We have no doubt that cinema is fantasy, fiction and imagination. But there is a certain downside when a film turns to science to use it as the focal point of the script, making a real mess in the process. A fact that stings in weird subjects like me (and as little known as Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson); But it’s also a source of confusion for the respectable audience, who have only heard of wormholes in front of the screen.
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And forgive me Star Wars fans, but the entire saga is chocolate for the purposes of this list. Why? Well, in that universe there are ghosts, chatty stuffed animals and magic (what they insist on calling The Force). When ships travel through space a “whoosh” can be HEARD, laser shots look like tracer munitions and any individual can go from 0 to the speed of light in two seconds… Simply put, this would require an entire book.
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The entire saga revolves around the concept of machines enslaving humans to extract energy from them. The problem is that at this point in our evolution humans do not produce energy, on the contrary, we consume it. And this also extrapolates to any living being, even plants, which harness the Sun’s energy through photosynthesis.
In addition, much of everything we consume is not used for things that can generate energy, such as body heat or muscles. 20% of all the energy we consume goes exclusively to the brain, just to think about whether America is better than Chivas. If people kept pedaling for about 24 hours, they would produce much less energy than they expend. If machines would simply set fire to whatever it is that they feed people in the movie, they could generate a lot more, without the inconvenience of a Keanu Reeves being born.
Dead people don’t move (duh). Even if some miraculous kind of virus endowed them with life (or lifelessness, I don’t know) it would be, at the very least, impossible. A few hours after death, muscles become blocked due to a process known as rigor mortis, caused by the absence of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is basically the fuel for cells. Without this nucleotide it is impossible for them to relax. The body can only move days later, when the breakdown simply breaks down the fibers in the muscles. Zombies in this condition would be waterier than Aunt Bertha’s rice.
And there’s more. And would vultures simply ignore a delicious, rotting walking delicacy? Even without the presence of vultures, after a year there would not be much left but the skeleton – which would also end up disintegrating one day. So where do the hundreds of recent bodies come from, when the only dozen or so desperate survivors are too busy plotting how to kill each other? In the old classics this is much more implausible, as hundreds of recent bodies emerged from cemeteries.
This 1995 film requires all kinds of introductions. In the cinematic disaster that ran Kevin Costner’s career aground, global warming melts the polar ice caps and the entire planet Earth is left as a gigantic ocean. In real life, if all the ice on the planet were melted, the sea level would rise about 70 meters, enough to leave much of Acapulco underwater, but there would still be residential areas above water level, so covering Mount Everest would already be ridiculous.
Another thing: Costner develops gills as an adaptation. There’s a reason whales and dolphins have stayed that way for millions of years without needing to reinvent gills. In order for a mammal to survive on the oxygen present in the water, it would be necessary to filter a truly colossal amount through the gills. A human would have to suck in more than 190 liters of water per minute. Unless it had the power of a jet ski, this would be a tricky thing.
Here we find the exquisite Scarlet Johansson playing the role of a mule who, by sheer accident, receives a colossal dose of an experimentally designed drug. Instead of dying miserably, Lucy becomes a goddess of sorts. Thanks to the fact that she can use 100% of her brain capacity, the woman acquires powers such as telekinesis (magic).
Grab your spears and stones, you Spock fanatics. We’ll start by saying that Star Trek takes science much more seriously than Star Wars. Ignoring a few basic errors – such as sound in space or the fact that there are spaceships on a world where teleportation is so easy, the real problem is an unexplained case of convergent evolution.
Vulcans have pointy ears and a serious problem with double entendres. Klingons have a forehead in the shape of a raisin grape and a tendency to use impractical swords. Ferengi are uglier than a fart in an elevator. The difference in evolution between very distant planets and Earth is resolved with a rubber front.
Convergent evolution is real. Turtles, armadillos, and pangolins are armored for the same reason: they can escape bites. Most insects have faces, like a person’s, because it has been proven that it works better to have eyes in front of you than on your legs. But, for an alien to bear any resemblance to a human being, not only would the planet it inhabit have to be the same as Earth, but its evolutionary history would have to be identical. There should have been the emergence of vertebrates, then mammals, then primates and finally hominids.
And it’s best to put away the rocks and spears right now, but Star Trek is creationist.
In our world, gamma rays transform people into corpses, and not just superheroes. The last movie made Bruce Banner immune to this kind of radiation before he was exposed, but there’s a bigger problem: where does the matter that makes up the Hulk’s muscles come from?
The law of conservation of matter usually says something like: “matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is only transformed.” We are made up of the same atoms that once made up a star. We all know the fastest way to gain atoms: by going to visit grandma. Either the Hulk is some kind of inflatable being, or he eats a cow without us noticing before he gets that big, and he loses all that mass somehow before he goes back to being Bruce Banner… It’s better that we don’t even think about how.
Let’s put aside magical powers like Charles Xavier’s, or the fact that Wolverine, like the Hulk, is more of a glutton than Shaggy and Scooby-Doo combined, because he would have to eat the equivalent of a leg to regenerate a leg. What’s really weird is Magneto.
His powers are based on something very mundane and well-known: magnetism. And he can use this to fly, wearing a metal belt or, depending on the movie, with an iron plate.
But, the magnetic force is not anti-gravitational. It’s more like an invisible thread. When a scrapyard tow truck takes a car by the roof, the weight of the entire car is transferred to it. It means that this flight of Magneto pulling the plate or the belt for himself is something absurd. It’s as if you’re in the water and pulling your own hair you fly out of it, in a surreal version of Baron de Munchausen.
Applying this same logic, if he tried to lift a boat or, worse, a bridge, all that weight would be transferred to his body. Unless he was Superman (and not an octogenarian with human strength) he would end up crushed to the ground. If the movements were lateral, like in the antenna scene in X-Men: First Generation, it would be pushed in the opposite direction.
If you’re interested, you can take a look at the best and worst science fiction movies according to NASA.
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