Faux-Pastronomy Movie Review
Science fiction by definition requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief. You have to allow for such things as aliens, artificial intelligence, psi, time travel, faster-than-light propulsion, and Slime People; otherwise why bother?
Still, there should be at least some pretense of scientific accuracy; otherwise, why bother? But, even as Mr. Scott in Engineering says you cannot deny the laws of physics, you also cannot deny the autocracy of the producer, the blinkered vision of a director, or the plain old scientific ignorance of a script.
Thus movie sf is replete with factual errors, some big enough to drive a comet through, others just passing absurdities that serve to remind us all why the Nobel Prizes are not handed out at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
Terminal Velocities. The effect of going very, very fast on the human body has been well-documented in sf ever since Destination Moon by those tight closeups of astronaut faces grimacing against the pull of inertia during liftoff. One major exception was the classic Things to Come in which lunar explorers were fired from the Earth in a giant cannon. Were that to be done, the sudden acceleration would turn the humans into thin protoplasmic jelly against the back of their craft. Similarly, in Star Trek V Captain Kirk falls off a mountain peak. Mr. Spock, in flying antigravity boots, snatches him just inches from the ground, saving his life – except that a halt from such a speed to zero would kill a person just as thoroughly as slamming into the soil.
Hollywood Abhors a Vacuum. The nature of interplanetary space itself has given filmmakers plenty of difficulty. “In space no one can hear you scream,” went the original ad copy for Alien, quite accurately, for sound waves don't travel in space, where no medium exists to carry them. But except for 2001: A Space Odyssey and a few other nonconformists, this fact has not been recognized. Explosions generate great roaring sounds, star-ships and X-Wing fighter craft (which commonly bank and turn exactly like planes in Earth atmosphere) whoosh past, and in some cases passengers inside of a ship can plainly hear things happening outside (except for screams, anyway).
I'm yo'pusher baby. An ancient Greek wise man said that if given a long enough lever and a fulcrum on which to rest it, he could move the world. Too bad he lived several millennia too early to sell that treatment to the movies. Major productions that have dealt with using directed force in making the Earth move include Gorath and Superman: The Movie. The trouble is, any push strong enough to shove the Earth contrary to its orbit would more likely shatter the globe into a million pieces than ease it along.
Matters of Gravity. Gravitational force is one of the least-understood phenomena in physics. Maybe physicists have been watching too many movies. While Marooned, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a few Japanese and Soviet productions made laudable attempts to simulate a zero-G environment, other cosmic flicks have simply ignored the absence of gravity, or included a brief dialogue reference to “artificial gravity” that dispensed with the problem. Astronauts aboard Rocketship X-M emphasized how gravity would decrease as they left Earth's influence, and one of their discarded jackets began moving around on cue. But nothing else ever did, and the topic was shelved.
Most inconsistent of all was the non-Kubrick sequel 2010, in which a ship docking the original movie's Discovery must stop spinning its artificial gravity section. Everyone in the movie should be in free fall, but in subsequent scenes cosmonauts are seen walking normally, leaning on chairs and countertops, and the hero casually tosses a prop in the air.
Size Does Count. One of the most frequently violated principles of science, especially in monster movies, is the inverse-square law. Put in biological terms, the bigger an organism is, the more its physiology must adjust to gigantic stature. Therefore, forget the giant bugs on their spindly legs in Them!, Mothra, Tarantula, and The Deadly Mantis. These are, after all, invertebrates, and without internal skeletons to support them, giant insects and arachnids would squash themselves under their own weight.
Random Noise. Miscellaneous goofs of all sorts… From The Invisible Man to Memoirs of an Invisible Man, total invisibility means that without opaque retinas the transparent heroes would go blind. In the original motion picture Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the submarine Sea-view happens to be underneath a field of unstable icebergs. The ship is pelted by sinking boulders of ice. In Capricorn One we're told that radio signals from Earth to Mars would make a round trip of 20 minutes (not the accurate figure but it's the spirit that counts); a few scenes later the ‘Mars’ astronauts are having a real-time transmission conversation with their terrestrial wives. In TimeCop, a character casually announces that a sample of gold has been radiocarbon dated, a well-known theoretical impossibility because gold does not undergo atomic decay. Would it surprise you to know that Peter Hyams, who made TimeCop, also directed Capricorn One and 2010?