Bad Science: Favourite SF Movie Blunders

Cafe Society
21

Mission to Mars showed a stream of Dr Pepper come out of the spacecraft and freeze into a long (tasty) rod of ice which then collided with something on the after part of the ship, causing catastrophic damage.

This wouldn’t have happened, of course; the Dr Pepper would have flashed into steam in the vacuum, then immediately frozen into a little, quickly-dispersed cloud of crystals.

But no one here wants me to get started on what was wrong with Mission to Mars. Seriously.

And of course that couldn’t have happened, because a fragile, exposed, unprotected piece of blue plastic covered the chip that kept the AI under control.

22

You know, I think I had heard that before. But my point was that my friend recognized the OS from some of the bits of text, and not from the interface as a whole.

23

Watch 2001 Dave Bowman, recall, goes from his space pod to vacuum in getting back aboard the Discovery. Notice how his blood didn’t freeze or boil, and he didn’t even lose consciousness.
This whole issue of humans-in-a-vacuum has been as recurring theme in Arthur C. Clarke’s work. He has people go out into vacuum without pressure suits in The Other Side of the Sky and Earthlight long before 2001. When the movie came out, he prepared an article to defend his stand that people don’ty come apart in vacuum. It’s reprinted in his collection The view from Serendip, and cites NASA studiers on monkeys to support his view. Later on, Clarke mentioned the idea in The Fountains of Paradise. In that, his most recent use of it AFAIK, he mentions the breaking of blood vessels near the surface and the time limitations.
But blowing people up is more dramatic, and Pierre Boulle (he of “Planet of the Apes”) has someone blow up in Garden on the Moon. So did Martin Caidin (Author of “Marooned”, and the book that sparked “The Six Million Dollar Man”, and who, with his test pilot background, oughtta know better) in Four Came Back .

24

Star Trek: Generations had an acme super sun-destroying missile. There were just so many things wrong with this, starting with the sun going out round about the time the launched missile reached the stratosphere and not, e.g., a minimum 15 minutes later assuming the missile travelled at lightspeed and the sun’s fusion reaction stopped instantly and the result of this was that it went out rather than, say, leaking its accumulated heat over the next few million years the way white dwarfs generally do…

But it’s unfair to pick on Star Trek for bad science, or at any rate unproductive, since it would take less time to pick out any piece of good science.

25

Wait til they watch 10.5.

26

Well, Battlestar Galactica is currently confusing me. The Cylon agents’ spines glow when they’re indulging in coitus (which they do a * lot *). And they are sensitive to whatever radiation/gas was present at the ammo depot. They appear to be vastly stronger than humans and have subspace transmitters built in that allow them to transfer their personalities over huge distances. All this argues for some biological or mechanical structures that would be far from subtle and would be easily detectable by fairly low tech means, such as putting them through a metal detector, exposing them to radiation, or maybe giving them a lap dance.

But at they same time, they are supposedly sufficiently indistinguishable from humans that it takes sensitive tests to identify them. Does not compute.

27

And how can anyone forget the “single-celled heart” in The Amazing Colossal Man ?

28

Ah, I knew there was another bit in **This Island Earth ** that nagged me, and it just hit me.

“The handles are magnetized.”

To quote Crow : ‘And if your hands were made of metal, that’d mean something.’

29

You know I don’t think that was an in-joke.
To me it was just a clunky piece of exposistion. I always hate that part of the movie. While my wife and I watch it we look at each other and yell “Exposition!”

Oh yes bad science… The whole time travel thing in Superman.
It does not make sense.
Superman goes back in time or makes time go backwards but for some reason time doesn’t resume the same!
That does not make sense!
Lois is in here car right at the moment the Earth is about to swallow her up but with Superman just standing there nothing happens!
That does not make sense!
Are there two Supermen existing at that time now?
Look at the silly monkey!

That and one Nuke on the San Andreas is not going sink California into the ocean… nor would any big quake! The land mass is not being held up by the rest of the continent!

30

Have we seen a Colonial women’s spine during sex? It’s possible (though absurd) that all women in the Colonies have spines that glow during sex! Seriously I think Moore said somewhere that they only did that in the mini because it looked cool and he regreted now that it doesn’t make sense. And regarding the Cylon personality tranfer; we don’t know if this is actually true. The Cylons appear to believe it, but we don’t know how much of their religion is based in fact. It does appear that Cylons have some method of FTL communication;


In KLG #6 knows about C-Boomers pregnancy
31

Alright look. All you people picking on Star Trek have a right to do so, but you’re going about it the wrong way. There’s no reason to assume, as Macalandra did, that the acme super sun destroying missile–really, it should be an acme super fusion stopping missile, it doesn’t actually destroy the star-- is traveling at c, because they have faster than light drives in Star Trek. That’s why Worf said the missle would take 11 seconds to go from the planet Viridian III to the Viridian star, rather than 10 or 20 minutes. Also, the shockwave generated when this acme super sun stopping missile is used was identified early on in the movie as being a subspace shockwave, subspace being one of those at least possible phenomena that allows the writers enough leeway to write stuff like this.

Incubus makes a good point about laser weapons. Which is why in Star Trek they have phasers. Basically they invented a particle called nadions such that when you fire a beam of them it makes a nice looking energy weapon.

That said, there are viable errors in some of the ways Star Trek does some things, like the way the starships bank and swoop. Yes, we all know that this is an error, but let’s just chalk it up to the helmsmen having a little fun, hmm?

As for the ships all happening to be in the same plane, that’s bullshit. Obviously the ships, once they get within a certain distance, are going to adjust to put themselves in the same plane as the other ship. Same orientation? How do we know that’s actually the case? Maybe we’ve been looking at the Klingon Birds of Prey upside-down all these years.

The one area where Star Trek does annoy me is all those two dimensional shockwaves. I mean, space has THREE zarqing directions, not two.

Don’t even get me started on that Superman movie. First, flying really really fast around the Earth opposite its rotation will not even slow it down, much less start it going the other way. Second, even if he somehow did manage to turn the Earth the other way, how in BLAZES is that going to cause time to reverse itself? HOW!?

32

The Earth didn’t start spinning backwards, thus causing time to reverse. Superman exceeded lightspeed, travelling back through time, and the viewer’s perspective travelled with him - so as Superman returned to the previous time, we went along, watching the Earth’s rotation appear to reverse itself as a consequence, not the cause, of the time travel.

33

If I recall, it was a fuel leak that froze into the long tasty fuelsicle, which broke off and drifted to the aft of the ship. When the main engine was ignited, the solid fuel exploded and caused said catastrophic damage.

34

Spatial Rift 47, it is funny watching you defend Star Trek. Just like it’s funny watching Candid Gamera defend time travel in Superman: The Movie.

My favorite line from The Wrath of Khan was the one I’m sure Shatner had excised. When Spock pointed out Khan’s 2D approach to starship battle, I’m sure he was supposed to say, “just like you, you frelling idjit!”

35

Sure. I recognized it as Unix from the filesystem structure myself.

36

lno, I’m 90% sure it was Dr Pepper, but the principle is the same either way.

And I’d like to take this opportunity to stand up for the producers for (some applications of) sound in space.

If my spaceship collided with an asteroid (or another ship, or a blast from an energy weapon etc.) it would cause vibrations in the hull, knock over furniture, hurl cargo against bulkheads, etc.

Anyone inside the ship would hear this collective noise. And if the sequence is being told from those character’s point of view, it would be accurate and appropriate to put sound into the shot.

Point of view, fellow Dopers. Point of view.

37

That’s how we hear sound on the new BSG. Moore even said so him self.

38

Upon some digging, we’re both right, Fiver - it looks like there was a meteoroid impact which punctured both the hull and the fuel line. The crew poured Dr Pepper into the air to identify where the hull leak was, and that (incorrectly) froze into a stream in space. However, unknown to them, the fuel line leaked and froze, which caused the explosion when they fired the engine. The Bad Astronomer references this in his article on the bad science in the movie:

39

As a programmer myself, I was quite impressed with the fact that the guy from Swordfish was able to break into a government computer in 30 seconds on a laptop with what appeared to be a DOS prompt. Using one hand. With a gun to his head. While getting a blowjob.

I was disappointed by one scene in Galaxy Quest, where the shuttle is on autopilot and flies away with those creatures falling off of it. Falling off of it straight down even though the ship was moving forward.

Red Planet. I know, fish/barrel and all that - but there was a great line where Tom Sizemore, expert geneticist, mentioned the 4 DNA nucleotides: A, C, T,…and P.

40

Actually, it’s a Unix variant.