So I finally got around to watching Batman Begins and I was most wonderfully surprised at how good it was…
Until they had a microwave emitter powerful enough to instantly vaporize thousands of gallons of water from 80 feet above, yet gentle enough to spare the humans fighting right next to it.
Damn you, whoever wrote that tripe. Damn you straight to hell.
Incredible hulk , spinning a 70 ton abrams tank around by the gun barrel
Declan
I don’t think you were supposed to believe in the Hulk.
With regards to “Batman Begins,” though, yes, that was absurd. What was painful about it was that such a weapon presented a great opportunity for the bad guy to suffer a poetic, and yet astoundingly gory, demise.
Why, don’t you know! The microwave emitter was specifically tuned to the frequency of water! Or something.
We’ve come along way since the days of Bat Anti-Shark Spray, but there’s no satisfying some people.
Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb…
From Jurassic Park, the thing that bothered me was when the geneticists started talking about their foolproof plan to keep the critters from breeding. I’d knew enough about parthenogenesis, which occurs in vertebrates (if only some lizards), to know that there was at least one way that a new species biology might surprise people even if one forces all the embryos to develop as females.
Add to that the fact that in many non-mammalian species the female is larger, and more aggressive, than the male, it just seemed really stupid to force all the critters to be female, not male.
And if I, a college drop out could see the problems with these decisions that the allegedly competent genetic engineers had made, there was a problem.
the G-forces Spiderman would experience, swinging that wide an arc at those speeds, would make his intenstines come spraying out his ass. Not to mention the effect it would have on any passengers he might be carrying along.
Similar reaction to Superman: Lois Lane falls off a tall building, and Supermant flies up from the ground to catch her. Their combined speed should have made her go splat when they collided.
The intensely dubious genetic engineering in **Jurassic Park ** was really just one symptom of Crichton’s larger exegesis on “chaos theory.” Now, it’s one thing to assert that complex systems are inherently unpredictable. But it’s hardly kosher to illustrate the point with a transparently faulty system that’s doomed to fail almost instantly. That’s like me building a house of cards, knocking it over, and then claiming I’ve proven architecture is impossible.
For me the movie lost its credibility when it became apparent the tyrannosaur was only separated from the guests by a hot wire. That’s just stupid no matter how you slice it. “Yes, John, but when the Pirates of the Caribbean ride breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.” Hey, guess what, Crichton? We also have zoos, and with vanishingly few exceptions the tourists don’t get eaten there either.
I’m starting to suspect that you just can’t trust Michael Crichton to convey valid scientific insights.
Umm…the wide arc is WHY there aren’t huge G forces on Spiderman. Ever notice that we don’t die on roller coasters, no matter how tall they get? Because the pullout arc is lengthened. He’s swinging long arcs, that would then reduce the Gs on him. The big Gs are on abrupt changes…like shooting a steel (non flexible) cable straight up while falling…then stopping you fast (Batman, anyone?) That would cause serious damage, but both the arcs that Spiderman uses, and the elasticity of the web for non-arced swings (think bungee cords) make Spiderman’s support system quite safe.
In the book, he lost me whne he tried to describe black clothing as being just as comfy in the sun as white clothing because of it being an effficient ‘black body radiater’.
OK, its pretty true, but guess where over half that radiated heat is going to go, Mikey?
Your body! Ooops!
Just now?
Spider-man 2, when Spidey, Doc Oc, and MJ were mere feet from the artificial sun which sucked in everything from miles around…except them. I’d also imagine the radiation would be so intense that they’d be instantly fried.
Adam
The entire movie “Armageddon” was ruined for me by faulty science. I don’t mind suspending my disbelief, but I’ll be damned if I’ll suspend my intelligence.
So a meteor is headed for earth, I’ll buy that. But am I really supposed to believe that it just suddenly appeared out of nowhere…and that NO ONE, not even a freaking backyard astronomer, noticed it before it was so close that civilization was threatened? What is this, a new law of physics: spontaneous creation? A gigantic rock just created itself from space dust, AND it’s defying all laws of motion and is hurtling towards earth with no means of propulsion save gravity…?
Are we supposed to swallow that NASA would choose to crash train an oil rig operator on SPACE TRAVEL rather than crash train an astronaut on the finer points of BLOWING UP ROCKS?
Science aside, are we to believe that a guy would have the opportunity to go joy riding with his sweetie, when there was a huge meteor heading for earth? Hello! What about, I don’t know, worldwide CHAOS?
Can you telll I’m STILL pissed about that 2 1/2 hours of my life that I’ll never recoup?
Missions to Mars didn’t just bend science or avoid it, the movie murdered science and then bathed in the blood. Simply too many examples to go over, no time to write a book.
Actually, according to an astronomer interviewed in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, the problem with this scenario is that we wouldn’t have nearly that much notice. The astronomer suggested that we’d have about a half-second notice on such things: according to him, there are more people staffing your average McDonald’s than there are people on earth who are watching the heavens for stray meteors aimed at earth. Granted, Bryson loves to go for the lurid; but I don’t think this part of the movie was implausible (I’ve not seen it, and so I won’t comment on the rest).
Daniel
Someone…Spider Robinson in his SF reviewing days, perhaps?..once quipped “Crichton doesn’t write science fiction, he writes anti-science fiction”.
Fenris
I can’t defend the radiation thing, but I thought it was only pulling in magnetic objects. So their fillings would be ripped out of their teeth (ouch) but not them so much.
But based on X-Men two, we’d have to hope none of them had been having an iron-rich diet, or they’re toast.
In X2 the guard was injected with massive amounts of, something, iron filings in suspension or whatever, by Mystique. It was that injected material that Magneto was manipulating, not the iron found normally in the guy’s body.
Although why the guard wasn’t killed by having huge quantities of metal shot into his body I don’t know.
For me, it was using frog DNA (instead of the far more logical choices of, say, birds or crocodiles) to fill in the missing gaps in the dino DNA. In the book, they went on to use this as a lame-ass justification for the idea that T. rex’s eyesight was based on movement (whereas in the movie, they didn’t even bother trying to justify such nonsense). There are so many things wrong with that idea, I don’t even know where to begin…