Worst Scientific Inaccuracies In Films

Hollywood doesn't have the greatest track record when it comes to getting the science in movies right. Maybe all the writers and directors forgot everything they learned in high school when they were in film school and couldn't be bothered to Google anything. It could also be that they just used too much artistic license or maybe they're just kind of lazy. This article will investigate movies that portray themselves as at least somewhat realistic and fall seriously short, rather than just calling out movies that are just blatantly ridiculous, like Flubber.

Die Another Day

Die Another Day is the twentieth James Bond movie, and the last one that starred Pierce Brosnan as Bond. It is perhaps best known for having extremely bad CGI, however it did really well at the box office when it came out in 2002. This means that audiences probably cared as little about scientific inaccuracies as the creators of the movie did. Or, they could just get away with it since everybody likes James Bond so much.

In the movie, Bond goes to North Korea, and in order to stop him, North Korea disguises one of their agents as a fellow Brit. How do they do this? By simply replacing his DNA.

However, that's not how DNA works. In reality, every cell in your body contains DNA, and it’s totally impossible to somehow switch it all out. In the movie its claimed they killed off his bone marrow to make this transformation possible, but in real life that’s actually a symptom of chemotherapy called myelotoxicity. Myelotoxicity could kill you, but it probably won’t transform you from an Asian into a Brit, in case you were actually considering such a strange procedure.

2012

2012 is a disaster movie that came out in 2009 about how an ecological catastrophe would strike in the year 2012 and destroy earth. If you remember, there was a lot of media hype at the time about the end of the world because of the whole Mayan calendar thing. NASA received so many emails as a result of people seeing the movie and freaking out, that they set up a whole website dedicated to explaining why the science in the movie is totally wrong.

Things start to get crazy on Earth in the movie when solar flares cook the planet’s core. In reality, this is impossible because neutrino particles cannot interact with physical substances.

On the website NASA made, they explain to the paranoid people of the world that in reality, solar activity has a regular cycle. Sometimes solar flares can mess with satellites, but that’s it. The world isn’t going to end because of solar flares. Hopefully the paranoid people of the world listen to NASA so that the next time we reach the end of some ancient calendar something like this doesn’t happen.

Lucy

Lucy is a 2014 sci-fi thriller in which Scarlet Johansson takes a drug that allows her to use all of her brain instead of just the 10% that most people use. With her full brain power unlocked, she gets telekinetic powers and throws people and objects around for most of the movie.

Since it’s release, Lucy has become the go-to example for exposing what’s known as the "ten percent of the brain myth". This urban legend states that human beings only use ten percent of their brains, and some people wrongfully think that this idea was even thought up by none other than Albert Einstein.

In reality, the idea that there are parts of the brain that are unused and could somehow be activated is not supported by actual science. While there are legitimate mysteries about how the brain functions, modern brain mapping suggests that all areas of the brain serve a purpose, just not all at the same time.

Star Wars

Star Wars probably has the most memorable sound design of any movie in cinema history. Everybody knows what a TIE fighter screeching by sounds like, what a ship’s cannon sounds like, what a blaster sounds like, and so on. It’s hard to imagine Star Wars being Star Wars without those sounds. However, in reality, none of these sounds should exist, because there's no sound in space. This is because sound is vibrations in atoms, and there are no atoms at all in the vacuum of space.

For more Star Wars inaccuracies you need look no further than the Twitter of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who is apparently determined to kill everyone’s fun. He has pointed out that “BB-8, a smooth rolling metal spherical ball, would have skidded uncontrollably on sand”.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

@neiltyson

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In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens , BB-8, a smooth rolling metal spherical ball, would have skidded uncontrollably on sand.

6:03 PM · Dec 21, 2015

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He explained that “In @StarWars #TheForceAwakens, the energy in a Star is enough to destroy ten-thousand planets, not just a few here & there.” Apparently not satisfied with debunking Star Wars, he has also pointed out that when they say they’re a billion miles away from Earth in Prometheus, that would in reality only put them near Jupiter, not in some other galaxy.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

In other George Lucas related news, the fourth Indiana Jones movie belongs on this list for a few reasons, but I'm just going to look at the most egregious example of nobody bothering to look into the actual physics of something before they filmed it.

In the movie, Indiana Jones is stuck at a nuclear bomb testing site, but survives the blast by hiding inside of a refrigerator.

Is it time to stop building that bomb shelter, and just clear out the fridge when you hear the nuclear air raid sirens going off? No. Scientist David Shechner, who apparently has too much time on his hands, has thoroughly explained on the website overthinkingit.com that a fridge is not going to save you from a nuke. Our adventurous archeologist would have been vaporized.

Armageddon

Armageddon is a 1998 disaster movie directed by Michael Bay, who isn't exactly a director praised for his commitment to realism and scientific accuracy. In the movie, NASA sends a bunch of average joe guys who work on a drilling rig into space so they can land on an asteroid and stop it from destroying the earth.

Armageddon is so scientifically inaccurate that NASA uses it as a test; they have people watch it and keep track of how many errors they can find. And there are a lot of errors. When they first land on the asteroid, there are fires burning all over the place, which would be impossible in the vacuum of space, as fire of course requires oxygen. Later, a space shuttle takes off from the asteroid horizontally, like an airplane, which also makes no sense.

Since there’s no air in space, the wings aren’t going to get any lift. You can just blast off, there’s no gravity to stop you. The heroes are also told that they're going to experience 9.5 Gs for 11 minutes. In reality, untrained people wouldn't be able to stay conscious if they experienced 9.5 Gs. This of course raises the question of why they're training oil rig employees to be astronauts and not the other way around.

The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises, the third installment of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, is mostly remembered for Bane’s weird voice, but should be remembered for its poor science.

In the finale, Batman uses his Batcopter to fly a nuclear bomb out of Gotham with less than two minutes left to spare on the timer. After an unnecessarily long kiss given the urgency of the situation, and a needless talk with commissioner Gordon, batman sets off roughly a minute later.

It must have taken at least another 30 seconds to navigate out of Gotham city, so a conservative estimate is he only had around 40 seconds of flying time to make up a distance of 10 miles away, which would be the minimum safe distance, in that time. That means his batcopter must have traveled at around 900 miles per hour, almost 3 times as fast as the fastest helicopter in the world.

However, even if he did manage to travel that fast, Gotham is still going to be screwed from the ensuing radiation. Batman may have saved Gotham from getting leveled, but all its citizens are going to have to move out if they don’t want to get cancer.

In other bad news for the caped crusader, his grappling hook doesn’t exactly stand up to science either. In the movies as well as the comics, he's able to bring himself and others to a complete halt from free fall with the cable. In reality, all this would do is tear your arm right off if you could manage to hold on. If you’ve been falling for three to four seconds, unfortunately you’re toast; the human body just can’t handle that amount of force. His batsuit must have provided some incredible support.

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park, the movie that inspired a generation of kids to care about dinosaurs, also gave them some misinformation about those giant reptiles. Real velociraptors were only a few feet tall, a fact they may have intentionally overlooked for the movie since that really decreases their scariness. They also would have had feathers just like their bird relatives on earth.

Turns out, the inaccuracies keep piling up. Utilizing cutting edge DNA sequencing techniques, some scientists at the University of Manchester attempted to extract DNA from insects that had been sub-fossilized in hardened tree resin, just like in the movie.

Unlike in the movie, they were unable to detect any DNA in the samples, which were between 60 and 10,600 years old. So, if you had amber samples that were millions of years old like the ones in Jurassic Park were, your chances of finding DNA are basically nonresistant.

The Matrix

The Matrix is a great movie. Lots of things don’t make sense from a physics point of view inside the Matrix itself, but we can forgive that, because it’s meant to be a computer simulation, and, of course, because it’s so cool.

The plot is based on the idea that after robots take over, they hook human’s brains up to virtual reality and just use the energy that their bodies produce. Using humans as an electricity generator isn't just sadistic, it brings a whole new meaning to the term “battery farming”.

Still, it may come as a relief if you were concerned that robots will want to use you as a battery in the future like they do in The Matrix or Rick and Morty. This is not just unlikely, it’s fundamentally impossible. They'll need more energy to keep alive than they'll produce.

In reality, it would be a terrible and inefficient system. This is because the human body simply doesn’t produce that much energy, only about 100 watts when it is at rest. On top of that, humans require a lot of energy in the form of food to be able to produce that 100 watts. So, the robots would end up wasting a ton of effort feeding all these people without getting a lot out of it. They would be better off using a real battery.

Gravity

In the 2013 movie Gravity, George Clooney bravely sacrifices himself to help Sandra Bullock by cutting himself free of the tether attaching him to her when he starts to drift away.

But in reality, there was no need for him to do this. He was attached to someone who was holding onto a solid object, so he would have just stopped drifting soon enough. Sandra Bullock could have just pulled him back, and then they both could have worked together for the rest of the movie.

The ever vigilante Neil DeGrasse Tyson has also pointed out that in real life, most satellites orbit Earth west to east, but in the movie all the debris is going east to west. Who knew a film named after a scientific term was so scientifically flawed?

Neil deGrasse Tyson

@neiltyson

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Mysteries of #Gravity : Nearly all satellites orbit Earth west to east yet all satellite debris portrayed orbited east to west

11:25 PM · Oct 6, 2013

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I hope you were amazed at the scientific inaccuracies in films. Thanks for reading!