Movies with incorrect basic premises?

That feels like it should be in quotes. Lost in a “studio fire”.

Two words: The Core

And its spiritual ancestor (with even worse science): Unknown World. When the protagonist is corrected with the correct science, his answer is "That’s what you believe, but scientists know … "

The Core

You can’t even get past the first sentence in the synopsis:
“The Earth’s core has stopped spinning.”

Live Free Or Die Hard: I’m no expert on utility companies, but I’m pretty sure you can’t “hack” into a natural gas company’s… uh, software, and “send” all the natural gas back to the station, where it will blow up.

Volcano.

Volcanoes typically only form in subduction zones, or over hot spots. The San Andreas fault near Los Angeles is a transform boundary, in which the continental plates move horizontally relative to each other, which is why there are no volcanoes in Southern California in reality. (Of course, that was the least unrealistic thing about the movie…)

I can let some scientific inaccuracies slide, but The Day After Tomorrow’s premise of global warming causing an almost instantaneous world-wide freeze-up was considerably less plausible than Noah’s Flood.

Armageddon

  1. A rock the size of Texas is about to strike the earth.
  2. We can do something about it.

This part sounds basically accurate (depending on what your definition of “very high” is) - fighting on the Western front in the last months of the war was intense and fiercely contested by German troops (not just against American units, but other Allied forces as well), in weather conditions that were often severe.

Can’t recall the title offhand, but my source on this is a recently published history of the fighting from about late fall of '44 to mid-'45.

"Signs"

The premise about an alien race, who obviously have the intellect and ability to seek out other planets in the solar system that support terrain life (life that can breath oxygen) and to build crafts that can travel the vast distance from their world to other worlds, and they don’t notice that the planet they finally come upon and land on is 2/3 covered with a liquid that can dissolve and kill them.

It would be like NASA sending off a space craft full of astronauts to land on Neptune, without wearing helmets or having tanks of oxygen to breathe cause, gosh, Neptune is made from hydrogen and helium with no oxygen. Oops.

I liked the excuse given in one of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality omake chapters, which goes something like this:

It kinda even makes sense, since the third movie seems to indicate that the laws of physics as we know them don’t really always apply out in the real world. Or maybe Neo is just a wizard.

Well one of the most horrific battles in the war in Europe, The Battle of the Bulge took place from December 1944 thru January 1945.

Which brings to mind Liar, Liar. In which a woman lies about her age to appear older than she really is. This reveal at the end of the movie cancels out that she signed a prenup that would leave her with nothing in her divorce proceeding, since she entered into the contract as a minor. However, wouldn’t that also invalidate her marriage, since she cannot enter into a contract as a minor? There was no mention of emancipation.

Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and countless others are based on the now discredited premise that magic exists.

**Curious George **is based on the premise that a (not named) modern-day country in Africa would allow an American to remove “an ancient idol” that looks to be about thirty feet high from it, for free (at least, the museum is in no position to pay any fee) and permanently. This is an important piece of their cultural heritage, supposedly. It was “carved by a thousand craftsmen”.

Sadly, not original to me.

As much as I love Casablanca, I always found it hard to believe that the Nazis would give a damn about Charles de Gaulle’s signature on letters of transit.

Of course, nothing in ‘Signs’ confirms that the beings are aliens or that they have spaceships, so your complaint about the premise is itself based on a faulty premise.

Nobody has mentioned Sharknado, yet? :slight_smile:

Hey! Bricker is trying to reverse-ninja me!

(Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I linked to earlier, is written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was also known as LessWrong and owns the site Bricker linked to.)

ETA: Sorry if this was too hijacky. I just found it pretty cool that somebody else’s mind went to that “the machines tell elegant lies” scene. Especially since it was Bricker.

“West of Memphis” and “Devil’s Knot” both take the premise that the West Memphis 3 were innocent.