I just saw the second to the last scene of Ghost where Carl the bad-guy friend is killed by a falling pane of glass hit by a swinging pully that he sets in motion.
I never noticed before but the second swing of the pully which hits the glass that kills him goes higher than the first, which according to my studies of the laws of motion is impossible (I know, I know, unless acted upon by an outside force).
Other than the 16 shot revolvers in the old Westerns and the sun setting in the east in John Wayne’s film The Green Beret, are there any other revocations of natural law that come readily to mind?
In Rat Race, Whoopi Goldberg is in some sort of extremely fast-moving vehicle, and someone shoots a bullet in the same direction. She and whoever she’s with see the bullet go past their window – backwards, implying that they are literally moving faster than a speeding bullet. Fine. But the bullet doesn’t fall. Horizontal motion, no matter how fast, has no effect on vertical motion (i.e. gravity) unless you get into near-orbital speeds. And I don’t think bullets are QUITE that fast.
In the transporter 2 when Jason Statham’s character somehow makes his car do a 360 degree barrel roll to knock a bomb off the bottom of the car by making the upside down car go by a hanging crane which knocks the bomb off and then lands the car. C’mon man how could they expect anyone to buy that even in a movie.
My daughter likes a particular series of made-for-TV movies with a sci-fi look to them. Apparently, no effort is made to have the stories conform to actual scientific knowledge.
In one movie they are on the Moon and are given a deadline. They must be off the Moon “before the Earth sets”.
Doc Ock takes Spiderman, throws him forward (ahead of the train). Spiderman twists and turns his way through the walkway, whereupon on the other side his momentum allows him to catch up to Doc Ock, tackling him.
Except for automobiles. Movie automobile physics is a subject in itself. In the movies, you can drive off an overpass and drop fifty feet, but if you’re moving fast enough that your car hits the ground at a shallow angle, nothing bad happens.