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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?
Radioactive spiders do not actually change you into a buff moviestar who swings around fighting hobgoblins.
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Geeks have a special gene that won't let us keep quiet during a movie when something isn't technically correct.
My sig can beat up your sig.
The story is the fiction, the science is what "should" make it seem feasible.
OBVIOUSLY
SHOW A LITTLE EFFORT IN YOUR WORK, EDITORS!
and
ICE CREAM IS A SUMPTOUS TREAT.
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/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!
I'm a professional scientist but I'm more pissed off by the "let's find a plot hole in a movie just to prove that I am smart"-people than the actual plot holes.
Hey, it's entertainment! Go with the flow!
BOO! TERRO
Hulk smash puny web server!
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.
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
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.
Gigli conjured up some matter out of my stomach and onto the theater floor.
Consider this: perhaps owing to the ubiquity of space combat in the Star Wars universe, every starship contains a synthesizer system combined with radar which senses ships in the vicinity, explosions, and blaster trails, and generates a surround-sound representation of all within the cockpit, to aid the pilot in dodging and maneuvering.
This explanation makes about as much sense as any other.
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.
bullshit. Most sound effects designers are Physics Majors anyways. Everyone (yes EVERYONE) watching a movie knows sound can't travel in a vacuum! All movie makers know it too, and they all admit it. The sound is for dramatic effect. I'm sorry, when I was 4 I woulda been bored to death with Star Wars if the Tie Fighters didnt have those cool metallic wines and the blasters have those blasty sounds. Hell, Asimov let it slide when he was consulting for the first Trek movie.
Personally, I like it a lot. Yeah, Kubric and Whedon, etc. use the true silence for the real dramatic effect, but movies would be boring if everyone did it. Besides, those sonic charges in Attack of the Clones had THE COOLEST SOUND EFFECTS. Everyone loved 'em.
If you want to argue what the sound is in Real Life, just imagine the viewer (yes, you) are viewing the action from outside, but you get the feeling you are in every space craft on screen, it's sensory immersion, the original point of it. Sonar doesn't really go "PING" (though some expensive medical equipment do). Before I knew it was silent in space, I didnt really give much thought to the sound effects in movies. Afterwards I passed it off as 3rd person omniscient experience (be it outside the craft hearing what's inside, or actually being in it, but seing it from outside....)
Besides, it's a FUCKING MOVIE get over it!
Thanks for listening.
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
Star Trek: Alien species can communicate without even exchanging any sort of dictionary. All ships have exactly the same concept of "up" and "down." It is also assumed that there is an absolute time (even though it is not explicitly stated). The theory of relativity simply does not exist.
Actually, Gene Roddenberry put some serious thought into these topics.
Alien Communication:
Star Fleet personnell are outfitted with a device called the "universal translator". It apparantly works on a sub-conscious level and allows the brain to automatically speak foreign languages. They've done some episodes where the Universal Translators didn't work and saw the results.
Personally I kinda like all the alien languages that you get in "Star Wars". It's a lot funner and makes things a lot richer in the same way that the various languages spoken in "Lord of the Rings" makes things a little more interesting.
Relativity Time:
Star Trek dates things with "Star Dates". The Star Dates take relevatistic effects in effect so that everything evens out.
Relative Travel:
In Star Trek, the ships don't travel faster than lite in normal space. The move to an adjacent space where the laws of physics are slightly more lenient. This allows the starships to leave earth and return without suffering the "twin paradox" effect too badly.
X-Men:
X-Men is a pure fantasy universe (like ALL comic books). Stan Lee is a pure story-teller. The Marvel universe reflects his disinterest with technobobbles. He just say's it works a certain way and it does. The characters, and their interaction, is the important part.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
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.
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."
I couldn't figure out what Captain Picard was doing to his uniform until I saw the movie Friday. Ice Cube does the same shirt smoothing move, but afterwards says "Do I still look high?".
-B
Anyhow, the movie newsgroups were flooded with many reviewers picking plot holes...
And I remember one wag posting something like this:
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.