What sci-fi movie was the most insulting to science?
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This is probably not close to being the worst, but apparently Battle: Los Angeles once again features aliens who unaccountably are tearing up Earth to get our water, despite the abundance of water elsewhere in the cosmos on planets not claimed by crabby, violence-prone sentients.
Maybe somebody needs to send a memo to Hollywood: we can understand why you would make this mistake in, say, 1953, but you can stop it now. Anytime.
Maybe somebody needs to send a memo to Hollywood: we can understand why you would make this mistake in, say, 1953, but you can stop it now. Anytime.
oops, I should have at least asked for a little bit of explanation.
2012 - Even if earth's core were super heated, there is no way that the entire continent of Asia would move a couple of thousands of miles to the west to around where Hawaii was in a matter of hours. If the continent was drifting that fast, the Earth is basically returned to primordial state where the entire planet is simply lava. Finally, the skies clearing in something like 60 days after just about every volcano on the planet erupt?? Oh, and don't get me started about needing money to build the Arc and how the Arc was populated.
The Core - Unobtainium, laser drill that drills through everything but unobtanium, the miracle unobtainium that turns heat directly into electricity that can be used just by touching a wire to it, and that a few nukes provide enough energy to start the momentum of the rotation of Earth. Apparently Earth's core doubles as a perpetual motion machine.
The Day after Tomorrow - We achieved full blown Ice Age in 3 days. Enough Said.
2012 - Even if earth's core were super heated, there is no way that the entire continent of Asia would move a couple of thousands of miles to the west to around where Hawaii was in a matter of hours. If the continent was drifting that fast, the Earth is basically returned to primordial state where the entire planet is simply lava. Finally, the skies clearing in something like 60 days after just about every volcano on the planet erupt?? Oh, and don't get me started about needing money to build the Arc and how the Arc was populated.
The Core - Unobtainium, laser drill that drills through everything but unobtanium, the miracle unobtainium that turns heat directly into electricity that can be used just by touching a wire to it, and that a few nukes provide enough energy to start the momentum of the rotation of Earth. Apparently Earth's core doubles as a perpetual motion machine.
The Day after Tomorrow - We achieved full blown Ice Age in 3 days. Enough Said.
The Core is meant to be absurd, which should earn it huge leeway, imho. I've never understood the thought process of those who bash this deliberately silly movie for being silly - there are dozens of other movies that are just as absurd, so why not harp on them?
Superman IV - Lacy breathing in space.
Yeah, the water bit in Battle: LA was pretty awful, as was the way the aliens invaded. Made for a decent visual, but there was little to no thought behind it.
Most of Emmerich's movies count for this, though The Day After Tomorrow had me actually laughing out loud in the theater (particularly at the temperature dropping 10 degrees a second line and the outrunning frost scene).
Most of Emmerich's movies count for this, though The Day After Tomorrow had me actually laughing out loud in the theater (particularly at the temperature dropping 10 degrees a second line and the outrunning frost scene).
The Core is meant to be absurd, which should earn it huge leeway, imho. I've never understood the thought process of those who bash this deliberately silly movie for being silly - there are dozens of other movies that are just as absurd, so why not harp on them?
wait, how was it that the Core was meant to be absurd? Did the entire production crew set out to make an absurd movie that basically had 0 scientific basis?
I think I harp on it also because it wasn't enjoyable for me. Armageddon's science was pretty dumb, too, but at least I enjoyed the movie.
I'm not sure that The Core set out to be silly, I think it was one of those after-the-fact defenses by the director/producers to try to save a little face. Kind of the same thing Shyamalan tried to pull with The Happening. Which qualifies for inclusion in this thread, I do believe.
Well, the thing to keep in mind is that "science" doesn't just mean facts and rules, it refers to the process we use to investigate the universe and distinguish valid ideas from invalid ones. So the way I read the question is, what SF movie was most disrespectful to the process of science or most badly misrepresented what science is?
One film that's always deeply annoyed me in that regard is Flatliners. This is a movie about a bunch of med students who are conducting an illicit "experiment" where they basically induce clinical death in one another for a few minutes, then revive each other and document their memories of the event as "evidence" of near-death experiences and/or the afterlife. Okay, it's sort of a supernatural thriller rather than strictly SF, but still, it purports to depict what the characters are doing as a scientific exploration, and nothing could be further from the truth. Science depends on repeatability. An experiment serves no purpose unless its results can be independently replicated and verified. What these students were doing relied entirely on subjective, unrepeatable, anecdotal accounts. There was no way they could possibly be verified, so they weren't scientific evidence of anything. The characters claimed that because they had experiences while their EEGs showed no brain activity, that was "proof" that they'd experienced something other than a hallucination or dream, something that happened to their consciousnesses outside of their brains/bodies, but that doesn't follow, because their minds could've experienced all those events in the brief moments before or after their brains shut down (since purely subjective, mental experiences can seem to take much more or less time than objectively elapses) or they could've constructed the memories after the fact to fill in the gap in their perception. Without external verification, there's no way to assess the reality of any of it. So there was nothing at all scientific about their methodology. They were just risking each other's lives for no reason. And that's what makes Flatliners one of the most insultingly wrong depictions of science as a process, even aside from the fantasy elements of the story.
Of course, there are countless movies, generally horror films and the like, that insult science by depicting it as dangerous hubris, tampering in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and paying a karmic price, or as a cold, heartless discipline that's morally inferior to just going with your feelings or whatever. B-movies in the '50s were full of this. So in this case I'd rather cite an exception, a rare movie that treats science respectfully. That movie is the original The Fly. You'd think it would be a classic anti-science parable whose point was that David Hedison's character was wrong to try to "play God" and got the punishment he deserved for his arrogance. Instead, he's portrayed more as a tragic hero who chose to take a risk for the worthy cause of expanding human knowledge and should be honored for his sacrifice.
One film that's always deeply annoyed me in that regard is Flatliners. This is a movie about a bunch of med students who are conducting an illicit "experiment" where they basically induce clinical death in one another for a few minutes, then revive each other and document their memories of the event as "evidence" of near-death experiences and/or the afterlife. Okay, it's sort of a supernatural thriller rather than strictly SF, but still, it purports to depict what the characters are doing as a scientific exploration, and nothing could be further from the truth. Science depends on repeatability. An experiment serves no purpose unless its results can be independently replicated and verified. What these students were doing relied entirely on subjective, unrepeatable, anecdotal accounts. There was no way they could possibly be verified, so they weren't scientific evidence of anything. The characters claimed that because they had experiences while their EEGs showed no brain activity, that was "proof" that they'd experienced something other than a hallucination or dream, something that happened to their consciousnesses outside of their brains/bodies, but that doesn't follow, because their minds could've experienced all those events in the brief moments before or after their brains shut down (since purely subjective, mental experiences can seem to take much more or less time than objectively elapses) or they could've constructed the memories after the fact to fill in the gap in their perception. Without external verification, there's no way to assess the reality of any of it. So there was nothing at all scientific about their methodology. They were just risking each other's lives for no reason. And that's what makes Flatliners one of the most insultingly wrong depictions of science as a process, even aside from the fantasy elements of the story.
Of course, there are countless movies, generally horror films and the like, that insult science by depicting it as dangerous hubris, tampering in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and paying a karmic price, or as a cold, heartless discipline that's morally inferior to just going with your feelings or whatever. B-movies in the '50s were full of this. So in this case I'd rather cite an exception, a rare movie that treats science respectfully. That movie is the original The Fly. You'd think it would be a classic anti-science parable whose point was that David Hedison's character was wrong to try to "play God" and got the punishment he deserved for his arrogance. Instead, he's portrayed more as a tragic hero who chose to take a risk for the worthy cause of expanding human knowledge and should be honored for his sacrifice.
- Lighting an aerosol can to fry a peach
- A rare metal called "unobtanium" (yes, I know it's a real-life term) that the characters themselves laugh at
- The whole bloomin' tone of the movie, which is filled with jokes and humor beats, especially in the first half. No offense, but if you couldn't tell that a large part of its tone was intentionally comedic, you didn't grok the movie at all.
Another innerspace movie like Fantastic Voyage, for instance, has none of the tongue-in-cheek, self-aware tone of The Core, but is every bit as scientifically farcical if not more. But people keep dumping on The Core specifically, maybe because thrashing Bay movies is perceived as too mainstream to be stylish.
And, in reply to Christopher: The Core also treats its scientist characters respectfully. Instead of having one scientist amongst an ensemble, a la ID4, TDAT, etc., Jurassic Park, or foregrounding regular ol' blue-collar boys (Armageddon), almost all of The Core's characters are scientists.
You know, that's exactly the comparison I was going to make. THE CORE felt very much like a throwback to some fun old 60's scifi spectacular like FANTASTIC VOYAGE--and enjoyable on those terms.
The aliens were aquatic (they "breathed" water and had tentacles but used exoskeletons to walk on land). Their vehicles and battlesuits were powered by hydrogen extracted from water (presumably by electrolysis since we saw electrical generators placed in the water at one point). They had to land in the ocean first before their battlesuits and vehicles could power up to fight on land. It was clear that their entire society was built around living in and using water.
You can extract water from a frozen ball like a comet or planetoid all day long, but that does nothing for you if you want to colonize a planet with abundant liquid water on the surface presumably similar to how your own planet is or used to be. Clearly they wanted to do that with Earth.
As far as mainstream non-franchise movies (because Trek, Star Wars, and all the comics movies would take up too much room) that are the most abusive to science (which is not a judgment call on their enjoyability or lack thereof):
The Core
2012
Armageddon
10,000 BC
Starship Troopers
The Day After Tomorrow
Independence Day
Avatar
I'm sure there are a lot more that I'm forgetting.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw5kK_p6QjA[/yt]
I thought The Core was pretty much a modern re-invention of Journey to the Center of the Earth. As far as the original story goes, it was pretty corny and the science was far out, even for what was understood back then. I'm reading it right now, and the science doesn't hold up at all, as far as rivers and storms and animals appearing deep inside the earth. So, even if The Core isn't a re-invention of the story, it does seem to take a lot from it in terms of how silly things can be.
Actually Jules Verne was a rigorous hard-SF writer by the standards of his day. He looked scornfully on H. G. Wells's flights of fancy and strove only to write about scenarios that he actually considered possible based on his era's best understanding of science. If they seem absurd today, that's merely a testament to how far science has advanced since then. Probably a lot of our most scientifically accurate hard SF today will seem just as silly to people 150 years from now.
I've seen a lot of bad science in a lot SF films over the years. I doubt ST09 would even crack the top 100.
Using Christopher's definition, I'd probably say The Happening. Not because it was a terrible movie, although of course it was, but because it was infuriating in its depiction of science. No science teacher ever says crap like it's an "unexplained act of nature" that we'll never know the cause of. That's sort of the opposite of science.
Well, should Trek movies even count? If so, then TWOK and TSFS are the worst - maybe an honorable mention for TUC.
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