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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.
does this mean the flux capacitor isn't real?
do you suppose that's why it's called science fiction??
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.
Radioactive spiders do not actually change you into a buff moviestar who swings around fighting hobgoblins.
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What gets me every time is when there is, say, an explosion (ala Star Wars) in space, and it goes "Boom!".
Obviously, without air, there would be no sound. I think it's much more dramatic to see the explosion without hearing the sound, like they did in 2001: A Space Oddessy, rather than the way they did it in Star Wars, which came across as rather cartoonish in comparison.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Granted, its always nice when fiction has basis in reality, but come on, if we're going to believe that a guy gets mad and turns into a giant green tank smashing bad ass (not to mention that his PANTS stay ON), cant we just ENJOY it for what it is?
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I agree that some movies push it a bit too far, but did people really go into The Hulk expecting to come out saying, "holy crap, I want to go get induced with gamma rays now!"
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Another site collecting this sort of stuff is Bad Astronomy
M@
Krispy Cream is people
That NASA made? That was pretty bad! The lighting, ack, and the dialouge? Ouch.
pfft.. that's not what she said!
Apparently to make a man, complete with 6 pack abs and a nice gold lame speedo, you just need a big ass empty aquarium and some funky colored fluids... but you do need to be wearing some really trashy lingerie...
(rocky horror picture show for those who are too young to remember, or maybe humor impaired)
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
OBVIOUSLY
SHOW A LITTLE EFFORT IN YOUR WORK, EDITORS!
and
ICE CREAM IS A SUMPTOUS TREAT.
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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!
Of course she was. I've created hundreds of beautiful women using my computer and various magazines.
I love Stan Lee's work, but let's face it. Just about all of the characters' powers come from the mysterious force of radiation. Well, it's not that mysterious now. In the 50's and 60's, it was a dark power that caused all kinds of mutations. All the A-bomb testing would throughout the world would have strange side effects on humanity, etc. In modern times, people don't fall for this line so easily. that's why in Spiderman and The Hulk, the screenweiters shyed away from radiation. Of course, all they did was replace it with modern day boogymen like genetic engineering and nanotechnology.
Hulk smash puny web server!
This is why "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" are commonly lumped together in book stores. It can be difficult to separate one from another and people endlessly dicker over where the line is. Also, where do you categorize books which were based on the science of the day, but over the course of fifty years are systematically proven incorrect?
Now people usually separate sci-fi into "hard" and "soft" to make this distinction, because they don't want to lump sci-fi and fantasy together. This seems to me to be a pointless form of elitism. Science fiction without any scientific explanation (even if not given) behind the "science" is fantasy, plain and simple.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Always informative and often hilarious... check it out!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Nothing wrecks a movie for me more than watching them talk about computers or doing stuff with computers that is so completely out to lunch that whatever illusion the movie has created so far is destroyed.
Then there's my wife, the genetics expert, for whom hollywood's attempts at describing that particular branch of science causes her to throw her popcorn in disgust.
I image that nearly everyone experiences this frustration with movies, regardless of their area of expertise though. I bet if my mom had watched american pie she would have said something along the lines of: "That's not how you bake a proper applie pie -- the crust should be darker!".
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
The producer commentary on the 'Back to the Future' admitted to some mildly bad science... Doc Brown's mispronunciation of the word 'Gigawatt'.
He said something to the effect that nerds everywhere wrote in and pointed out this egregious error after the first film was released, but for the sake of continuity they had to keep using the 'jiggawatt' pronunciation for the rest of the films.
The Incredible Hulk: Not Real
Also Not Real:
The Tooth Fairy
Santa Claus
Porn
The New York Times
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
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
I think the problem most people who disliked The Matrix Reloaded had was that they didn't understand it. For once they were being expected to think. For once they were watching a movie that requires more than one sitting to really comprehend. IMHO, Hollywood needs to do this more often instead of constantly shovelling out brain dead crap aimed at the lazy lowest common denominator. I personally appreciate a movie that I have to think about at least a little. That being said, there were some holes in both Matrix movies.
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...
Entertainment has the power to stir the imagination. It only takes one yammering asshole who thinks he's sooo smart because he found some obvious flaw in a story to ruin the experience for others. I don't think we have much to fear by the dumbing down of science in cinema. Real science rarely makes for thrills and explosions. Those that make for good movies (PI for example)still take liberties. Poor funding for science education and rampaging ignorance are more danger to science than The Hulk.
You shouldn't care...it's entertainment!
As a computer geek, I know how to program, use the internet, and assemble collections of OEM components into working computers. I wince every time I see some Hollywood version of these activities, because they are always utterly ridiculous! They aim for entertainment value rather than realism. The teeming masses don't know any better. And they don't want to. A movie is supposed to be entertaining rather than educational or thought-provoking.
I bet it's the same for every profession. I'm sure real firefighters look at firefighting scenes in movies and find a hundred little inaccuracies or unrealistic stretches. Lawyers must have retched at "Legally Blonde". Hell, I've been on a witness stand and your average real-life court case is about as exciting as boiling pasta, and lawyers don't holler "I object" every two minutes.
Everybody who really understands the basics of General Relativity and Special Relativity knows why FTL travel and "subspace" communication can't happen. Hell, Star Trek is internally inconsistent as well -- how do you fire a phaser out of your ship's warp field, across normal space, and into another ship's warp field when both ships are travelling at some multiple of the speed of light? But the average viewer doesn't give a flip about Relativity and has no desire to analyze the fictional science. They just care that Worf gets warm fuzzy feelings about pounding Borg ships with photon torpedoes.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
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.
Is the accuracy of "social science". Like "American Wedding", for example. Here we have some nutcases from the previous two movies, who had huge house-destroying parties, and that bachelor party was the best they could do? Please!
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No. Most emphatically, no. There are a lot of science fiction writers who manage to write books that are based in hard science. Writers like Niven, Brin, and Bear, not to mention many, many others, all write engaging stories using extrapolations of real science. What this website, and people who understand even the basics of science, are complaining about is blatently bad science. Ignoring things like basic laws of physics or biology.
You can stick within the guidlines established by reality and still have incredible stories. If you don't believe me, just look at the world around you. It follows these rules and is full of wonderous variety.
I stole this sig from a more creative user.
one day working the hell known as OEM tech support, I had a customer call me claiming that AOL told him he needed to have his "modem flux capacitor" reset in order for him to get connected to the internet.
Prozac makes the voices in my head say nice things to me.
Does exclude our "aerodynamically impossible" flying insect friend from a career in the movies?
;-)
I mean seriously, if someone had said in the Middle Ages that there was to be no fiction to challenge or exaggerate current scientific knowledge think how boring literature and art would be. Flying machines were built by technical people who were inspired by science fiction of the day. Who knows, perhaps there is a flux capacitor or perpetual motion machine out there in someones imagination
crazy dynamite monkey
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.
The problem is, when you have a certain amount of knowledge in any particular field of science, you are simply forced to notice these inconsistencies. My personal field of interest is physics, so I immediately notice, and am terribly distracted by, physics blunders.
You read Slashdot, so I'll assume you have a fair degree of computer knowledge, or at least pretend to. Imagine watching a moviem, supposedly about some fantastic computer hackers, where in a certain scene the main character says: "I've installed a 2.4 gigahertz hard drive, and applied a firewall to the keyboard. Let's see them hack through that!"
If you're anything like me, the contents of your mouth, be it Coke, popcorn, or whatever, would immeditely be distributed across the heads of the five unfortunate people sitting in front of you.
It's not that I don't try to ignore the problems and simply enjoy the movie. The errors are simply so huge I just... can't.
People are now used to high drama, high action and MASSIVE special effects in their Sci-Fi diet. But a major part of the atraction of 2001 is its realism which many people find very boaring.
Have you every spent two or three hours watching Nasa TV when a soviet cargo ship docks with the ISS? Real life space activity is miserably slow, tedious, deliberate and boaring. 2001 played it like it was. The space scenes were slow, deliberate and tedious just like the real thing.
2001 cannot be compared to the new Star Wars films or DS9. 2001 was from a time when there was no CG effects. Special effects in general were new and most lacked any realism. But, 2001 made it work. It was believable and realistic and that is what makes people fans of 2001. If you must compare 2001 to something, try comparing it to the Star Trek TV series. Until 2001 was released, Start Trek and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea were the state of the are for Sci-Fi.
Now as for the Acid trip scenes in 2001, I can't explain that but,those scenes were fairly short. In real life there is no boom when something explodes in space and things happen very slowly or people float off into the void.
It's a science FICTION movie.
No, it's a SCIENCE fiction movie. "Fiction" would normally be considered redundant; "true story" has to be explicitly labelled, since we assume the opposite.
The problem with SCIENCE fiction movies that don't use correct SCIENCE is that the authors can do whatever the hell they feel like with no consequences to the story, and generally that sucks. The story is one big deus ex machina. I mean hell, even death can be randomly reversed in a non-science SCIENCE fiction movie. Spock's dying was sorta dramatic; who really gave a damn that Data died in Nemesis? Anyone? Anyone? If they want him back there's more ways to get him back then you can shake a stick at. Drains the drama right out. (And provides a vivid illustration of the damage to the Star Trek universe that has been wreaked since then.)
It absolutely destroys the drama. Note I'm not criticising the "reality" or other "nerd" points, I'm making a point about the quality of the movie.
It's a real shame, too, because real science-based SCIENCE fiction movies have a vastly wider drama continuum available to them then traditional movies. Few things are as alienating as being thirty light years from the nearest human, ripped out of one's time into a competely unfamiliar society, or facing some of the unique hells technology can provide. To piss away these opportunities in favor of deus ex machina after deus ex machina is doing everyone, including the author as well as the more-obvious audience, a disservice.
Only science fiction shows think they can get away with this kind of deus ex machina. Even soap operas pay more attention to continuity, and I'm not kidding in the slighest.
They were based upon the ancient Greek idea of mankind having "sparks" of the god(s) inside their very being; that everything the god(s) created had a piece of themselves inside as well. Or, for a more modern adaption, go for John Carpenter's "The Prince of Darkness." That film's premise advanced the idea that every thing in the universe had particles that were of God and also anti-God inside them; thus explaining how objects and people could be controlled by the paranormal... The reason why the Midichlorians "ruined" Star Wars is because it took away the moviegoers feelings that they too could be a Luke Skywalker, a hero transformed by his beliefs and his own inner strength. A whole generation of sci-fi moviegoers dreamed of becoming Jedi Knights only to find out that the universe made it impossible for an individual to become one from faith alone; that they only could touch the divine if they had enough microbes in their blood... The Matrix is terrible because if you've seen "Dark City" before, there's no point in seeing the film. Its just an algamation of the plot of "Dark City" (and with some of that movie's sets as well) mixed with the special effects from "Blade", the computer plot *adapted* from "The Deadly Assassin" episode from 70s Doctor Who, and a healthy batch of wire-fu. And for the third film, we have Mech-Warrior in it now as well...or maybe Robo-Jox. I know the only reason why I'll go see it is because Monica Bellucci appears in it...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
This is the reason that studios add "bad science" to movies. 2001 was a true science fiction film.
Star Wars and Star Trek are NOT sci-fi. George Lucas himself described Star Wars as a "Space Western". Star Trek is more like space sociology. They explore current sociological issues through the lense of a more ideal social future. Every once in a while Star Trek episodes hit on a sci-fi topic, but that is rare. In fact the most sci-fi movie was Star Trek 1, which everybody thought was pretty boring.
The best science fiction of late was "Contact" starring Jody Foster. That movie was lambasted as being boring and plotless. When the "asteroid" concept hit hollywood, two movies were made. The action packed "Armageddon" starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck contrasted with the thought provoking "Deep Impact" starring Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman (the first black portrayal of an American president) and Tea Leaoni. Armageddon was the more popular (and pretty stupid in my opinion). Deep Impact was very thought provoking and brilliant but took a deep second to the action flick.
The best blend I've seen lately is 'Minority Report', 'The Sixth Day' and 'The Matrix: Reloaded'. All present a sci-fi plot in an action mode with action stars.
The brilliance of Sci-Fi is that it challenges us to think. The plot is often incomprehensible without a little deep thinking. Thats what science fiction is for, to challenge us.
Many people won't get 2001, it requires thought and interpretation. A lot of people really liked Matrix: Reloaded, but ultimately didn't have a clue of the real meaning of the film beyond the fighting and chase scenes. Some people look for different things in movies. I enjoy a good think and enjoyed 2001. If you don't enjoy thought than the entire sci-fi genre probably isn't for you.
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Yes, 'Independence Day' was pretty much mindless enjoyment... I got as far with the 'willing suspension of disbelief thing' as
'Ok, so these aliens are invading earth pretty much for the sheer hell of it, the Fresh Prince is an ace fighter pilot, Lone Starr is the president, and they've just given Cousin Eddie control of a multi-million dollar fighter jet'
But when Jeff Goldblum plugs his Macintosh in the mothership network (good thing those aliens have compatible jacks in their spaceship control panels) and "uploads a virus" to an completely alien operating system written by a species advanced enough to have mastered interstellar travel, I'm not buying it anymore. He must have had a copy of O'Reilly's "Giger-derived Alien Scripting Language In a Nutshell" with him when he went to Area 51.
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.
That's right, everyone... by some weird cosmic coincidence, the stuff you see in Science FICTION movies is not real... and is, well at least in some cases, just plain impossible. Those of us who know better refer to this stuff as FICTION.
According to dictionary.com fiction is defined firstly as 'An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.'.
Ah hah! Imagine that! So in the world of science FICTION, they use imaginative creation to INVENT something that doesn't represent actuality. WOW! What a concept!
Look, if it was SCIENCE SCIENCE it just wouldnt be as fun to watch... if it was SCIENCE SCIENCE, it'd just be the Discovery Channel or TLS but costing you $8 per show (not to say these channels dont have anything of interest mind you).
Esp:
The episode where Bender gets fired out the torpedo tube while the ship is moving at full speed making it impossible for the ship to catch up to him.
Frye (as Captain Yesterday) jumping over a railing after a falling gemenoid and Lela says "Frye, you can't fall fast enough"
While I love to bash the Hulk, I have to give MASSIVE PROPS to the people who assembled the credits and introductory sequences. I worked as an undergraduate with light-based live-cell visualization systems. There wasn't one of them (fluorescein, green fluoroescent protein, diaminofluorescein) that wasn't shown in that sequence. And none of the images, as far as I could tell from 1s clips, were "digitally enhanced" most of them were actual images from fluoroescent microscopes.
So if you want to see a good representation of current cell visualization techniques, take a look at that sequence again.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
People that didn't want to acknowledge that an action movie could have depth to it. It amazed me the number of angry reactions it got from people. Basically, they were pissed that this was NOT your typical action movie that has no layers of meaning and is purely superficial.
See, like with anything thing in life, you get elitest snobs when it comes to movies. They feel they are 'cultured' or 'refined' or whatever because of their taste in movies. this, of course, does NOT include shoot em' up movies for the simpletons. But here you have a movie that is a shoot 'em up, but yet has a real compelling story and more than one level of meaning. So they find that it is actually something they can like. But they aren't SUPPOSED to like things like this, hence you get angry reactions.
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
In fact, pretty much any Marvel-influenced movie is a special case. I mean, c'mon, even when I was a kid I had some vague idea that people didn't really turn green and get musclebound when they got mad, or that Angel would have had to have had hollow bones and pectoral muscles roughly the size of a Buick to actually fly with those wings of his.
Science fiction is about the STORY, not about the effects. Sure, it's better if the science behind it is more solid, but the thing that makes science fiction good is the plot and characterization, not the science. Really, all the science is is a device to allow us to ask the basic question behind science fiction, "What if . . . "
If the story's enjoyable it's much easier to willingly suspend disbelief and let yourself think, for a few minutes at least, that a guy can shoot webs out of his wrists or death rays out of his eyeballs. We all (well, most of us) overlooked "made the Kessel run in twelve parsecs" and the explosions in space, because we thought the story behind Star Wars was so much fun. (On the other hand, if a movie otherwise stinks, the flashiest special effects aren't going to save it, and any recognizably bad science is just going to make such a movie more laughable.)
Someone you trust is one of us.
a big honkin' retcon job.
Phil Plait has a site called Bad Astronomy which features all the bad astronomy, and various other forms of science, that are inappropriately represented in contemporary films, news, and television. The site is excellent, and journeys into other areas, such as debunking common myths and misunderstandings about astronomy and science in general. I'm surprised it wasn't one of the ones mentioned in the title.
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.
1972's The Man is all about a black man (James Earl Jones) who becomes president (from Pro tempore of the senate) when the President and Vice both die. That's the earliest I know of. (Birth of a Nation the earliest, perhaps?)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Things I learned by watching SCI-FI
1) When hacking into any computer system, the system will tell you that you are in by flashing "ACCESS GRANTED" or something similar in HUGE letters across your screen.
2) Any technical problem can be solved by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow (Dr. Who)
3) Any humanoid or machine that is devoid of emotion will always somehow develop emotion.
4) If you travel to a distant planet that you've never been to, (IE Dagobah) to see someone you've never met (Yoda), you will manage to land in just the right place. (Star Wars and others)
5) All planets other then Earth have just one climate type (Hoth - Ice, Tatooine - Desert, Dagobah - Swamp) (Star Wars)
6) Even if you don't have a protocol droid, you can communicate with an Alien slimeball in English, and he will understand you, and likewise you will understand his language. (Star Wars)
7) Space Ships can travel planet to planet and can easily escape gravity, and never have to worry about burning up upon reentry.
8) No matter unhumanlike your species, you will find Earth women attractive.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Hindsight is sharp, but do not forget the film came out in 1985. Giga- was not in common usage until after the first commercial 1-gig drive came out in 1995. I recall actual discussion about the pronunciation -- is it a Jig-a byte, or, to avoid the potential negative racial connotations, a Gig-a byte.
In a couple years I guess we will have to settle on vernacular pronunciations of peta- (10^15), and exo- (10^18) bytes.
In Star Trek, on thing they did not do was waste time explaining some of the basic technology of the series. For instance, No one explained warp technology you just knew it worked. No one explained how they communicated at warp speed. No one explained teleporting. Oh sure you can read the fan technology guides if you want too but you don't have to enjoy the show.
Surely if you were improvising such a bomb, you'd set the oven to run for much longer than necessary?
Examples: Most Wanted, Under Siege
You have received this message in error.
Seriously, go call radioshack right now and ask if they have flux capacitors in stock. They'll pause for a moment, then tell you they're out but should have more in stock in about two weeks.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
1. Make no distinction between science and technology.
2. Do not discern between hardware and software
3. Appearance supersedes function and reality. Or in simple terms, if it looks or sounds funky, it makes sense.
4. Brilliant scientists are universally knowledgeable in all fields of scientific study.
5. Trump out "well-known facts", that no one in existence has in fact ever heard of before this story, which may be presented for the sake of plot explication.
6. Any device improvised or jury-rigged, out of available materials on short notice, will work at least as well as or better than the actual device whose function it is meant to emulate or replace. This principle is also known as "MacGyver's Law", or "The Doohan Principle."
7. Alien races will virtually mirror humankind, in appearance and culture, with only one or two notable exceptions to set them apart.
8. Any form of mysterious or unknown form of energy (like, oh say, nuclear radiation) has the power to give previously-existing lifeforms bizarre powers, increase their size, or bring them back from the dead.
9. Technology introduced at the start of the story always causes everyone's problems, while technology introduced in the middle or at the end of the story always solves everyone's problems.
10. All previously-known scientific laws and principles are open to reinterpretation, revision, or just being ignored, for the sake of the story or the above-mentioned laws.
--- No Boom? No Boom today. Boom tomorrow, there's always a boom tomorrow.
I own 2001 on DVD (shhhh!!!!) and am always startled at how it only just barely looks dated, even today. There are a few things that aren't right, but they all have an It Just Didn't Happen That Way flavour to them. Like the logo on the phone booth, or the implication that the U.S.S.R. would still be alive and well in 2001. I find that Star Wars looks incredibly dated now.
Contact was a worthy film. It tried - it really did - to be "the proverbial good science fiction film". They almost got away with it. A really good try. Even a flawed movie can be interesting and worth watching.
...laura who thinks The Blue Danube is excellent music to dock spaceships to, and that no radio telescope operator should be without a recording of Classical Gas.
One of the things that a story does is set up the rules by which the rest of the story plays. Part of the tension of a story is trying to understand how it is yet to unfold within the constraints that have been set up. When those constraints are violated we have a deus ex machina and it defuses the tension incorrectly and ruins the pleasure. A simple example: imagine a detective story where the protagonist tries to find a thief. In the last chapter they give up using their conventional methods and reveal they are telepathic and find the criminal that way. Crap story right? It's like losing at chess because your opponent suddenly decided to implement a novel rule giving them an extra queen at a crucial moment.
One of the problems with bad science is that you can't ever learn the rules of the game. It means the story loses its tension. But this only matters if the story is initially presented as one where science matters. If the story clearly isn't hard-science, it doesn't matter about the accuracy of the science, as long as we can figure out the rules.
For example: in Star Trek it bothers me more that the crew suddenly forget they can use intra-ship transporting than that the underlying science of the story makes no sense.
But in a spy story set in the early 21st century the rules have been set and having, say, an invisible car, is completely dumb. But not just because the science is bad. The rules have been messed with and there can be no dramatic tension as anything goes. Who knows, maybe the baddy will suddenly turn out to have some mega space weapon that can wipe out entire countries. If anything goes then you might as well just play random events unconnected by story.
And of course rules are made to be broken. Sometimes it's fun to see a movie that plays with the rules. But even then there needs to be a set of meta-rules otherwise it's just random events again. (And even that's OK if the events look pretty, say, but then we're no longer talking about plot.)
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
when you take a comic characters, they do not need to meet the standards of real world physics, they need to meet the physics of the comic book universe in which they came.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
I don't really mind the bad science, if it allows for a decent story. What really irks me are the numerous examples of computing environments that "hackers" would never use. For instance:
The 3D Visual Virus Studio that pops up in movies such as Swordfish.
The inability of spies, whistleblowers, etc. to MINIMIZE or at least Alt-Tab away the "Copy Secret Files x% Complete" window!
The latter makes me gnash my teeth and make hissing sounds at the movies.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
My father and I were watching an old black and white movie set in the Roman empire and there was a chariot chase in it. One of the chariots barrelled over a cliff and rolled down the steep hill, leaving debris in its wake.
My father and I both simultaneously filled the last element by jumping up and making explosive noises in order to modernize the movie.
I'm currently trying to sell this idea to Mel Brooks.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Apparantly, Cops are potrayed fairly unrealistically as well.
Yeah,
they're usually portrayed as the good guys.
This problem of technical inaccuracy is not just something that bugs geeks watching sci-fi. I have a friend who is a big sports fan, and he cannot watch sports movies, like Any Given Sunday, because he says the depiction of the sports is so godawful and over-glamourized it completely spoils the film for him. Now I'm not a football fan, so I rather enjoyed AGS... but I have not been able to enjoy any of the latest Bond movies because of their bad science (how does a free-falling man catch up with an accelerating airplane?)
"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts,
Just repeat to yourself "It's just a show,
I should really just relax
For Mystery Science Theater 3000."
Have you read "Stranger in a Strange Land"? "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"? "Friday"? "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls"?
If not, I would highly recommend you do so. Heinlein decidedly did NOT write just for "Cleaver Family Morality' and to say he did is either ignorant or dishonest.
Anyhow, the movie newsgroups were flooded with many reviewers picking plot holes...
And I remember one wag posting something like this:
The people at area 51 had been working with a sample fighter for 50 years. They probably hacked out a cross-compiler in that time...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Damn, you beat me to identifying it. FWIW, the trifids were murderous, intelligent plants that evolved on earth. They weren't a big deal to control though, because humans were smarter and faster, and were a common zoo exhibit (but somehow nobody ran across the salt-water thing). The meteor passed by earth, releasing some weird radiation that blinded almost everyone on earth (except the small number who for various reasons never saw the sky during a certain 24 hour period). Versus blind people, the trifids suddenly had the upper hand. All this is from my memories of the book, but I think the movie was pretty faithful, except that in the book, salt water doesn't come into it. The books science is pretty reasonable (once you buy mobile, inteligent, carniverous plants and blindness-inducing comet radiation of course) The book leaves it open whether the few sighted survivors will manage to beat back the Trifids, or if humanity will just be wiped out (which actually seems the most likely outcome). Obviously an ending that wasn't going to fly with Hollywood.
The book was high quality scary sci-fi (for a kid anyway). The movie is camp though and through.
My major argument with movie physics doesn't really have anything to do with wrong physics per se. What I care about is that the film/book/etc is internally consistent and doesn't violate its own rules. Movies that do that send me into a seething rage.
My thought is that basically, the filmmaker and the audience "agree" to suspend reality with regard to some parts of the "physics" of the world they are in, but the idea is that in other respects the world they live in is the same as ours. For example, most of the main characters in Star Wars are humans that act like humans who just happen to be able to fly through space.
Once one sets out those rules though, they should be inviolable so that the range of possible occurrences, actions by the characters, etc should be readily apparent to the audience. "Back to the Future" is a fantasy, but the filmmakers suspended reality only to the extent that in that universe (a) time travel is possible and (b) it works a particular way. So, it's not really legitimate to complain that in any "real" time travel scenario, modern physics says that our paths would probably be fixed and you couldn't change anything. It's a given that you can change things in the BTTF universe and that pictures/newspapers/etc will alter to match it.
However, audience members would have been rightly furious if Doc had decided to fly down from the clock tower to connect that other line for the DeLorean instead of sliding down that metal cable, for example. You could claim that "well, it's a fantasy, so we've left the bonds of reality behind", but that undermines the entire concept of the movie: what would real people do if they had control of a time machine?
Even Back to the Future falls prey to this problem in the third movie. Doc spends all movie fretting about how taking a woman to the future who would have been killed anyway falling off a cliff will disrupt the timeline. But he has no problem hijacking a train filled with people who will now no longer get to their destinations! How much will that disrupt the timeline? Doc just violated all his own precepts!
Good authors, filmmakers, etc have a knack for defining what is permissible in their fantasy worlds and what is not. Part of the thrill of the movie is to see how characters solve their problems in the constraints they are given. The "deus ex machina" ending has been used too many times in Hollywood, and in my opinion filmmakers ignore their own constraints to their peril.
Looking around, it seems that the EM radiation hitting the surface of the moon won't create much heat after all.
Sorry everybody.
Happy people make bad consumers.
It is myth, with some sci-fi trappings. Star Wars is space opera. Matrix is myth and psychology. Star Trek isn't even sci fi, IMHO. It's space melodrama and morality play. Science fiction is different from these. It includes plausible extensions of technology and theoretical boundaries, and hopefully an interesting plot about people dealing with their changing world. Aliens is sci-fi, but only fails to be guilty of bad science because it doesn't bother to explain every detail. If they had tried to tell us why the Sulaco was able to make the journey to LV 426, it would have quickly gotten stupid. 2001 is sci-fi, as is A.I., as is Contact. Hulk is not sci-fi, although it does contain bad science. And yet it was a very good movie, I think.
Most of it was. The velcro shoes. The artificial gravity through centripetal force from a spinning ship. And, as far as I have read, even that moment when he survived being ejected from the pod into the vacuum of space without his helmet by just holding his breath.
I think that particular scene was questioned by quite a few people. I know I did. I had always heard the theory that the inside of our bodies have pressure. Since space does not, the idea is that, without a pressurized space suit, we would explode or at least be killed by exposure to the vacuum. This hypothesis has actually been proven to be false. Here's another link with some discussion of the topic. I used to have a much better link that discussed all of this including some info on a Russian astronaut who recently died in space, but I can't find it.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
To me, these don't fall into the "suspension of disbelief" category. It's just simple ignorance. Hell, an auto mechanic occasionally works at micrometer scales, it's not like they're getting something esoteric like a particle decay sequence wrong (tau to k-muon? madness!).
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005