Bad Science In Movies

December 27th, 2010 by Endswell in Artsy Sh*t, Movies

Sometimes for space-based movies to work, scientific accuracy is sacrificed for plotlines. Fortunately, we have people like the gang over at io9 to keep painstaking track of these inaccuracies so we can have further evidence that Apollo 13 was awesome.

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Updated: io9 (Thanks Scott & Charlie) | Via

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Recent Comments

Chewbacca

This is really stupid. Obviously the based-on-a-real-NASA-mission movies don’t have lasers and aliens.
Christopher

I did not know that lasers were “faster-than-light”. Perhaps that’s only when fired in glass houses . . ..
Allillgator

Also virtually all of the sci-fi weapons called “lasers” aren’t actually L.A.S.E.Rs. They aren’t simply light beams, they are usually charged energy packets, and energy doesn’t have to move at the speed of light. Which is why they aren’t depicted as instantly connecting to their target. They travel under the speed of light because they aren’t just light weapons.
Allillgator

But imagine if they filmed Apollo 13 without going through the effort of actually filming in zero G. They’d have that bad science of moving in slow motion in zero G at least. And they could EASILY have made the apollo 13 explosion much stupidly larger. And could perhaps have done Sound in Space.
3 things right there they could have done stupid.
Planet-man

Contact has “easy communication with Aliens” checked when almost the entire plot of the film revolved around how DIFFICULT it was and the mass lengths taken to establish a way to communicate across space, involving transmissions that took lightyears and mathematics stripped down to its most basic, language-less form…. but does NOT have FTL travel checked when almost the entire plot of the movie revolved around achieving it. Another pointless one of these charts filled with more holes than the movies it’s trying to send up. “Faster than light weapons, e.g. lasers”…. I mean, come on.
Fire2box

love that lasers are now faster then light..
Maxwell Davis-Marsh

Stargate may be guilty of all planets having the same gravity, but even in the original movie there’s a reason everyone speaks the same language.