Sci-fi movies are meant to be fun, not educational. We get that. After all, if we were looking to brush up on the 3 laws of Newton (or is it 4?) we’d be attending a Physics 101 lecture, right? However, even if we do allow for creative license and the director’s discretion to bend the laws of science any which way he wants, there are still some limits to which you can mess around with science. Here are some top offenders that have taken things a bit too far.
This is the movie that NASA dismissed as the “most absurdly inaccurate sci-fi film ever”. According to them, not only did the movie lack any scientific foundation whatsoever, the film was also offensive in that it triggered a lot of panic among the people who started calling up the agency to verify the claims of the movies. For the first time ever, NASA had to create a special website to quell this mass hysteria. Need we say more?
Although it looks pretty cool to have a gigantic space ship hovering over your heads, it is scientifically impossible for a vessel from outer space, especially one that huge, to do that without causing major natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. If science worked right in this movie, the aliens would have already won the day without even having to unleash their formidable anti-matter ray - simply because the Whitehouse, not to mention most of Washington DC, would already be underwater owing to the tidal waves that would have swept across the city with unprecedented fury.
No matter how much you stretch your imagination, can you really digest the idea of giant insects being technologically advanced enough to fling a rock through space so accurately that is misses 70% of our planet’s watery surface and land slap bang in the middle of a city like Buenos Aires? I’m hearing rumbles in my stomach already.
Duke University’s leading paleo-climatologist William Hyde made a public statement regarding this movie - “This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery.” Why? Well undisputable as climate change may be as a fact, it would take a major chunk of Antarctica to melt to create the massive floods shown in New York City. And, it would take two and a half years for the polar ice cap to melt, even if you somehow managed to direct all the rays of the sun at it. It’s definitely not happening overnight for sure!
Laughable as the idea might be that Arnold Schwarzenegger is Mars’ last hope for survival, it is even more unbelievable to see him, or anyone else for that matter, sauntering coolly across the surface of planet. Since its gravitational pull is 1/3rd that of Earth’s, you would expect to see Arnold, irrespective of his bulky size, bounding through the room like a Jack Rabbit But nooooo...not in this version of the red planet.
Indian Jones is capable of doing virtually everything. He is Spielberg’s answer to Superman, and thankfully, he wears his boxers inside his trousers. However, if you ask us to believe that he can escape a nuclear blast by hiding in a fridge lined with lead without so much as a hint of bruising, burning, and flattening, you are testing our faith a little too much.
The world has been taken over by robots and humans have been turned into Duracell batteries and harnessed as sources of energy. Except, not! We make for very poor sources of energy and the machines have better chances of generating more power by burning those pods in which humanity has been imprisoned. It’s a simple matter of using resources efficiently!
Well, that should teach us to believe all that we see. Can you think of any other fanciful movies to add to this list?
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