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Hello again, badmoviephiles.  I am back with a new review!!!  This time, I'll review the epitome of Superheroes played by the late Christopher Rerve.  Yup, Superman.  Now I am reviewing things from all the s-man movies he's played the lead role in.  In my opinion, Christopher was the best of them.  But in my opinion, Superman was the most ridiculous fictional character in history.  Because nothing that Superman does can ever be possible in real life by any means.  I'll be covering a few of those.

 :twirl:Earthquake triggered by a missile  This was in the first film.  A missile which was hijacked by Superman's arch rival, Lex Luthor smashes into the San Andreas fault triggering a series of Earthquakes.  This is impossible.  First off, the missile itself was a standard ballistic cruise missile, not a nuclear one.  It smashes into a weak point in the San Andreas fault line triggering those earthquakes intended to sink California.  Even if you did that, those Earthquakes wouldn't happen.  Why?  Because trying to trigger earthquakes with a single ballistic missile is like knocking down the whole Empire State Building with a basketball.  It just doesn't work.  Earthquakes are caused by the motion of the techtonic plates under the surface and when they hit an obstacle, a tremor happens.  Nothing mankind can do will push a techtonic plate into motion.  Sorry guys.

 :bouncegiggle:How S-man stops the Earthquakes.  What does Superman do to stop the earthquakes?  Does he halt the shifting of the techtonic plates?  Nope.  He seals the San Andreas fault by going under the earth and pushing a single boulder in place.  That is pointless.  Even if you could seal the San Andreas fault, it would just crack again.  That would never stop earthquakes from plaguing callifornia.  What will stop earthquakes from plaguing california?  Oh, just the same thing that will stop earthquakes all over the world.  But it won't happen for a few billion years,  The Earth's crust thickens and all its techtonic plates fuse together.   This will happen long after all life on Earth is extinguished.

 :question: Superman reverses time  Ridivulous, ridiculous, ridiculous.  Superman finds Louis Lane, the love of his life, dead.  Struck by the grief he feels, he flies up into orbit and flying faster than the speed of light against the Earth's rotation, he reverses it.  Not only does he reverse the Earth's rotation, he reverses time!  This is ridiculous on every level.  First off, you can't reverse the Earth's rotation by flying around it at the speed of light.  If Superman wanted to reverse the Earth's rotation, why didn't he just cling to Mountain Everest and push it eastward?  Also, reversing the Earth's rotation would have been far more catestrophical.  It wouldn't reverse time and it would have done a lot worse than making the sun rise in the west and set in the east.  The atmosphere would create terrible windstorms which would knock everything down as it was still following the Earth's original rotation.  Is it possible to change the Earth's rotation?  Sure it is, wait a few billion years.  4 billion years ago, the Earth rotated much faster than it does today.  A day was roughly 12 hours long.  In 2 billion years, a day will be 36 hours long and 2 billion years after that, 48 hours long.  Yes the Earth's rotation is slowing down.  But will it come to a complete stop?  Not likely.  By the time it does, the Sun will have gone through its natural cycle and incinerated it.

 :bouncegiggle:Heat and X Ray vision  These are things we see in both the first and second films, Superman using Xray vision and General Zod, Ursa and Non using heat ray vision.  These things are biologically impossible.  I mean in order for these things to happen, they would have to have radioactive isotopes in their brains generating these powers and these would make Superman very dangerous to be close to.  Anyone close to him would die of radioation sickness.

 :bouncegiggle:Super-breath  This happens in Superman II.  Our hero is knocked unconscious by a flying van.  The people think he is killed.  They turn on General Zod, Ursa and Non to try and lynch them.  But how these three keep the lynch mob away is laughable.  They use their super-breath to create a storm to keep them away.  This storm lasts for several minutes!  They don't take a break to inhale again, they just keep blowing and blowing like their lungs have infinite capacity.  Ridiculous.  Even if you could blow a superbreath, it wouldn't last anymore than a few milliseconds before you needed to inhale again.

 :question:Kryptonite  What is this stuff and why is it deadly to Superman?  Allegedly its made up of the fragments of his homeworld of Krypton.  If this Kryptonite was so deadly to him, then why didn't it kill the populace of Krypton before its sun went nova?

 :bouncegiggle: Superman makes a diamond out of a piece of coal  I know what you're thinking, diamonds are made of pure carbon so this is possible.  Yes, its possible.  But the problem is Superman made a 1 karat diamond out of a piece of coal that was less than half a pound.  He would
have needed a lot more coal than that to create a diamond of that size.  In reality, that little lump of coal would have created a diamond that was microscopic in size.

 :bouncegiggle:Superman stops Mount Vesuvius eruption  This is laghable and ridiculous/  Mount Vesuvius is erupting.  Superman flys in to the rescue to stop it.  What does he do?  Simple, cuts off the crest of a nearby mountain and uses it to cork Mount Vesuvius.  This wouldn't stop Vesuvius from erupting, it would just turn it into a bomb!  You see, the eruption would continue in spite of the obstacle.  Extreme pressure would build inside of the volcano until BLAMMO!!!  You get an explosion twenty times worse than hiroshima.   No more vatican or papacy!!!

 :bouncegiggle:Bombs in da Sun!!!  In Superman IV:  The Quest for Peace, the s-man takes all the world's nuclear stockpile and where does he dispose of it?  In a black hole?  Nope.  Out in a far away galaxy beyond the reach of man?  You wish!  What does he do?  Throw them in the sun!  Bad idea.  I mean, sure the sun is 500 times bigger than the Earth.  Well we have enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world ten times over.  So imagine what they would do to the sun.  The Sun is a nuclear engine, yes a nuclear FUSION engine.  Nuclear missiles work by nuclear fission, quite the opposite.  So if you threw several hundred nuclear missiles into the sun, it would start a chain reaction which would ultimately destroy the sun, and Earth!

"Don't mess with the S!"
Sorry, but I already messed up your twisted fantasy.

Later badmoviephiles.

(http://i267.photobucket.com/albums/ii296/Sp1ctacular3/Want_A_Cookie.jpg)

I really hope you had more fun writing that than I did reading it because they only way you could have had less would have involved being physically tortured while you were trying to type it out. 

To be fair, Superman reversing time by flying around the Earth very nearly ruined the first film for me. 

For me it was the bit where Lois starts thinking to herself as she's flying with Superman.
Even in Lego it's pretty unbareable... It's like she's trying to rap or something...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTAqyCt9f7s&feature=related

What killed it for me was Margot Kidder. Seriously? Lois Lane was supposed to be desirable, right? I mean, Margot Kidder, even back then, was a notch and a half above Eileen Brennan on the hotness scale.

 :bouncegiggle: That's kinda true, Flick, but no matter what you think of her looks, you can't deny that she was awesome in Black Christmas - for me that was the true defining moment of her career.

And Wyrewizard my man, sometimes suspension of disbelief can be a good thing.

It brings up so many questions.  Chief among them, why doesn't he reverse time on Krypton a few years, then beat the crap out of Brainiac and prevent its destruction?  Yeah yeah, yellow sun vs red sun and all that jazz, but they don't really mention the sun stuff in the original Superman film.  

It's probably the most unbelievable event in any superhero movie yet made, and that is saying something.  

Edit to add:


It's a weak explanation, but in the comics at least, Krypton wasn't actually made out of kryptonite - instead, when it exploded, chemical processes converted some of its material into kryptonite.  And the actual similarly named chemicals are not related in any way - the element in DC comics is purely fictitious and might as well be magic.  Did you know Superman is also weak to magic?  Funny, but true.  


It depends on what you mean by destroy.  If you mean wipe out humans and most complex life, yes.  But we couldn't really physically blow up the earth, we'd be doing minor damage to the crust at best.  


Why?  The bombs aren't going off (and even if they were, I fail to see why this would cause a "chain reaction".  A chain reaction of WHAT?), and they're just made out of plutonium and metal - in reality, they'd simply be destroyed by the heat of the sun, long before they actually made contact.  It'd just be lumps of matter being absorbed into a gigantic ball of gas.

I agree with Jim on the nuclear missiles - tossing them into the sun wouldn't do anything.  

The Mount Vesuvius thing is kind of funny to think about.  I don't believe you could chop off the top of a mountain and then carry it somewhere - it would collapse into a pile of rocks and dirt.  And even if you did have something that big and heavy, putting it on top of an erupting volcano would probably be a horrible idea.  You've got all that pressure of the magma and gas under the volcano, and now you've added a bunch of pressure on top of it as well.  I'm thinking you'd have pyroclastic flows incinerating everything for miles in every direction.

Reading these posts, I've come to the conclusion that Superman probably does more harm than good !

Hello all, new posting here though I 've been reading the forum a while. Actually, I'm one of those people who can't ignore laughable science errors in the movies though I still love  cheesy science fiction. The errors just crack me up. Had to say that you were doing great on pointing out impossible stuff but ran right off the road on the last one. The sun is a MILLION times the size of earth. When earth falls into the sun in 5 billion years the sun won't even notice, like putting a speck of dust in Vesuvius. So nuclear weapons would make far less impact.             

When your movie stars a guy who's bullet proof and can fly just because the sun is a different color where he's from, nitpicking the scientific errors is kinda missing the point. 

You might as well complain that Bugs Bunny shouldn't really be the same size as a human and be able to talk.  And where does he get all that dynamite?  And why doesn't it actually kill anyone when it blows them up?

The scientific impossibilities are only noticeable if a movie tries to take its whole premise "seriously" like the ridiculous "Core" or " Armageddon" . Cartoons obviously don't. Superman and lots of others do. Actually Armageddon was fun despite being preposterous.

Agreed on Armageddon. Absolutely ridiculous, but good fun. Armageddon worked because it didn't take itself too seriously. I mean, they even reference Wile E. Coyote when discussing some of their maneuvers.

Word on the Core script is the main writer of it wrote is a secret satire on the modern disaster film.  Makes sense if you look at the science angle - virtually EVERY SCIENTIFIC SCENE IN THE FILM, as well as all the disaster scenes, is completely preposterous.

Sorry, but there's so much wrong with this I don't know where to begin...

Firstly: nuclear weapons can't literally destroy the world as in blow it to pieces. When this is said, it means that the after-effects of our entire nuclear arsenals being detonated would be enough to wipe out civilization or life ten times over, and even then this is only as estimate. The formula of gravitational binding energy gives a good estimate to the magnitude of energy required to actually blow the world to pieces (and so thoroughly the pieces are freed of their mutual gravity), and this comes to around 2.24E+32 joules, or around 53 Quadrillion Megatons, compare that to the size of the world nuclear arsenal (somewhere over 5000 Megatons) and you'll see how small an effect we'd have on the actual planet with our little firecrackers.

Secondly: Most modern nuclear warheads work via a small fission reaction to create fusion, not fission absolute. The sun is a giant ball of plasma, that is matter held together by gravity, and the fusion comes from the ultra-dense conditions at its core. As has already been pointed out, the weapons should be vaporized before they can detonate (this is a point where the film goes wrong), and even in the event of them detonating, there is a no known mechanism in physics for such a chain reaction to take place that could progress from small fission and fusion explosions to destabilizing an entire star.

Thirdly: The sun is massive. MASSIVE. The amount of energy released by the world's entire nuclear arsenal is absolutely and utterly insignificant compared to the sun. It wouldn't even belch as it ate that crap up.

I compare it to what you say here

I missed that little gem when I was skimming WW's post earlier.   :bouncegiggle:

Absolutely. They knew it was impossible. I thought using the name "unobtainium" was kind of an obvious wink at the audience.

I'm not exactly sure what WW's deal is. I can't imagine him as some miserable nutcase who is incapable of enjoying fiction that isn't factual, or that he's dumb enough to put as many glaring scientific inaccuracies into a post by accident. He doesn't really engage in the discussion, just makes his proclamation and watches. It's not what I'd call participation, and it doesn't feel like trolling. Maybe he is just a nut.

Anyway, for the record, if I want to see something totally rooted in reality, I turn the TV off and enjoy reality. If I want to escape from reality for a while, I'll take fiction, and as long as it stays somewhat true to it's own internal reality, I can take it for what it is. To see only the faults, to me, is not a strength but a weakness. If WW is at all sincere, I pity him.

Yep.

It's not rejection of real world physics that makes a movie go wrong, but rejection of the movie's own established physics. Internal consistency in all areas is key for a good piece of fiction. This is why most fantasy has its own rules that it sticks too. You can't really have a story without consistency, but you can make up any rules you like, as long as you stick to them.

People are keyed to this. We don't call Superman out for flying, since there is no contradiction inherent here, but we will call him out if he beats up a galactic threat one moment, but then gets beaten up by a merely human character the next. Unless, of course, there is a previously established reason for that happening, like an established weakness (Kryptonite).

Of course, as well as basic consistency, it extends to give us absurdity within absurdity. No one scoffs at Palpatine using the force in Star Wars, but we would do a double take if during the fight with Mace Windu in Episode III, Palpatine's arms snapped off, shot up his nostrils, his faced turned rainbow colors, and he rode to safety on a Harley-Davidson WL while the theme from Lost in Space played in the background. Mace Windu then does a double take and begins to play tic-tac-toe with a bush baby while wearing a rug and smoking a table leg.

Go on, think of an in-universe explanation for that.

That depends. Was it the theme from Seasons 1 and 2 or the theme from Season 3? :teddyr:

I'd like to thank the original poster for providing so much to deconstruct. :cheers:

Sorry, didn't realize the original poster was really a troll or I wouldn't have encouraged him. Thought he was kidding. Maybe someone can put up a list of problem children for this site.

And of course if that happened in Yellow Submarine while the Beatles were singing that all you need is love, nobody would bat an eye there.   :wink:

Everybody needs a hobby another thing everybody needs is somebody to point at, laugh, and say "thank God, I'm not that bad,' so I guess we all win!

True enough. There's no fusion taking place anywhere near the surface of the sun, just in the core. And if I'm not mistaken, the centre of stars is where heavy elements are made, including fissionable ones like uranium. Why? Because the sheer weight of the star pushes the particles together. I don't think fission can even occur there. Fission and fusion are basically the same thing - a competition between the forces pushing the particles together and the forces pushing them apart. It's just a question of which force is strong enough to overcome the other.

And as others have said, the bombs won't get anywhere near the sun intact. But let's assume they do go off before they vaporize. I really love the way nukes are assumed to work like conventional weapons, that they might explode with full force if they get hot or otherwise damaged. A nuclear weapon is a pretty carefully designed and constructed thing, and detonation depends on everything being precisely timed and working just so. If you set off the explosive lenses willy-nilly by heating up the bomb, all you're going to do is blow it to pieces.

As to whether you can trigger an earthquake with a missile, remember that we're talking about a nuclear warhead (hence the mushroom cloud and the danger of Hackensack being completely destroyed), aimed at a carefully chosen spot along a major fault line, with the intention of releasing the natural tectonic stresses built up there. Major earthquakes happen on their own, the plan was not to produce an earthquake from scratch, but to give nature a little push.

That said, underground nuclear tests have produced the equivalent of earthquakes, one of them as high as 7.0 on the Richter scale, with aftershocks over the next few weeks. That was the Cannikin test in Alaska - a 5Mt bomb planted a mile underground. Consider that the US has detonated a bomb three times that yield, and the Russians tested an aircraft-deliverable bomb ten times the yield of Cannikin (and possibly 20 times if they'd used the depleted uranium tamper the design called for). It was possible to drop a 100Mt bomb from an airplane in the 60s. The 50Mt version still managed to leave a hole in the ground bigger than my hometown.

So, to recap, nuclear weapons are insignificant as far as the sun or the entire earth are concerned, but they can be very effective at making the ground shake.

I usually don't feed the trolls, but what the hell? This is fun.


Of course, any element of your home planet is going to be perfectly safe, like arsenic and lead and radium and all those other wholesome, natural substances. I mean, if they're poisonous, why isn't everybody dead?


He made a diamond with his bare hands and you're concerned about the amount of coal he used? Give your head a shake.

It became radioactive when the Krypton sun went supernova.

I don't see his trolling (if that's what it is) as a problem.  If it becomes a problem, then I'm sure he'll be banned.   

Thought I'd pass on some clarification of the "destroy the world ten times over" argument we've been hearing for years. I was already aware that the damage done increases much less as the bomb yield gets higher, and fallout is such a widely variable thing that it's hard to put into concrete terms, but I finally got around to looking up the overkill argument, to see where it actually comes from. As far as I can tell, it's quoting (or rather misquoting) Philip Noel-Baker, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who said this in 1971:

"Both the US and the Soviet Union now possess nuclear stockpiles large enough to exterminate mankind three or four - some say ten - times over"

Notice he said "exterminate mankind" and not "destroy the world." But setting aside four decades of people getting that wrong, it was wrong when he said it. He was, after all, a politician, not a physicist. I was able to find an article by Brian Martin, an Australian social science professor, published in 1982. Martin does come from a physics background, and keep in mind that Martin is, among other things, a peace activist. Gotta give him credit for putting scientific accuracy ahead of ideology.

I just want to say for the record, that it's extremely hard to drown a person a second time.  If you do it right, they're actually going to be ddead after the first time and unlikely tro come back, much less come back 9 more times in a way that's easily killed. 

Just sayin'. 

Look out, he's possessed by WyreWizard. :buggedout:

Wow, this thread has been a very interesting read in an omg wtf kinda way.   :thumbup:

I thank you all for your comments and insights.  However, I must say I disagree with those of you who said nukes wouldn't affect the sun.  One or two of you said Nuclear fission and fusion are the same.  HELLO!  They are not.  They are the complete opposite of each other.  Nuclear fission is when atoms explode and their quarks hit other atoms causing them to explode, thus creating a chain reaction of exploding atoms.  Nuclear fusion is when atoms under great heat and pressure fuse to form new elements.

Now, we all saw how the S-Man threw those hundred or so nukes into the sun.  But they didn't explode before they touched the sun.  They clearly hit the sun's corona before they exploded.  The resulting explosion would have sent fissioning atoms and quarks straight into the sun.  The suns heat would have not been able to stop them.  When those atoms and quarks hit the helium atoms deep inside the sun, they would break down into hydrogen.  The chain reaction from that would have sent the sun into a younger state.  Then the hydrogen atoms would be destroyed.  Slowly, the sun's energy would decrease.  It would lose pressure and not be able to hold itself together.  The sun would gradually cool down and turn into an inert cloud.

There is so much wrong with that one statement, he's surely baiting people, because he can't seriously believe anything that crazy (at least I hope not). I'm going to assume it was a joke, but again, I'm enjoying this, so what the hell, I'll play.

You gave a very... interesting.... description of how fission and fusion usually happen in a bomb and in the sun, respectively. But you don't have a clue how they work, much less how they would interact. There is no magic, just the forces that govern the movement of particles, binding them together or pushing them apart. The heaviest elements, including all fission fuels, have atoms large enough that their nuclei are not held together all that securely, so they split all by themselves, decaying into other elements and giving off energy and particles. Of greatest interest in nuclear weapon design are neutrons (not quarks). Fission is an ongoing process that even occurs to a very small degree in substances we would consider stable, such as zinc. Why does fission occur? Because the forces that bind the nucleus are just barely strong enough to hold it together, and sometimes not strong enough. Capturing extra neutrons is, in the case of uranium or plutonium, the straw that breaks the camel's back, which is what allows us to create a sustained chain reaction in a reactor or a bomb. But under normal circumstances, fission just carries on. And atoms don't explode, they split and release radiation of varying wavelengths, including heat and light. The explosion comes when that energy hits the surrounding matter. If you've ever seen footage of a nuclear explosion in space, where the only significant matter around is the bomb itself, it looks nothing like an atmospheric blast. I suppose the Superman movies did get that wrong.

Now, let's take a look at just how hard it is to sustain an explosive chain reaction in big, heavy, unstable atoms of fission fuel, much less in anything else (helium, for example :lookingup:). To achieve a supercritical fission reaction (boom), you need to meet a certain minimum ratio of mass to surface area - more neutrons produced and less opportunity for them to get away. You can either assemble a greater mass, as in the Little Boy bomb, or decrease the surface area by implosion. This is usually accompanied by an injection of neutrons to get things going. And at that point, the immediate result of that release of energy is that your fuel is going to expand and finally vaporize, thus tipping the balance of volume to surface area the other way. This is why the Little Boy bomb used less than two percent of its fuel. A good deal of nuclear weapon development has involved finding ways to get more fission to occur during that brief instant when conditions are right for it. That very brief instant while the bomb is still in one piece. The fission reaction is over by the time its effects are seen.

Fusion, on the other hand, involves pushing (usually light) atoms together against the forces that cause them to repel one another, until the binding force (the same one overcome in a fission reaction) can fuse the nuclei into one. It's just a balancing act, nothing more. To say fission and fusion are two different things because they work in opposite directions is about as idiotic as saying that pushing is in no way related to pulling for the same reason.

A fission reaction would do nothing to the sun. And again, all the fusion is happening deep inside the sun anyway, so the two reactions will never meet. And if they somehow did meet in the centre of the sun, the same forces that push the light elements together would act in opposition to the forces splitting the heavy elements apart. For all we know, the centre of the sun could contain extremely heavy elements that couldn't exist anywhere else

The only way in which the two reactions have ever enhanced one another is when an artificial situation was created in which the two are induced together - an H-bomb. The heat, radiation and pressure of a fission reaction (which is over by the time this happens) will cause hydrogen to fuse into helium. And when two atoms of tritium come together, they give off four very energetic neutrons. These neutrons, in turn, induce fission in a depleted uranium tamper, U-238 being unable to sustain a chain reaction except under neutron bombardment. This is where about half of the average hydrogen bomb's yield comes from - fission induced by the fusion reaction. But to get that, you have to wrap the fusion reaction in uranium, to catch the neutrons. And there is no real chain reaction, because without the neutron bombardment, there would be no fission of that third stage. The same principle works to a lesser degree in a boosted fission weapon, which has a tiny bit of tritium in the centre of the fission core as a source of extra neutrons to speed up the fission reaction and produce more energy before the fuel comes apart.

But again, it comes down to scale. Big fusion reaction buried inside big star vs. little fission reaction. Only in a small, enclosed device, will the two processes ever affect one another, and that is in successive stages (albeit extremely quick succession) of fission, fusion, fission - not together. On the sun, not a chance. The sun is too big to be affected directly, and there is no means by which a fission explosion is going to induce any kind of chain reaction in a light gas. Think about it - fission uses fuel too heavy (in practical terms anyway) to undergo fusion and fusion uses fuel too light to undergo fission. They are two sides of the same coin, or perhaps two sides of the same balance scale. Hell, they both give off the same particle - neutrons. And the fusion reaction gives off more of them. Bombarding the sun with neutrons will achieve exactly sweet f**k all.

In conclusion, don't argue nuclear weapons with me, Sonny. I've spent a lot of time studying the history as well as the workings of them over the years. It's not quite a hobby, but it's an area of intense interest. And yet I can still enjoy monster movies from the 50s without once being bothered by the grossly inaccurate portrayal of nuclear energy. Boy, am I stupid. :twirl:

As for the sun's corona apparently having a hard boundary, I'm not even going to go there. Talking nukes is fun, but I don't think I'll go further than that.

superman is a fictional chatacter, right ?

Yeah, but that doesn't seem to matter. Personally, I'd have just said that Superman throwing a big bag of assorted bombs into the sun looked dumb. Quibbling over the technicalities of a movie like Superman 4 is kind of like picking smelly bits out of a garbage dump.

But that's how WW gets his kicks, by posting some absurd, inflammatory hoo-ha and finding it incredibly funny that people want to discuss it with him.

But a discussion of nuclear physics is a discussion of nuclear physics, and that's interesting. And as trolls go, WW does an admirable job of staying out of the topics he starts, which can allow them to grow into something more than nitpicking.

Guess I can't post hyperlinks or pictures yet but take a look at this to see how silly the idea that our nuclear weapons could affect the sun really is. Go to You tube and search "How Small Is Earth?". The comparison of earth to the sun is at about 36 seconds in. The rest is showing how tiny the sun is compared to other stars.

I think you need a minimum of ten posts before you can post a link.  But here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NYRVsKAkFM

This thread is actually quite educational.

I have just 1 question for you.  Are you a quantum physicist?  You sure do talk like one.

A physicist probably wouldn't put it in such vague terms. I'm just a layman who has read some books on the subject.

Rev, Thanks for the link posting help. You probably saw there were several similar videos, all basically the same.

All this talk about whether or not a bunch of nuclear bombs would set off a chain reaction if they were thrown into the Sun has reminded me of a certain...other...movie. A movie that mentions a fictional bomb that, when detonated, would cause sunlight to explode in a chain reaction that would pretty much destroy the universe.