What sci-fi movie was the most insulting to science?

[Capt_Pickirk]

I think I saw a fan edit somewhere that replaces that with superman using his laser eye vision.

or whatever that power's called.

 

[Christopher]

Well, of course there is the Donner cut of Superman II which doesn't include the cellophane shield or a lot of other stuff that was added when Richard Lester took over as director.

 

[Set Harth]

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.

Really? Well, if so, it didn't come across clearly enough. I guess I should watch it again.

Where Inception seems to violate its own rules midway through is in the issue of the kick. As established in the Saito job, the kick to wake a dreamer up from a given dream level occurs within the level above ( unless it's getting killed within the lower level ). As of the Fisher job, a kick within the level the dreamer is on is also required. However, as has been pointed out, though this seems at first glance to be the film illegitimately changing the rules in midstream, it is explained by the fact that in-universe the rules are actually different in the case of Yusuf's deep sedation and the higher number of dream levels.

 

[Broccoli]

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]).

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.

Which I agree with, but that wasn't what I was referring to. Of course you can manipulate dreams from external stimuli. Even the movie acknowledges that with the tape recorder music.

What Ellen Page does, however, is much more than just inserting a sound. She creates, basically, an entire world and which is then uploaded into someone's sub-conscience. She more or less manipulates the sub-conscience from the inside.

Then again, the more I think about it, it might not be impossible...just highly improbable.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Isn't it likely that Inception is intended to be a metaphor for the art of movie making and the suspension of disbelief? I suspect that Nolan is clever enough to insert elements of doubt deliberately. Cinemas are also dream injection technology.

 

[Christopher]

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.

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.

Okay, I just saw the movie again, and I think your interpretation is a reasonable one. It did seem that the factor of synchronization between levels was important -- when the van went off the bridge in the first level and we got the avalanche in the third level, Cobb said they'd missed the first kick and would have to wait for the second, the moment of impact with the water. So apparently the idea was that you had to trigger the sense of acceleration (or deceleration) simultaneously (or at least overlapping in time) in all three (or four) levels, and you couldn't wake up on a higher level until you were "kicked" in the one below it (and would thus "ride the kicks" up top as Ariadne said).

That's still a difficult conceit to buy relative to reality, that it's the sense of acceleration or deceleration that wakes you rather than the sensation of free fall itself, and that being in continuous free fall as in the hotel wouldn't wake you, only a sudden change in acceleration (either starting to fall or ending a fall). I think that the evolutionary reality of it is that if you feel yourself falling, you're damn well gonna wake up. (Unless you're, say, an astronaut who's had time to get used to the sensation of free fall.) But I guess the breaks from reality can be rationalized as the effects of the dream-sharing technology and Yusuf's tailored chemicals. It's rather hard to believe they could have such precise effects, but then, it's hard to believe just strapping a few people to a suitcase could make them mind-meld with each other. Still, as I said before, it's okay for a story to be fanciful so long as it doesn't contradict its own parameters. And I guess Inception was basically staying true to the rules it laid out, so that resolves my main objection.

Still, I'm not certain the logistics and details of it all quite added up. The specifics of when and how the kicks happened, and some of the dialogue talking about how they worked, didn't quite seem consistent. Not to mention that the relative timing between layers is all over the place. Although maybe some of that could be rationalized due to the mind being not quite as linear and computerlike as the dialogue suggested, like maybe the flow of time was subjective and variable depending on circumstances. And some of the timing inconsistencies with the kicks could be the result of people needing different amounts of time to actually wake up once the process of being woken is initiated. Still, there are points where it feels like the film, as clever and imaginative as it definitely was, sometimes tried to be a little too convoluted for its own good.

 

[Gepard]

We also have to buy into the idea that some stimuli from the layers above – certain audio such as "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" and the Kicks – are experienced in the lower layers, but that other stimuli – like sounds of gunfire, yelling and the weightlessness – aren't. It doesn't seem to follow any pattern I can see except for what's convenient.

 

[Set Harth]

I suspect that Nolan is clever enough to insert elements of doubt deliberately.

Speaking of which, aren't there strange visual effects in the scene where Arthur enters the "lab" from the street, in a seeming attempt to blur the distinction between so-called "reality" and the dream state ( hinting that reality might be a dream ), or am I simply looking at a bad DVD transfer in that case?

 

[jefferiestubes8]

My top pick is "2012", a close second is "The Core" and not too far behind is "The Day after Tomorrow."

Your picks landed in the top 5 of this article on technology review from yesterday:
The Five Worst (Hard) Science Fiction Movies Ever
How could we have forgotten The Lawnmower Man (1992) ?
Oddly they chose Mission to Mars (2000) as worst.

and yes I agree The Day after Tomorrow was a huge insult. I think Independence Day was worse especially with Will Smith interfacing and uploading a computer virus.
Honestly I think the dramatic thriller The Sum of All Fears (2002) had bad science involved.

Full disclosure:
I have Mission to Mars & The Core on my DVD shelf. they are fun scifi films and have great production design. I particularly like the space exteriors in Mission to Mars.

 

[sojourner]

^Jeff Goldblum's character used an Imac to infect the alien ships in Independence day.

 

[Admiral Shran]

The only good thing about Mission to Mars was Connie Nielsen, who I simply adore in everything she's in. As bad as that movie was, the ending was ridiculous.

I always liked The Lawnmower Man, despite it's bad science. It had a nice, creepy kind of horror feel to it.

 

[MacLeod]

True enough, the red ball was terrible science, but it's hardly a new thing in Trek. Hell, the transporter is scientifically insulting. In Star Trek 6 we had a FTL moon explosion. The bad science in Trek 09 is just as bad as the bad science in the rest of Trek.

Been a while since I saw the film but didn't they say it was a sub-space shockwave?

 

[Deckerd]

I'm sorry but I just love the idea of someone finding Trek09's transporter science insulting. It's just too adorable.

 

[MacLeod]

And I though the Heisenberg compensators worked just fine. I might be wrong but I think I remember hearing/reading that we had managed to transport a single photon.

It's not exactly fair to critise films set in the future about their science. A reasonable explanation is that science has moved on and they have a greater understanding of the universe. The real issue is when those films (shows) break their own estabalished laws of science.

No of course films set in the modern day are a different issue.

 

[Christopher]

It's not exactly fair to critise films set in the future about their science. A reasonable explanation is that science has moved on and they have a greater understanding of the universe.

But that's not really the way science works. Yes, it's always expanding, but new laws don't replace the old ones so much as supplement them. If we're talking about a subject that we don't know much about, then yes, there's a wide range of possibilities. But if we're talking about something that's already solidly proven by abundant experimental evidence, like the laws of thermodynamics or General Relativity or the Uncertainty Principle, then any further advanced discoveries are going to have to coexist with those laws rather than replacing them. By analogy, the explorers of centuries past had plenty of new lands on Earth to discover, and actually finding and charting them disproved a lot of their assumptions about those formerly uncharted territories, but discovering Alaska didn't disprove the existence of Paris.

So if a story contradicts principles of science that are already solidily established by overwhelming evidence and experimental confirmation, then the "science moves on" excuse doesn't cut it. True, maybe new science can discover workarounds, ways of avoiding limitations arising from current laws. For instance, using quantum entanglement to get around the Uncertainty Principle and allow teleportation, or using the space warps of General Relativity to get around the lightspeed limit of Special Relativity. But those workarounds still have to deal with the reality of the laws we actually know; they don't just let you ignore them or pretend they've been revoked. So there are limits to how far you can validly apply that notion.

 

[Deckerd]

Even if there were a way of warping space, do we really see it fitting into dinky little spaceships full of people who of course will not be affected in any way by the gigantic time, gravity and momentum distortions such spacebenders would create.

 

[Nerys Myk]

True enough, the red ball was terrible science, but it's hardly a new thing in Trek. Hell, the transporter is scientifically insulting. In Star Trek 6 we had a FTL moon explosion. The bad science in Trek 09 is just as bad as the bad science in the rest of Trek.

Been a while since I saw the film but didn't they say it was a sub-space shockwave?

What science does the "red ball" represent? The closest thing I can think of would be the "exotic matter" needed to stabilize a wormhole.

 

[sojourner]

The "red ball" counteracts the "blue balls", both of which are needed in order to make red pills and blue pills.

Take the blue pill.