It's more like pie in the metaphorical sky.
What sci-fi movie was the most insulting to science?
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It's more like pie in the metaphorical sky.
The Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe Formula, which dates from 1995, would have saved Eleanor Arroway quite a bit of effort, but was unknown at the time that Carl Sagan wrote the book. Beyond that I will say no more.
I don't remember the design in the sand, but I doubt it. Just read the book. You won't regret it.
And you can add to that the fact the The Core, as fantastical and silly as it is, is at least more or less internally consistent, whereas Fantastic Voyage... oh, dear...
Cracked.com said:
So, there you have it: leaving aside the boring impossibility of humans bodies working in standard Earth gravity after being shrunk to a fraction of their original scale, Fantastic Voyage utterly fails to maintain even any cursory internal consistency.
And people bitch about The Core, which has about a hundred times more intended humor and meta-awareness? Shiiiiitttt.
It may not be the most insulting movie to scientists, but if anyone has any solid arguments for a movie more insulting to science, I'm listening.
^Asimov's novelization of Fantastic Voyage fixed that plot hole. As well as all the other scientific mistakes in the movie. He pretty substantially rewrote the story, in fact.
So, I finally finished Journey to the Center of the Earth. Quite a fun read. I still think it comes off feeling more like Science-Fantasy than Science-Fiction though. I'm not faulting Jules Vernes, however, as writing a book about a journey to the center of the earth would be difficult whoever writes it. Onto 20,000 Leagues next.
So, I finally finished Journey to the Center of the Earth. Quite a fun read. I still think it comes off feeling more like Science-Fantasy than Science-Fiction though. I'm not faulting Jules Vernes, however, as writing a book about a journey to the center of the earth would be difficult whoever writes it. Onto 20,000 Leagues next.
I'd like to throw honorable mention to 1902's Le Voyage dans la lune. So hilariously inaccurate, even if they likelydidn't know any better.
Also, while clearly not the worst, Inception's take on dreams is pretty bad. Granted, it was the central conceit of the film and the film moves so quickly and can engross the viewer where one doesn't really notice it right away, but still...dreams are not holodeck adventures. However, the fact that they don't really explain the process of entering the dream (other than "we can do this") works in the inaccuracy's favor.
Also, while clearly not the worst, Inception's take on dreams is pretty bad. Granted, it was the central conceit of the film and the film moves so quickly and can engross the viewer where one doesn't really notice it right away, but still...dreams are not holodeck adventures. However, the fact that they don't really explain the process of entering the dream (other than "we can do this") works in the inaccuracy's favor.
Actually that's a case where Verne should've known better, but he fell prey to a common assumption of the time. He assumed that Earth's gravity would get gradually weaker with distance and that the travellers wouldn't experience free fall until they reached the point where Terrestrial and Lunar gravity cancelled out. But even then, it should've been possible to understand that a vehicle on a ballistic trajectory would be in free fall throughout -- that even though the pull of Earth's gravity is still present, it's pulling equally on the craft and its occupants so they wouldn't feel any sensation of weight, of being pulled against any surface. But that was a case where lack of experience blinded people to what they should've been able to deduce mathematically.
What really damages Inception for me is a glaring inconsistency at the heart of the story. Okay, they say that the sensation of falling will wake someone up. That's reasonable. It's a deeply ingrained reflex from when our ancestors lived in trees. And we're shown, during the portion where Ellen Page is getting everything explained to her, that the subjects wake up as soon as the chair begins to tip back -- not when it stops falling, but when it starts falling, as it reasonably should. It was the sensation of free fall itself that caused them to wake up.
But then they completely contradict that for most of the movie, because they start falling in the first layer but they remain in the dream, and it's not until they hit bottom that they wake up. Not to mention that when the van is flipping around, that would also create the sensation of free fall, so that should've awakened them too.
So not only does the movie contradict real-world common sense, it commits the far worse narrative sin of contradicting its own exposition. It's fine for a story to be fanciful as long as it plays honestly by its own in-universe rules. But if you set up a rule and then change it for story convenience, that's a huge cheat. And the sheer dominance of the free-fall aspect as a plot point makes this mistake very intrusive. It seriously undermined my enjoyment of the film.
That wasn't really a subject in the shared-dream state. That was just Arthur dozing off in a chair, and Eames taking advantage of it. Compare with Cobb being "dunked" in the beginning. He doesn't wake up as soon as he starts to tip back.
It was explained in the film. When using the Chemist Yusuf's sedatives to enter the multi-layered dream-state, only a synchronized "kick" on all levels simultaneously would wake the dreamer(s). They could roll around in the van all they liked without waking up until the musical cue started playing on the lower levels to tell them it was time to wake themselves up. It wasn't a normal single layer dream-state.
My main objection was the way the movie insisted on having dreams follow video game and movie conventions, rather than just asking "what are dreams actually like" and constructing the movie around that: making the subject matter fit the form rather than the reverse. Any action movie could follow movie conventions (and they do); why can't one about dreams be more imaginative?
So it's more an artistic than scientific objection. You can't really "prove" that dreams don't have video-game-style levels, or that any given dream wouldn't involve shootouts and car chases.
Yeah, the movie establishes its own arbitrary rules that are impossible to dispute - nobody can prove that dreams wouldn't work this way, if technology or drugs were invented to make them work that way. It's self-referential. But if anything is possible in the movie, why can't the "anything" be more surprising and break free from the expected rules of a shoot-em-up action flick?
Really? Well, if so, it didn't come across clearly enough. I guess I should watch it again.
You raise an interesting point, but I am not saying the types of dreams that were depicted were wrong. It is just the general way they were presented.
We do know enough about dreams to realize Inception's take on this is incredibly flawed. They are not giant video game levels. It is impossible for that to happen. If you are dreaming, and, in your dream, you perceive yourself in a room, that is the only thing that exists currently in your dream. Granted, in Inception, there are other people within the dream, so that might change things up, but the film never goes into it (not that they necessarily needed too).
Also, they play with the concept that Ellen Page is able to construct dreams for other people. That's impossible. You can't force a dream on someone since dreams are created from the specific person (with the general accepted theory that all elements of one's dream is the dreamer [ie. if the dreamer is running from a wolf in a forest, then the dreamer is not only themself, but the wolf and the forest too]).
However, the film wisely ignores how they can do this, and only that they can do it. This plays in the film's favor, because the minute they try to explain the process, it'll undoubtedly loose the little credibility it has. The film can get by as is, but as I mentioned earlier, the moment you start to think about it after the move is over, it starts to fall apart.
As a side note, the film oddly ignores lucid dreaming, which since the dreamer knows they are in a dream, they should be able to control all elements of the dream (think The Matrix). But, if they did that, Cillian Murphy would have realized they were not in his dream and would have foiled the con.
Yeah, the do kinda spell it out in the film, but so much goes on that one is bound to miss a few things first one or two go-arounds.
Well, I wouldn't agree with that. A dream, so neurology tells us, is a narrative that the rational part of the brain constructs out of the inputs it perceives while the memory pathways are being restimulated as part of the process of long-term memory storage. Whatever it perceives, it incorporates into the dream. So it's quite common for a dream to be influenced by external sensations -- for instance, if your phone rings while you're dreaming, you'll hear a phone ringing in your dream, or you can incorporate the sounds of people talking outside your window into your dream. I've sometimes found that external, real-world sensations, like the room being too hot and stuffy or getting a painful stitch in my side because of a bad sleep position or inadequate mattress, have been greatly amplified in my dreams. So if there were a way to induce selected sensory perceptions in a dreaming individual, it would certainly be possible to manipulate their dreams.
When I was four or five I remember thinking that Lacey must've been a kryptonian. I mean, normal people don't breathe in space. That was a really dumb film.
^Well, in Superman II you had sound carrying in space, which is pretty much the same problem. However much Donner went on about "verisimilitude," the films made no bones about being in a fantasy universe.
Although, granted, Superman II didn't give Superman rebuild-the-Great-Wall-of-China-vision. But it did give him the expanding cellophane S-shield force-field attack, which is almost as bad.
Although, granted, Superman II didn't give Superman rebuild-the-Great-Wall-of-China-vision. But it did give him the expanding cellophane S-shield force-field attack, which is almost as bad.
This wasn't insulting to science; it was insulting to humanity as a species!
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