmission were indeed from mars, and figures something's fishy. "good guy" talks to "bad scientist" who then knocks him off, but before he disappears, he divulges suspicions to a close friend/reporter, who plays the hero. Now, whole thing requires cooperation from the astronauts, who comply, only to find the spacecraft blowing up on re-entry due to heat-shield failure, thereby "killing" them, even though they've never even left the earth. Now, astronauts must escape before "bad scientist" really kills them off. Nice sci-fi/thriller/comedy/70mm action flick, but didn't get the acclaim it deserved. Ppl poked numerous holes into the plot, which I concede isn't airtight, but still, is pretty sound considering other cheaply made sci-fi's involving data on a floppy disk or somesuch.
I'm the first to cringe at "insultingly stupid physics" during movies, but standardized nitpicking such as the one provided in this movie is highly annoying.
Let's not forget that filmmaking is an art and as such doesn't have to be realistic. I notice irrealistic stuff in a movie, and cringe when it isn't justified, but gladly accept it when it is. The need for style > the need for realism.
This is especially true for Asian movies and directors, whose respect for reality is far supreior to that of most Hollywood directors, but will willingly disregard it when it pleases them. I could mention John Woo's HK era masterpieces, which are wholly unrealistic -- but who cares? Tsui Hark's Time and Tide is an incredible combination of highly realistic action moments, far more than 99% Hollywood movies, and completely ludicrous/impossible events. And the director knows it.
Upon reading this, I pulled the old ST:TNG Technical Manual from the shelf, which dates back to 1991 (I wonder if this has any collector value). And in the introductions, I find this:
"The Starship Enterprise is not a collection of motion picture sets or a model used in visual effects. It is a very real vehicle; one designed for storytelling. [...] Documents such as this Technical Manual help give some background to the vision we work so hard to create on Star Trek. Rick [Sternbach] and Mike [Okuda] have obviously had a lot of fun filling in the gaps and trying to find technical 'explanations' for some of our mistakes." -- Gene Roddenberry
There you have it, folks: story comes first, physical accurate explanations come later. The list of credits has a lot of names from NASA, Boeing, Rockwell and so on. Those scientists (or people in the know) were constantly asked from advice - but if the story demanded some excuse, then the scientific background was set aside (according to the comments scattered throughout the manual).
Do you honestly think this has hurt the series?!
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
Actually, you could "hear" the explosion, when the shockwave gets to you
With no atmosphere, there is no shockwave. Sure, the debris from the explosion would eventually hit you, but no one would seriously try to call actual matter hitting you "sound."
I repeat: Explosions in space have no shockwaves. A nuke detonated 10 feet over the surface of the moon would amount to little more than a small dust cloud a few feet in diameter (if anything) when the remaining atoms slammed into the surface. It would be nothing compared to a similar detonation on Earth.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
JMS, the creator of Babylon 5, got sick of the you-cannot-hear-sounds-in-space complaint and posted a response. The gist of his argument -- apart from artistic issues -- is that space is not all empty all the time. He asked some experts, apparently, and decided that sounds were possible.
An exploding manned (soon to be unmanned) spacecraft would carry a breathable atmosphere and other gases/particles to carry sound. Weapon zaps and engine whines would be audible from within these crafts and over their comm-links. It's all a question of where you stick your microphone. Nobody is telling you where the mic is or how it works.
1) Trek Universe: the galaxy populated by white people with funny foreheads. I mean, chimps are nearly identical to us genetically, look at them!
2) Bad magic physics: they're going a few light years and the stars are just zipping by. Come on!
3) Continuity is sacrificed for goofy morality. Guys who turn into giants wear uberlycra pants all the time.
4) Cultural continuity in the galaxy. OK, B5 had some truly wierd aliens, like the vorlons, and a narrative that helped explain the continuity somewhat, but the rest...
5) The general lack of plots involving easily predictable tech, like nanotech, ubiquitous computing, and radical bioengineering of human flesh.
6) Political dullardry. Haven't these damn script writers read Sam Delaney or KS Robinson? Things are going to get wild and wierd, mutate and evolve.
7) Gender idiocy. Again, things have changed radically in just the last 10 years, what makes you scriptflakes think we're going to maintain a Cleaver family morality in perpetuity? Damn that Heinlein. See Varley, Delaney, Stephenson. Sex is between the legs, gender is between the ears, and we're figuring that out already.
8) Economic ideology. New economies are the nature of social progression, STNG tries to be blandly utopian as a cop-out, let's see some interesting econotech please.
9) No one ever excretes in the future.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I heard this explained really well one year at Toronto Trek.
If you can strip out all of the characters and plot from a story and it's still interesting, it's probably sci-fi.
You read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to hear Captain Nemo explain how they fuel the submarine, how they feed the crew, etc. But you don't watch Star Wars to learn about ion engines, blasters or light sabres work.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
The truly sad thing is that I recognize bad science when I see it. The average American would not. I see this as not being a failing of Hollywood, but as a failing of the American educational system.
... it's amazing that all those "sheeple" don't accidentally forget to breathe or something, eh?
Oh gag me. Why does Slashdot tolerate this sort of self-congratulatory egomaniacal crap? Give me a break. You think you're the only person who passed high school physics? Newsflash: you're not that special.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to rip on you, but it just really gets me when I hear people here sighing and tsk-tsk-ing the scapegoat "education system," and assuming that they're not only in the intellectual elite of their peers and co-workers, but that the rest of their society isn't even close to them. Oh those poor, stupid morons, stumbling around the sidewalk
Blech. Get over yourself, kid. People aren't as dumb as you think and one day, you're going to say the wrong thing to one of them and come out looking like a total, arrogant ass.
Radioactive spiders do not actually change you into a buff moviestar who swings around fighting hobgoblins.
OK, First off: I have no problem with "physics" like this - it's suspesion of disbelief.. I know that it wouldn't happen, but it doesn't ruin the movie for me..
But what really annoys me is when TV hosts of (for example) the Discovery channel, start claiming "there is real science behind it!"
When Spiderman was released, Discovery had an interview with different entymologists and biologists, asking them about the "science" in the film.. and their conclusion was "there is real science behind it."
For example, when asked about "spider-strength", the biologist said "spiders can lift many times their own bodyweight - so it's correct!".. while completely ignoring that the reason that spiders can lift many times their own weight is that they're small, not because there is some magical "spider" quality that gives them super-strength.
If a spider was a big as, and weighed as much as a human being, it wouldn't be able to damnwell move, let alone lift anything, because its muscles wouldn't have enough strength to overcome their own weight.
This is what pisses me off - not the faux-science, but supposedly intelligent individuals treating it as real science.
It's a question of degree, and is directly related to 'suspension of disbelief' - originally a consideration of live theatre. What it encompasses is the degree to which a person is able to accept things that are false and stay focused inside the story and not their reality. For example, can an audience accept that Act 2 takes place 8 hours after Act 1, even though only 10 minutes have passed, or that the scene on stage is at night though it is clearly daytime.* Science Fiction that takes excesses tend to run directly into this problem square on.
This is visible to some extent in all films, not just Science Fiction. For example, I recently saw The Count of Monte Cristo. In it, a prisoner is taught to become a master fencer by another elderly prisoner, while digging a tunnel and being malnourished. And he taught him on stone so well that fighting on a sandy beach presented no problem whatsoever. Clearly not very likely, but acceptable enough as a plot point in a rented movie since the overall story of escape and vengeance was more interesting.
From my point of view, I'm more critical of science fiction because I like science. I can accept minor bs-physics (for example, almost no space movie that I've seen has bothered with the fact that planets move - somehow Mars is always on the way to Earth) if there is an interesting story that doesn't harp on it.
I never could understand why Solo et. al. weren't bothered by a moon floating without a planet, unless they just assumed it was Alderon's. And in Star Trek II I always wondered why the sensors didn't notice a missing planet, but the story and execution made up for that oddity.
The same criticisms of SciFi are probably true of historically themed films to historians, but this is not commented upon nearly as often.
*[I learned in a Theatre History class that there once was a movement and law in France that the plots of all plays were to be in real time to the performance. Strange, but not quite as drastic as killing slaves for real blood near the end of the Roman Empire.]
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I get torqued about this kind of thing from time to time, but far less than I used to.
Most SF movies are allegorical; they don't try or even need to get the facts absolutely straight to a) tell the story, and b) get a point across. For example, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was chock full of silliness, but it got an important moral point across about trivializing sapient creatures. Minority Report had a big plot hole, but it was a thought-provoking allegory about how reliance on a crime-predicition technique could screw over the innocent.
Bad Science is a problem when the story directly warns about a specific problem . . . typically, "awful warning" stories about health or environmental issues. For example, there was an utterly ludicrous TV movie about global warming a year or two ago. No one could possibly learn anything from it that might make than informed citizen.
Stefan Jones
It's out!