“We call him Neutron because he’s so positive.” As spoken by a beautiful lady physicist, allegedly one of the world’s greatest scientific minds, in This Island Earth. Unsurprisingly, the planet Metaluna, which she was called upon in an interstellar recruiting drive to help save, was doomed.
The space ship coming to a silent screeching halt in Dark Star.
This Island Earth is one of my pet peeves. The book, by Utah engineer Raymond F. Jones, is actually very good. (It’s finally back in print, after years of obscurity, and you can get a copy and read it.) Jones would never have made that kind of error. The problem is that they took his book and threw virtually all of it out, except the first chapter or so, which they dumbed down considerably.
The usual suspects:
1.) Ships in SF movies almost never move as if they’re really spaceships in a vacuum. They glide and swoop as if they’re in an atmosphere. 2001 and 2010 got this right, and just about nobody else. (Some people claim the new Battlestar Galactica series does it right, but nmot from what Ive seen)
2.) People don’t explode in vacuum (Outland, Total Recall
3.) Putting lightrs in your space helmet lets the audience see the actor, but it would make it really hard for the guy ion the helmet to see. Outland, again. Alien, too many others to mention.
4.) In space, no one can hear your exhaust. Again, too many cases. I’ll cut 2010 some slack on this – they were in special circmstances – but even the big guys – Star Trek and Star Wars – get this one wrong.
5.) Why is it that even in movies that profess to know better, robots and computers still try to Take Over the World? Forbidden Planet, Bicentennial Man and a few others get this OK. Even Star Trek, which gave us a reasonable Data and the plausibly hostile Borg, still gave us malevolent Holodeck Programs and “The Ultimate Computer” in TOS.
6.) More computer problems than you can shake a stick at — Mice always make noises, computer keyboards make too much noise, displays that are absurdly efficient, Scotty’s being able to use a keyboard so efficiently and programming a centuries-old Mac, Indeoendence Day’s compatible human and alien computers, Jurrassic Park’s “I know this, it’s Unix!”, the ten-ton poor speech vocoder evil computers of the 1950s, and on and on.
You guys need a trip to the Insulting Stupid Movie Physics page:
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
Apparently *The Day After Tomorrow * and *The Core * are running neck and neck for the title of Most Scientifically Ignorant Movie of All Time.
About The Core, the authors of the website said (among other things):
Have fun. I sure did …
In all fairness, after seeing This Island Earth many times via MST3K, I had come to think the lady scientist’s line about the cat was perhaps ironic.
In Independence Day, the ships were so damned huge that gravity should have flattened everything underneath them. That would’ve reduced the drama a little bit…
Actually, I like the idea of shooting down massive ships that completely overshadow entire cities. the logical consequence is a huge pile of rubble – crushed city plus cashed spaeship – where your city ought to be. But somehow they never show that.
And this after initially not knowing about the mouse (he tried to speak into it).
Despite ‘up’ and ‘down’ only having any kind of meaning on a planet, spaceships in Star Trek always encounter each other moving in the same orientation and plane.
“She made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”
Of course, we can pretend this means something that might be plausible in the Star Wars universe, but we all know in our hearts that this is a screw up.
C’mon. Han just meant that he found a shortcut! 
I always enjoy “When Giant Animals Attack” movies. You know, the ones with 50 foot tall ants, 50 ton rabbits, etc. “Them!” is a classic example. They conveniently ignore the Square/Cube Law of animal proportions, which basically says that those ants would be immobile lumps of tissue, unable to lift their own bodies on those spindly legs.
Oh, one more thing…
Han shot first!!! 
No joke, I went to see this movie with a major computer geek friend of mine, and when they showed the computer screen he said “that’s Unix.” Two seconds later, the girl says “I know this, it’s Unix.”
This is slightly off-topic, but what would happen to a person in a vacuum?
I’ve always wondered what the reaction to the “I know this, it’s Unix” line would’ve been had it come from a 10 year old boy with plastic frame glasses. Something tells me it would’ve been ignored and not brought up as “ONE OF THE WORST SCIENCE MOMENTS OF ALL TIME!!!11!!1”
I can’t let this lie.
WTF? It was a bunch of blocky graphics.
(As a lot of folks here know) A Unix “screen” typically looks like this:
**$**
If they wanted something more graphic they could’ve had Xeyes running.
And no computer system in the history of the world has ever put ACCESS DENIED in big flashing letters in the middle of the freaking screen when you get a login wrong - but every movie-land computer does this. (Not science but someone has to say it).
Passing shot: A lot of future spaceships appear to be steam powered. What gives with all the gushing steam in space exploration? (This excludes Trek where all access and control panels don’t vent steam, they are wired to explosives).
They die, but seriously I know your blood would boil and possibly freeze at the same time. Can anyone else be more specfic?
He explained to me later how he recognized it. The whole swoopy, graphical interface was completely bogus, but the folders had classic Unix names, /bin, /etc, /home, something like that. He saw those and knew it had to be Unix.
I swear it happened just the way I described. I’m sticking up for the kid in that scene.
How about the misuse of labeling various weapons ‘laser’ weapons? As in ‘laser’ rifles/cannons/beams, etc. Generally these fire some glowing pulse of energy that travels surprisingly slow for something that is supposed to be moving at the speed of light.
Wouldn’t a laser weapon carry an invisible beam in space, since there isn’t anything in a vacuum to reflect the beam of light (aside from the thing you are zapping) ? Wish they would just make up a name for it or something, rather than incorrectly calling it a ‘laser’.
Firefly got this right, as near as I can tell, plus no sound in space and not all ships appearing on the same elliptical plane.
Nor do they instantly freeze solid. I forget if it was Mission to Mars or Space Cowboys that got that wrong.
This did lead to an excellent and rather subtle joke in, of all things, Spiderman 2, when Dr. Octavius is describing his cybernetic arms (which he invented using his degree in “Advanced Science”) and a reporter asks if he’s worried about the arm’s AI taking over his body. Because, naturally, that’s just what AIs do. They always want to kill all humans. Kinda like cats, really.
The swoopy, graphical interface was an actual 3D graphical filesystem navigator for IRIX called FSN. SGI still provides it for download from their website.