What's the worst example of bad science in a film you've watched?

[Jfswift]

That you can hear explosions and laserguns in space.
It's the worst because the film-makers can't even plead ignorance - everybody knows about this.

I've seen one spin on that which really only works for Star Wars. I believe it was mentioned their ships can create an artificial sound effect for the crew. Still, though I agree, kind of lame.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

3) "Star Trek" (new) Totally disregarding red matter: I am sorry, black holes don't work that way.

See, that one didn't bother me as much. I mean, no that isn't how they work, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about magical red goo that makes blackholes. It isn't like Star Trek's never asked us to believe weirder things (Genesis Project anyone?)

But a Super Nova isn't some made-up thing. It's a real, watchable event. You can watch them happen in our galaxy with a normal, currently avaliable telescope (assuming that one's going on at the moment). And, as we've all noticed, the galaxy hasn't been threatened by any of them, not since the greeks (or whomever) noticed a star get brighter all of a sudden, then vanish entirely.

 

[Buizel91]

That you can hear explosions and laserguns in space.
It's the worst because the film-makers can't even plead ignorance - everybody knows about this.

This. It seriously pisses me off.

I once was give a plausible(ish) explanation for this.

In the future starships will come equipped with a program that replicates the noises humans expect to hear through the internal speakers, including zappy lasers and doppler effects when approaching\passing an object, just to help them make decisions faster and feel more comfortable.

It think it was on the free-space forums I was told that, I mean why else go to the effort of making a doppler effect sound program that calculates everything on the fly for your space game?

that's basically the excuse given in a game callede Shattered Horizons. The premise is that the spacesuits you're wearing have the same doppler effects used to give the characters more awareness to their surroundings, since fighting in space would be really difficult with no hearing, as it's a huge part of our battlefield awareness and to not have it is a massive disadvantage.
The thing I like about Shattered Horizons is that it doesn't just use that as an excuse for sound effects in space, but it gives you to option to turn them off, so you only hear your own breathing and the low batter of your space-rifle (????) in your hands as the vibrations are transferred to the air in your suit.

What is that game! i want it! now! is it for 360 O_O

lol It's called Shattered Horizon. It's only for Steam on PC, sry. Here's a better vid to make you salivate EVEN MORE (in case you didn't want it enough)

Damn, my computer would never play that =( ooh well i'll live *sobs in corner*

 

[Damoclies]

3) "Star Trek" (new) Totally disregarding red matter: I am sorry, black holes don't work that way.

See, that one didn't bother me as much. I mean, no that isn't how they work, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about magical red goo that makes blackholes. It isn't like Star Trek's never asked us to believe weirder things (Genesis Project anyone?)

But a Super Nova isn't some made-up thing. It's a real, watchable event. You can watch them happen in our galaxy with a normal, currently avaliable telescope (assuming that one's going on at the moment). And, as we've all noticed, the galaxy hasn't been threatened by any of them, not since the greeks (or whomever) noticed a star get brighter all of a sudden, then vanish entirely.

Oh, I totally suspended disbelief on the magic red goo (mentally filed under "Technology Indistinguishable From Magic" folder) But the "black holes as magic gateways through time" and the "black hole resistant Romulan ship from the future" (not black hole PROOF, but tested to survive event horizon gravitational forces for long enough to have one last dramatic conversation.) Was.. a little much for me.

 

[Liedna]

anyone see the movie shoot em up?
my friend had a blu ray copy. he said it was awesome...
The main character on several occaisions kills people with carrots. seriously. at one point he shoves a carrot into someones mouth and it comes out the back of the guys head....

 

[Cpu46]

Independance Day!

Jeff Goldblume inplants a COMPUTER VIRUS on an alien computer. He does this without knowing the first thing about the operating system, what programming languages the aliens use, any possible security/firewall protection oreven THE BASIC LOGIC THE ALIENS USE! And he does this in a matter of hours!

Oh, and he is so certain this will work that he risks the entire human race on his strategy.

They released a deleted scene that shows Goldblume hacking the computer of the ship they already had or something along those lines. Don't know why it would get cut though.

 

[Treefingers]

That you can hear explosions and laserguns in space.
It's the worst because the film-makers can't even plead ignorance - everybody knows about this.

I don't mind it because watch any sci-fi film and mute it when it is in space. have you gone and done that well as you may have noticed it is stupid and makes the film more boring.

I take it that neither of you have watched 2001: A Space Odyssey?

 

[mishagale]

But if i have to go their...Terminator 2, Liquid Metal...a Robot made out of Liquid Metal. Seriously where are his circuits and stuff

It's not as nonsensical as it sounds, you just have to stop thinking of a robot having to be constructed out of transistors and integrated circuits. Instead, consider the T1000 as a conglomeration of millions of tiny nanoscale robots (like the replicators in Stargate Atlantis) and it's somewhat plausible. All these tiny nanobots moving around each other would create an effect very much like liquid metal (or more like sand, if they were macroscopic.)

 

[Damoclies]

anyone see the movie shoot em up?
my friend had a blu ray copy. he said it was awesome...
The main character on several occaisions kills people with carrots. seriously. at one point he shoves a carrot into someones mouth and it comes out the back of the guys head....

Yes, that's silly. Tell your friend that cooking off the bullets like he does in the last fight scene would render them so inaccurate that he would be lucky to hit the wall behind the guy he was aiming at, let alone four shots center mass.

 

[mishagale]

surprised no one has mentioned lightsabers. now don't get me wrong lightsabers are ossum but from a purely scientific point of view they are rediculous.

Dr Michio Kaku posits that you could make a lightsaber using a plasma torch with a telescopic ceramic core. Check out the TV shows Science of the Impossible, also his book Physics of the Impossible (but I don't think the saber idea was in the book.)

 

[Trifixion]

Solaranite. A substance which causes sunlight to explode.

WHA-??

...of course, given the source was the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space...

A possibly worse example of "they want us to buy this?" related to science from a movie would have to be...well, a tie between the Fantastic Four movies and the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough. I mean, c'mon, do they seriously expect us to believe Jessica Alba as a genetics researcher or Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist?

 

[DanDeFool]

That you can hear explosions and laserguns in space.
It's the worst because the film-makers can't even plead ignorance - everybody knows about this.

I don't mind it because watch any sci-fi film and mute it when it is in space. have you gone and done that well as you may have noticed it is stupid and makes the film more boring.

Anybody ever see the Wing Commander movie? In this movie, the Captain actually tells his crew to stop loudly celebrating their recent victory because the Kilrathi might 'hear' them. Of course, that movie also has starfighters dropping off the runway slightly when they launch.

OT: Not a movie, but there's this one episode of the TV show Fringe where some mad scientist injects some hooker with a drug that causes her to become pregnant, carry a child to full term in a matter of a few hours, only to have it grow so rapidly that the fetus bursts out of her stomach, killing her, and dies of old age all in one night.

The bad science comes in with the fact that, other than having the fastest pregnancy evar, she's perfectly healthy during the whole scene. She'd kind of have to be to be shrieking in torture the way she does, I guess.

Okay, seriously? I guess they figure we forgot about the conservation of mass, because if any woman had a child inside her grow to full term and beyond in a matter of hours, she would be dead of dehydration and having zero blood sugar long before the kid had a chance to play chest burster. You try losing seven pounds of water in an hour and see how it makes YOU feel.

This totally turned me off this show. For a show about fringe science the writers apparently don't really understand anything about science, which means the moral of the show is probably that "SCIENCZ IZ BAD! DER HER!" and nothing else.

 

[Thedayrecker]

In Terminator: Salvation, all the machines are wildly inacurate. We have machines that can fire a machine gun (and have every bullet hit the sames spot) now, but in the future, machines are about as accurate as a drunk with Parkinson's.

 

[Anarchemitis]

two words:
The Core.

 

[Jerious1154]

The Day After Tomorrow. First of all, climate change does not work that way. More hilariously, there is a scene where they manage to outrun coldness, and then stop it by slamming a door.

 

[Sougo]

You want bad science? Try the falling tank scene in the A-Team movie.

Not content with merely destroying some of my fondest childhood memories of saturday afternoon t.v. They then had to make a scene with so many faults of logic and laws of gravity it would make Sir Isaac Newton soil himself in disbelief. Here's how it goes down:

Our heroes (for lack of a more relevant word) escape an exploding aircraft carrier under attack from fighter jets by driving a tank out of the bay doors at a height of at least 30'000 ft, in order to survive this act of complete idiocy, they pop open the tanks hatch (without the change in air pressure sucking them out like a hairballs under a Dustbuster), "Face-Man" uses the tanks mounted 50. cal machine gun to take out the fighter jets (which he hits with all the accuracy of a guy who ISN'T rapidly hurtling to the ground in an umpteen tonne tank).

With their enemies smited, the team focuses on landing safely (like that's possible). "Hannibal" decides that the best course of action is to guide the tank into a nearby lake (to soften their impact) using the negative force of the tanks cannon recoil to navigate into the lake (i'm not qualified to argue wether or not this is possible but i will say its very unlikely he knows exactly what coordinates to bark out to achieve this and i very much doubt the recoil from the cannon will have enough force to counter the force of A TANK FALLING FROM THE SKY!!!).

Unfortunately for the viewers this plan works flawlessly and lands in the dead centre of the lake and cuts to them having suddenly safely escaped the submerged tank with them on the lakes jetty no worse for wear (when in reality if they hadn't been destroyed completely or smashed into the bed of the lake completely buried in a watery tank shaped grave, there is no chance in hell that the combined strength of all 4 members of the A-Team would be enough to force open a tanks hatch under the pressure of all that water, but i would have believed this if Mr T had reprised his T.V. role in the movie).

So there you have it this sub-Michael Bay turd of a movie has had it's crowning action set piece blown out of the water by a disgruntled fan of the original T.V. series. I feel so vindicated. No sequels please.

While I agree with your points and its relevance to this thread, I did go into this movie solely for the purpose of watching the unrealistic action. However, I was disappointed on even this front, as it seems the entire 'action' of the damn movie was summed up in the trailer. Yes, the standard trailer aired on tv seems to have contained ALL the action scenes of the movie.

 

[gellert1984]

In the Mummy the big blockbuster verson, the poor slave chaps who dig up the box with the mummy's innerds in get sprayed with a substance refered to later as "salt acid" this is impossible a salt like sodium cloride (table salt) is the result of the combination of a Base and an Acid (useally a Bases are alkilid) this combination of alkilides and acid preduces a PH neutral substance (that PH 7 fucking 7 not 5.5 like the dove adverts say 5.5 is a mild acid!!!!!!!!!!!!!) if you so either ur substance is a salt or a acid or a base it cannot be a combination of any of these fuck sake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_acid

Historically called muriatic acid or spirits of salt, hydrochloric acid was produced from vitriol and common salt.

 

[Damoclies]

You want bad science? Try the falling tank scene in the A-Team movie.

The 50cal would also throw the tank into an unstoppable tumble, having no force to act against the recoil of the gun. And yes, hitting water at terminal velocity would, at the very least, break every bone in your body no matter what.

 

[LordLandon]

Pulse.

THEY ARE USING FREQUENCIES THAT WE DIDN'T KNOW EXISTED!