Hollywood Science: Difference between revisions

** 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.

* In ''[[Highlander]]'', Brenda dates Connor's sword by its absorbency. Yes, the ''absorbency'' of a ''katana''. In real life the metallic composition of a sword (which can sometimes give clues as to its date and place of manufacture) can be ascertained by subjecting a small sample of its metal to something called atomic absorption spectroscopy. WE won't go into details (though [[wikipedia:Atomic absorption spectroscopy|if you insist]]) but the absorption in question is of ''light''. Evidently the writers had vaguely heard of it but misunderstood what it involved, unless the katana really was made by the legendary swordsmith Andrex.

* ''[[The Rocketeer (film)|The Rocketeer]]'': Zeppelins ''do not burn like that'', dammit!