# Factual Scientific errors in movies... **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [August 27, 2004, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704 "2004-08-27T00:20:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/21 "2004-08-27T02:52:38Z")
This one’s in a lot of movies, but the first big one I can recall is Tim Burton’s **Batman** – Hero fires his gun/hurls his grappling hook _while he’s falling_, it snags onto something, the rope goes taut, and our hero comes to a sudden jerking halt with no ill effects. (When the real stuntman pulled a trick like this for the climbing scene in **For Your Eyes Only** he aparently had all sorts of safeguards built in). I’m sorry – there should be broken bones, broken spines, maybe a few limbs pulld out of sockets, the rope should stretch and rebound… all sorts of gory and uncean stuff. Don’t try this at home, kids. Rockets in space are _always_ good for a laugh – rocket engines roar in vacuum, and ships bank in vacuum like ships flying in atmosphere, and _never_ turn around their center of mass. There’s no point in listing all the film that got it wrong – almost all of them do. A handful – \*\* 2001, 2010[/] (although their noisy braking maneuver is borderline inaccurate) **Apollo 13** and a few others got it right. If you want to see how _real_ spaceships move, watch some old NASA footage. Everything seems unreal – because it’s an unreal and unfamiliar situation. The bad films play to our expectations, and screw up – like the Superman cartoon **The Bulleteers** that features a jet plane-type craft – which makes propellor-airplane noises. Special mention to **Starship Troopers** for unphysical fying above and beyond the call of logic (swooping turns as mentioned above, the surface of a glass of liquid gets pulled sideways by the gravity of an asteroid – but the glass doesn’t move good non-skid surfaces, etc., etc.). ---
**Author:** ![Kluge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a183cd/32.png) [@Kluge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kluge)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/22 "2004-08-27T03:09:06Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Speaking of which, I still haven’t forgiven George Lucas for having Han Solo complete “…the Kessel Run in Five Parsecs” in the original **Star Wars**. They made Greedo fire first, but they didn’t fix this? If you’re gonna choose real units, make sure that they match the thing being measured. I don’t care even if this was intentional – it causes a Disturbance in the Force. Well, they seemed to have come up with an explanation to this, after the fact if nothing else: [The Kessel Run](http://www.starwars.com/community/askjc/jocasta/askjc20020221.html). ---
**Author:** ![Kluge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a183cd/32.png) [@Kluge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kluge)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/23 "2004-08-27T03:11:27Z")
> [@Kluge](#): > > Well, they **seemed** to have come up with an explanation to this Or maybe they seem to… ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/24 "2004-08-27T03:34:34Z")
> [@](#): > > I’m exactly the opposite. Hanging an important plot point on it is the only excuse I can think of. I hate it more when it’s irrelevant; then, the mistake is just lazy stupidity, nothing more. To me, there’s a certain level of forgiveness I give to a writer. When I see something in a movie that is impossible or “lazy” (as you call it), I simply ask myself, “Can the movie work without that?” If the answer is “Yes,” I simply don’t care. One example: The laser in _Goldfinger_… y’know, “Do you expect me to talk?” and all that. Technically, THAT’S an impossibility, as you shouldn’t be able to see the laser. However, it is so insignificant and infinitesimal to the plot - a visible laser - that there’s no point in getting worked up about it. Other examples would be “sound in space” or other such sci-fi conventions. Only the most anal of people would give a damn. ---
**Author:** ![Ephemera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8baadc/32.png) [@Ephemera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ephemera)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/25 "2004-08-27T03:44:51Z")
> [@tracer](#): > > (And, yes, it **is** a science fiction movie. No way in the real world would Drew Barrymore have that much trouble getting a date.) That was the only part of the movie that was even the least bit believable. Leelee Soblieski not being able to get a date, on the other hand. Inconcievable! ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/26 "2004-08-27T03:55:34Z")
The scene in X2, where the X-schoolmarm’s are taking the X-students through the exhibit on human evolution…why, there were enough science bloopers in that one scene to make me almost wriggle off my seat with anxiety. My favorite was “recent genetic studies have suggested humans and neanderthal’s may have interbred.” (I’m probably not quoting it exactly, but that’s pretty close). Well, no, actually, the mtDNA work suggested the exact opposite, which was known at least as far back as 1997, well before even pre-production work on the film. Also, a lot of the gobbledegook about “mutation” in the opening or closings of those films…agh! Total cringer. Then there’s Magneto’s magic EM field that, I guess, mutates every cell in a non-mutant’s body, but doesn’t mutate mutants, unless, maybe, they’re unmutated mutants, or perhaps even unmutated mutants are immutable? The leg bone’s connected to the head bone? What? ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/27 "2004-08-27T04:05:33Z")
Thank you, Loopydude, for providing a perfect example of what I mean by people getting far too upset over trivial plot elements. ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/28 "2004-08-27T04:08:22Z")
Trivial? _Trivial_!?! They’re mutants! This whole mutation madness is _the_ thing that makes them the X-Men! It’s implausible enough; why do they have to rub our poor noses in it? ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/29 "2004-08-27T04:14:52Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Speaking of which, I still haven’t forgiven George Lucas for having Han Solo complete “…the Kessel Run in Five Parsecs” in the original **Star Wars**. They made Greedo fire first, but they didn’t fix this? If you’re gonna choose real units, make sure that they match the thing being measured. I don’t care even if this was intentional – it causes a Disturbance in the Force. I understood this to be deliberate - he was judging how much these potential suckers knew about spaceflight, if they swallowed it whole (as they did) he could bamboozle them with bullshit and charge them even more than he usually did. ---
**Author:** ![Kluge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a183cd/32.png) [@Kluge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kluge)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/30 "2004-08-27T04:19:56Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > How about the “Oxygen destroyer” in the original **Godzilla**? How does that make water act like acid and dissolve fish (and Godzilla), bones and all? And if it’s a mis-translation, it’s a doozy (although my subtitled uncut version has the phrase, too). Well, when you think about it, if you remove the O from H2O, and all the electrons with it, you’re left with only H+ ions. Seeing as how, IIRC, the acidity of a substance is based on the concentration of H+ ions, you’d be left with one helluva a strong acid. Now how you make all those particles just disappear like that is beyond me. ---
**Author:** ![SPOOFE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c5a1d2/32.png) [@SPOOFE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SPOOFE)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/31 "2004-08-27T04:22:21Z")
> [@](#): > > Trivial? Trivial!?! They’re mutants! This whole mutation madness is the thing that makes them the X-Men! It’s implausible enough; why do they have to rub our poor noses in it? … What does some random blurb about neanderthals have to do with mutants? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/32 "2004-08-27T04:23:54Z")
> [@](#): > > Special mention to Starship Troopers for unphysical fying above and beyond the call of logic (swooping turns as mentioned above, the surface of a glass of liquid gets pulled sideways by the gravity of an asteroid – but the glass doesn’t move good non-skid surfaces, etc., etc.). It’s probably unfair to take shots at one of the dopiest movies ever made, but if anyone complains I’ll say this post was meant as a satire. Anyway, there was a scene at the beginning of the movie where the nefarious plans of the bugs were being explained. With lots of pictures and voiceover narration for the slower members of the audience. It was shown that the bugs lived on the opposite side of the galaxy. And the main part of their military strategy was throwing asteriods from their solar system towards ours. If you’re the intellectual equivalent of a bug (a Hollywood screenwriter for example) this probably seems like a good plan. But the rest of us have to wonder if maybe the bugs were actually at war with the dinosaurs and couldn’t figure out who we were and why we were attacking their planet. And let’s not go into the whole issue about hearing a spaceship explode. ---
**Author:** ![MaceMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4bbf92/32.png) [@MaceMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaceMan)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/33 "2004-08-27T04:25:42Z")
“Lord of the Flies” carries over an error from the book…lenses for near-sightedness (myopia) are concave and diverge light, so they can’t be used to start fires. I remember getting upset when reading the book in 8th grade, since this was a major plot point, but no one else caught the error, or cared when I mentioned it. ---
**Author:** ![Darkhold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@Darkhold](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darkhold)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/34 "2004-08-27T04:33:29Z")
> [@Dooku](#): > > It’s pretty hard to beat **Saturn 3**. Kirk Douglas and Farah Fawcett are being chased around a Space Station by Harvey Keitel’s evil robot. > > How do they get rid of the robot? They cut a hole in the floor of the Space Station, cover it with a blanket, then stand on the other side while the robot falls through the hole and out into space. Then they embrace. The End. Er what? If I’m remembering the right movie at some point they cover over the hydro garden and the robot falls through that into water not into space. And they can’t embrace because by the end everyone’s dead but Farah. ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/35 "2004-08-27T04:40:55Z")
> [@MaceMan](#): > > “Lord of the Flies” carries over an error from the book…lenses for near-sightedness (myopia) are concave and diverge light, so they can’t be used to start fires. I remember getting upset when reading the book in 8th grade, since this was a major plot point, but no one else caught the error, or cared when I mentioned it. As opposed to what? Flat? I mean, can’t you just turn the glasses around to “make” them convex? I’m confused. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Rieux](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Dr.Rieux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Rieux)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/36 "2004-08-27T04:41:49Z")
Tom Sizemore, as the biologist in _Red Planet_, made at least two ridiculous mistakes (three, if you count trying to play a character with a graduate degree): [ul] [li]Referring to the Martian creatures as “nematodes” when they were obviously arthropods (i.e., they were like insects–not worms).[/li][li]Stating that the four letters that make up DNA are “C, A, T, and P.”[/li][/ul] ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/37 "2004-08-27T04:44:38Z")
> [@SPOOFE](#): > > … What does some random blurb about neanderthals have to do with mutants? It’s supposed to directly tie in with the whole “evolution” angle they keep bringing up in X-Men films. Hence, I’m not under the impression it’s a completely throwaway scene. It’s, y’know, supposed to make you _think_ about human origins. How we _evolved_, and what we may be _evolving into_. Thing is, what they want you to think is total crap. ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 5:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/38 "2004-08-27T05:02:16Z")
> [@Ellis Dee](#): > > As opposed to what? Flat? I mean, can’t you just turn the glasses around to “make” them convex? > > I’m confused. Erm, no, they are concave no matter which direction light happens to be travelling through them … ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 5:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/39 "2004-08-27T05:02:20Z")
> [@Loopydude](#): > > It’s supposed to directly tie in with the whole “evolution” angle they keep bringing up in X-Men films. Hence, I’m not under the impression it’s a completely throwaway scene. It’s, y’know, supposed to make you _think_ about human origins. How we _evolved_, and what we may be _evolving into_. **Thing is, what they want you to think is total crap.** Bolding added Are you serious? _That’s_ where you lose your ability to suspend disbelief? Cyclops can shoot rays from his eyeballs, but don’t expect me to believe that homo sapiens and neanderthals interbred? Wow. I know your complaint is in line with the OP, but the bolded sentence required me to type this response. ---
**Author:** ![HPL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3da27b/32.png) [@HPL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HPL)\ **Post date:** [August 27, 2004, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704/40 "2004-08-27T05:03:34Z")
> [@Little Nemo](#): > > It’s probably unfair to take shots at one of the dopiest movies ever made, but if anyone complains I’ll say this post was meant as a satire. > > Anyway, there was a scene at the beginning of the movie where the nefarious plans of the bugs were being explained. With lots of pictures and voiceover narration for the slower members of the audience. It was shown that the bugs lived on the opposite side of the galaxy. And the main part of their military strategy was throwing asteriods from their solar system towards ours. If you’re the intellectual equivalent of a bug (a Hollywood screenwriter for example) this probably seems like a good plan. But the rest of us have to wonder if maybe the bugs were actually at war with the dinosaurs and couldn’t figure out who we were and why we were attacking their planet. > . Notice that the astriod manages to beat them back to earth as well, implying that the thing is being propelled faster then light. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/factual-scientific-errors-in-movies/261704.md?page=3)