Hollywood Science: Difference between revisions
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** [[Gravity Sucks]]
** [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]]
** [[Weird Moon]]
** [[Weird Sun]]
* [[Artistic License: Biology]]
** [[Devolution Device]]
** [[Evolution Power-Up]]
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** If you're outside the event horizon, you can escape if your engines are strong enough. Once you cross the event horizon, ''nothing whatsoever'' can get you out, period. Physics acts differently inside a black hole. Not that there'd be much [[Inertial Dampening|"you"]] left at that point.
* [[Montage]]s used to demonstrate the effect of global events often show it being approximately the same time of day around the world.
* ''[[Armageddon]]'' is loaded with Hollywood Science, to the extent that it has become something of a [[Running Gag]] on the [https://web.archive.org/web/20050815000425/http://badastronomy.com/ Bad Astronomy website]. Some can live with it, some can't.
* An incredibly horrible example from ''Bad Boys 2'': A truck carrying some cars is traveling at very high speed. One of the cars falls off but is still attached to the truck by a chain. It hits the ground and digs in, thus acting like an anchor. Said truck's rate of acceleration actually seems to increase!
* A good example of bizarre Hollywood logic can be found in the movie ''[[Batman and Robin (film)|Batman and Robin]],'' where one of the two villains has a diamond-created [[wikipedia:Laser cooling|laser-powered cooling system]] necessary for his survival. Laser cooling Does Not Work That Way. It is for cooling groups of atoms from "cold" to "''damn'' cold", please pardon the imprecision of that expression. It wouldn't work for anything like the setup in the movie.
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* Some people, though, [[So Bad It's Good|enjoy these sillier aspects of such movies]], citing them as [[Rule of Fun|part of the fun]]. ''[[Deep Impact]]'', however, was [[Narm|supposed to be serious]], which arguably [[Dan Browned|makes its inaccuracies worse]]. For instance, the four nuclear devices causing a clean cut in the comet (as shown in a graphic in the movie) is impossible on several levels.
** One troper's Astronomy teacher in college was a science adviser on ''Deep Impact''. They ignored most of what he said, except for his strong warning about the ridiculousness of having astronauts hopping around on the surface of a comet as though they were on the Moon (if you were standing on a comet you more than likely wouldn't be able to tell there was ''any'' gravity, period); the scene was altered. Of course, he also got a cameo out of the deal (balding guy in mission control, even has a line).
* Skipping blithely over the [[Artistic License: Biology|biology]] in ''[[Evolution (film)|Evolution]]'', there are two massive chemistry howlers in the the section where Ira Kane (played by David Duchovny) works out how to beat the aliens. Firstly, saying that arsenic is "our" (i.e. carbon-based life forms') poison doesn't really work. Lots of elements are more toxic to humans than arsenic, like, well, selenium, the aliens' poison. And secondly, the idea of a nitrogen-based life form is just whacked anyway, as nitrogen doesn't form into long chains the way carbon does. Nitrogen-based compounds... well, let's just say the shared syllable in ''Nitro''gen, ''Nitro''glycerine, and Tri''nitro''tolulene [[Made of Explodium|is not a coincidence]].
** It also depicts evolution as inevitable progress towards intelligent mammals, while a line in another part of the film correctly states that natural selection doesn't favor complex animals over simple ones. And it depicts a simple soft-bodied crawling invertebrate as having a mouth on the dorsal surface and an anus on the ventral surface, while every real-life analog is the other way around. On the other hand, [[Rule of Funny|it's a comedy]].
* ''[[Fantastic Four (film)|Fantastic Four]]'' (2005) has a Star Trek-esque "cloud of cosmic energy" floating by Earth's orbit, and Reed believes this type of cloud may have triggered evolution, and could have untold benefits for humanity and biological science. It looks like the writers were trying to take the hokey "cosmic radiation" origin from the comics and make it more relevant to modern science. But there really is an area of concentrated space radiation right around Earth's orbit, the Van Allen Belt, where the Fantastic Four in the comics encountered high levels of space radiation due to poor shielding. The made up glowing energy blob has less of a basis in reality than the origin from the 60's.
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* ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'' featured an episode where one of the heroes had a hard time closing a space station's bulkhead because the ''air rushing out'' kept blowing him back. We can assume that he didn't seal himself on the "You die now" side of things, so it seems that air pressure flows from low to high in the world of Stargate.
* ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]'' has a season one episode "The Alternative Factor" where Spock declares the planet they are orbiting has a "oxygen-hydrogen atmosphere". This is extremely unlikely, as oxygen and hydrogen are highly reactive and react rather violently with each other, producing water. Specifically, this is the strongest chemical reaction per weight unit we know about, and we use it in rockets like the Space Shuttle to get satelites and other equipment into space. Very likely Spock wanted to say "oxygen-nitrogen" instead, describing an atmosphere like the one we currently enjoy on earth.
** Another episode had the cast using what they probably thought was a high number - one to the twenty-fifth power, which is...one. What they probably meant was 1 x 10^25, which is 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.
* ''[[Team Knight Rider]]'' once claimed that "Liquefied nitrogen gas" was a high explosive, even though nitrogen is well-known for being functionally inert in most situations. Presumably they meant "Liquified ''natural'' gas".
** Or someone noticed the shared syllables in Nitrogen, Nitroglycerine, and Trinitrotolulene. Again.
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== Web Original ==
* Parodied, like nearly everything else, in ''[[Italian Spiderman]]''.
* The classic website [https://web.archive.org/web/20131030162524/http://www.aycyas.com/ And You Call Yourself a Scientist!] is devoted to pointing out the numerous examples of bad science in cinema.
* Likewise, [[The Nostalgia Chick]]'s video "Playing God" has numerous helpful tips about how to stop science going wrong in movies.
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[[Category:Hollywood Style]]
[[Category:Steampunk Index]]
[[Category:This Index Will Kill You]]
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