I just sat through “A Sound of Thunder,” which is loosely based on a Ray Bradbury story by the same name. The premise is that time tourists step on a butterfly and change the future. Yawn. William Tenn wrote a terrific send-up of that story in which the time tourists return to a much-changed future oblivious to the fact that anything had changed… because, of course, if the future’s changed, it’s changed you.
Well, such logical problems are far from troubling the makers of this messy movie. In fact, they are much exacerbated by pseudoscientific gibberish about “time waves,” which are obvious CGI ripples that move through physical space like Kai’s Power Tool tsumamis, and supposedly science-minded people voicing such confused and wrong-headed conceptions of evolution that the movie would have honestly gained scientific credibility had Kent Hovind been brought in a consultant.
There are also simple plot holes that five year olds would spot. For one thing, different groups of tourists keep returning to the same place and time and killing the same unfortunate T Rex, without once encountering the last group. For another, a butterfly somehow escapes the apocalyptic wrath of a volcanic explosion a few feet away, but can’t fly out from under a guy’s boot… which butterfly apparently is the sole owner of the DNA that makes evolution a law based on natural selection rather than a completely different force that compels all life to be more like the drawings on the backs of seventh grade boys’ notebooks. The consequences are man eating plant and baboon-dinosaur hybrids that appear all at once in the otherwise unchanged distant future.
So at this moment, with that fresh in my mind, I’m wondering if there has been any serious-minded movie which was more scientifically insensible. I’m willing to let Back to the Future and Bill and Ted and other comedies slide, because they don’t take themselves very seriously.
If you want to be tight-assed about it, you can find nitpicks in anything. I mean, they were traveling through time, for God’s sake* – why are you willing to accept that, but nothing else?
“A Sound of Thunder” was not about science or scientific issues; it was about a metaphor that the smallest action can have major consequences. If you start nitpicking about the science, then you are taking the first step down the road to complete cluelessness.
It’s fiction, not a science textbook, and has no reason to have to please your narrow idea of what time travel is. The story still has power because of its metaphor, and if you want to be a literal robot and ignore that for scientific fact, that’s your flaw, not the story’s.
*Yes, there is some scientific justifications for time travel, but they came after the fact: the trope was invented before they existed, and the device used by Bradbury hasn’t a chance in hell of actually working.
Maybe not as bad as The Day After Tomorrow, but The Core should have an honorable mention. And Armageddon.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that all movies that portray science in some way do it half-assed at best. I mean, I’m a humanities major and I’ll find myself throwing popcorn at the TV and screaming “That would NEVER happen!!”
Dude, Intuitor.com’s “#1 Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics Classic”–I give you The Core. From start to finish, this is a briliantly technically wrong movie, in every way you could imagine; it’s more divorced from reality of physics than a Road Runner cartoon: The Core is a marvel. It has everything: common physics misconceptions, blatant misrepresentations of physical laws, a complete range of stereotypes, ridiculous feats of engineering, and pure fabrication of scientific “facts”. The weighty or sad parts are so inane, they made us laugh out loud. The dialog, plot, and action are predictable, if not outright tedious. Yet, the bad physics provide nonstop surprises. It’s the worst physics movie we’ve ever viewed. It’s so bad, it’s almost entertaining..
Here are more Intuitor.com reviews. Independence Day is one of my favorite reviews; aside from Brent Spiner’s inspired performance as a government scientist (and he’s perfect…I work with people like this) the movie is the biggest pastche of bad scifi ever. All they needed to top it off were some Ray Harryhausen stop motion effects and a guy in a rubber dinosaur suit.
If your talking about the Bradbury story, perhaps you’re reading is correct, but that’s also a trite and boring point to make, and it suffers no less from the fairly obvious logical problem upon which it rests. If you’re talking about the movie, you’re obviously mistaken. The movie was “about” CGI monsters and money, but was so badly executed in every way they probably lost money on it.
This statement suggests that noticing major logical contradictions, plotholes, and pseudoscientific blathering is “nitpicking,” which compels me to wonder what valid criticism of a movie would look like. Can they kill off a character and have him whistling by in the next scene? Have cowboys setting a little campfire on the dark side of the moon, with their moon cattle grazing on the green cheese in the background?
Of course, any of that would be fine in a comedy or puppet show, but in a purportedly serious, science-based movie, it seems like fair game.
The notion that such “nitpicking” – which, in this case, is the most basic exercise of critical thinking, as would be done by anyone with a flickering of consciousness – is the road to “cluelessness,” is so very silly I’m not sure how to respond without derailing the thread and drawing a warning from a mod. Well, here’s the best I can do:
everybody knows there are WHALERS on the moon (they do carry a harpoon, after all) sadly, there ain’t no whales so they end up telling tall tales and singing a whaling tune…
then they go off to farm Buggalo, not cattle, geez, get your facts sraight…
First, the totally lame, “they are thinking in three dimensions” line when all they did was wrap their drawings around 3 sides of a cube.
But what really killed me is that Clarisse (or whatever Jodie’s character is called) didn’t think of the obvious point of asking just how much static was recorded on her videocam. That was the very first thing I thought when they show her the static on the TV: “Show me how it starts and how it ends”. How can DC suits see it and the super scientist not think of it?
So no movie should ever be made unless it sticks to the strictest standards of scientific knowledge and never ventures into what may or may not be or even poses a big what if. Brilliant. You should work in Hollywood. :rolleyes:
“Duality,” being your name, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this particular choice of fallacy. Since I’ve explicitly given examples of spectacularly unscientific movies that are OK by me, it shows not just lousy reasoning, but laziness as well.
Ah, The Core. I saw the previews for the movie with my family. My father turned to me and asked “So where does all the angular momentum go?” On the plus side, movies like The Core and Armageddon did give us a great South Park episode in “Die Hippie Die.” (An aside: Seeing movie previews with Dad can be hilarious. His comment about Tristan and Isolde was “If the story could survive Wagner, it can probably survive Hollywood.”)
Anyway, although Contact was mentioned already, how likely is it that a fairly low-power, non-focused broadcast could actually be picked up with any clarity at all?
SoT wasn’t great scientifically, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. The problem was the animation! It was 1 step up from being drawn with crayon, I swear! The premise of the movie was okay though.
Spiderman (can’t remember which one) has Spider man having to make a choice: swing down and save the girl or swing down and save the falling trolley car of innocents? He’ll do both! He shoots his webbing and swings down, saving Miss Watson, then fires another web and swings to the other side, shooting another web to the falling trolley and saving both.
You know, because he could catch up to Mary Jane (let alone a trolley car) after it hits terminal velocity.
Van Helsing, a wretched movie in many many many ways, had me out of the “moment” so many times. I can’t even recall all the silly little they did with physics and such.
Those great old 50s movies thumbed their noses at science in ways that modern movies don’t even APPROACH. Case in point: Kronos. Aliens in a distant star system, so they send out a giant robot battery to steal power from Mexican power plants.
No, I am not making that up. Apparently, travelling interstellar space is so cheap and easy that you can more than make up for the expense by aborbing power from a few electrical plants on Earth. Interesting. But not particularly scientific.
{quote=duality72]So no movie should ever be made unless it sticks to the strictest standards of scientific knowledge and never ventures into what may or may not be or even poses a big what if. Brilliant. You should work in Hollywood.
[quote]
A movie, or a book, has to make sense in the context of its own rules. We assume all the rules of our world apply, and that the creators will give some sort of justification when they don’t. It’s only annoying when a movie violates its own logic.
Didn’t it sit in the can for years before being released?