Badmovies.org Forum

So I was watching THE CURSE, yes that Wil Wheaton film, the other day.  Sure it's a p**s poor adaption of an H.P. Lovecraft story (and aren't they all?), but it's not too terrible.

But it had a line somewhat late in the movie that made me laugh.  See, an asteroid has crash landed on a farm and a not too responsible doctor has sent the by-products to a lab to be tested.  So the scientist test the stuff and relate the results to the guy with this immortal line of dialogue (papaphrased because I'm not going to put the film in again just to quote it):

"We don't know what it is.  It's literally changing the molecular structure of the water!"

Good God!  Changing the molecular structure of the water?  Why, the only thing that can do that is almost everything!  Well, not really, if you really want to get into it (things are just "added in").  But it's pretty bad and it made me laugh.

Also, the guy from BATS yelling "I'm a scientist!  That's what we do!  We make things better!" is also pretty funny.

I don't know, any other examples of bad science speak?

From the movie SLITHIS (1978): the origin of the creature (something like that) is 'organic mud'.

From "Mimic"... "Of course its the same species, I did a pH test."
-Ed

Wasn´t there some discussion about "Jurassic Park"?
I remember it was about why they took the genetic material from a frog and not from a lizard.
They seemed to have forgotten (in a big - very big! - budget movie) that Dinosaurs were Lizards, not amphibians...

I believe we could reference every single episode of every season of Star Trek for having unfounded scientific "techno babble." Talk about the dilithium power rods, flux capacitators, warp drives.... you know where I'm coming from. It's silly to think about factually, but from a fictional standpoint it's quite amazing that Rodenberry orignally came up with all of this stuff. And now there are books out on the market that are aiming at proving that this stuff not only is possible, but we're doing it right now.

I refer to you The Physics of Star Trek. It talks about the possiblities of teleportation, warp drive (the bending of space), phasers, etc..... Fun book to read. Enjoy the geekiness.

Scott H.

Almost everything in 'The Core'. I can't narrow it down to anything specific as I won't put myself through the hell of watching that again.

Reptile once were amphibians, when life first made the huge jump from sea to land they lost they're gills grew legs, etc. they eventually evolved into reptiles, making amphibians a predecessor to the dinosaurs.
I think.
Can someone fill me in here?

Not sure if modern amphibians didn't evolve separately from a common ancestor. Also can't remember if Crichton gave a reason for using frog DNA in the book. Might just be so that the dinosaurs can unexpectedly change gender. In any case, it was ever stated that they used frog DNA because it was the closest thing available, and I doubt they would have made the mistake.

Besides, the view supported in Jurassic Park is that dinosaurs are most closely related to birds.

When I think of goofy science lines, I always think of Jon Pertwee's favourite recurring line from Doctor Who: "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow." Doing that could accomplish pretty much whatever the situation required. When you think about it, the Doctor was doing the stock TNG solution years before TNG.



Post Edited (04-05-05 15:04)

How about the ENTIRE movie "The Day After Tomorrow."  Sorry, I ain't gonna quote the whole script.

True science geek grad school story: at a wedding, a WEDDING, a whole table full of us geeks got into a serious discussion on whether that episode of TNG when they hit the 'quantum filament' properly depicted if a human could survive a decompression to space ambient conditions (the vacuum part, not the temperature part).  The really funny thing was, one participant in this discussion is a HIGHLY respected chemical physicist who might just be on the track to a Nobel.

In the book Crichton explained it as that they didn't have the complete dinosaur DNA, so they used DNA from another creature to fill in.  I forget what the creature was, could have been a frog.  Really bad science, if you don't know whats missing, how can you fill in for it.

Somebody is trying to get a place on Buffy's list. (:

The idea was that the frog DNA was "close enough" to the dinosaur DNA.  For example, we have large segments (most of it, actually) of our DNA that is common with chimpanzees, our closest relative.

I suppose the thinking might be that if the frog DNA was NOT close enough, it just would not sustain life; that is, if something that was missing was truly unique to the dinosaurs, the whole enchilada would not work.

Another thing to keep in mind: DNA is not a simple one-to-one mapping of information.  There are 'modular units' (I sure don't know the technical terms) that might mean one thing with 'coupled' with fragment A and something a little different when coupled with fragment B.  In other words, the information density is MUCH higher than a simple linear mapping would suggest.

I'm not sure if Crichton knew or surmised this when formulating the frog substitution, or if he just conjurred something that sounded cool and fit the plot design.

"Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!"
*he said, having been too lazy to read the other posts and hoping no one has already covered it*

Does neutron flow even have a polarity?

I've always liked:

"Check the angular vector of the moon!"

(Dr. Zarkov in Flash Gordon)

Brother Ragnarok wrote:

> "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!"
> *he said, having been too lazy to read the other posts and
> hoping no one has already covered it*

Somebody did :)

I think that just about every line uttered by John Carradine fits this criteria and, to me, that man was the king of techno-babble.  In fact, from "Vampire Men of the Lost Planet" comes this one:

"It's dangerous, but you can use them. We're merely rearranging her brainwaves, electromagnetically."

Yeah, that would mean they are using the brain equivalent of a bulk eraser on her head.  Great stuff and John always had the delivery just perfect.

The more syllables in any word John Carradine uttered the better. Yes, it might take him a while, but it was worth it. (:

There was an awful post apocalyptic movie with George Kennedy about a monster that can only reproduce by raping very recently pregnant women and having it's sperm take over the egg.  The doctor figures this out as he watches a computer screen showing the human sperm implanting in the eg and then a large "monster sperm" following it in shortly afterwards.  

So um...  where did THAT footage come from?  Does the girl's uterus have a security camera?

When The Core came out in theaters, I took a date to see the movie. I didn't have many intentions towards her, but wanted to find out if she was the kind of girl who actually enjoyed watching stupid movies like me. Hey, she actually sat through it, gotta give her that much. Anyways, in the credits is a little listing that caught my attention. It read "realistic physics consultant" or something like that, and three names of three doctorates came along as those people.

MEANING they must have consulted, if only briefly with some people who knew what they were talking about in the physics world.

Can we assume it is possible for the Earth to stop spinning and that it is possible to get it started again? With nuclear blasts? By melting the inner crust? And this will bounce around the inner layer creating inertia? Or something like that. Where do they get this crap from. Some less-than-genious physics student who has an overactive and somewhat apocalytic imagination?

WHAT second-rate physics doctorate would let these kinds of massive mistakes into a movie?

This reaches further back in film history to the new beginnings of CGI, back to Star Wars and the outer space fights. All the space fighters had wings on the ships..... and this seems wrong to me because there is no point of wings where the is no wind- or air for that matter. Why didn't anybody catch there gigantic oversights? Or are they not oversights, but allowed into the movie due to a lack of care for further thinking?

The lack of appropriately thought out ideas seems to be the cause of careless movie science. If people fully developed an idea to where there were no holes in the idea, that idea may become good. The Core was not thought out and it defintitely wasn't good.

No more of this.... THERE ARE GOOD MOVIES OUT THERE TOO!!! I think I'll watch....... I'll watch....... umm, there aren't any good.... well........ I don't seem to have any good movies. Maybe I'll turn on the tv. Oh---boy---Ricky---Lake. Gaaahh.............

I found this site

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

a couple of months ago (no tellin' what I was surfin' for), and I think it is pretty good.  Scroll down near the bottom, and there are some links to some reviews from the Physicist perspective.

The key point, imo, is that physicists CAN enjoy a movie on it the merits of what it's supposed to be - entertaining - not always fretting over if the science is 'right' or not.

"This reaches further back in film history to the new beginnings of CGI, back to Star Wars and the outer space fights. All the space fighters had wings on the ships..... and this seems wrong to me because there is no point of wings where the is no wind- or air for that matter. Why didn't anybody catch there gigantic oversights? Or are they not oversights, but allowed into the movie due to a lack of care for further thinking?"

Just to touch on the issue of having wings on space fighters...I figure they've got wings for 2 reasons: A) If you recall, they do fly through the atomosphere of planets now and then B) Wings make the ships look cool. How stupid would a Tie fighter look if it was just a ball? What about the X-Wing fighter...what would they call it if it had no wings...the No-Wing fighter?
Ah, just some points to ponder.

I agree. I loved Carradine's delivery of the line in The Unearthly, where he talks about making some necessary sacrifices.

I just always assume that movies take place in a parrallel universe that's usually quite a lot like ours but has slight differences in the laws of physics...and occasionaly logic. Helps me sit through a lot.

I vote for the latter.

The X-Wing fighter's wings were not aerodynamic in purpose at all, they were weapon mounts that afforded it a wider arch of fire than the narrow-gunned tie fighter.  I think the X-Wing was a superior design, though visibility would have been rotten.

And for the record, they weren't called wings, they were called "S-Foils."  Some of you may recall the words of the brave Red Leader: "Lock S-Foils in attack position."  By spreading the wings, they placed the four guns into a wide rectangular kill box - making air-to-air gunnery easier.  Yeah, I'm a geek.  So?

You still ain't getting on the list. (:

The aerodynamic issue was brought about the Viper on Battlestart Galactica.  I remember in school reading a pro-con article (yes, I actually got to read articles about BG as school assignments!); the guy that wrote the con article complained about the wings for a space fighter.  The counter arguement was, of course, they also fly in the atmospheres of planets.

The Viper's wings, if anything, are even LESS efficient as lift producers than the X-wing.  I think of it as a ballistic stability thing, more like fins on a rocket; the Viper is so fast, and its engines powerful enough, that lift is not important.

With the X-Wing figther in SW, well, it just LOOKED COOL.  (Ditto the Viper, btw).

Eirik wrote:


> And for the record, they weren't called wings, they were called
> "S-Foils."  Some of you may recall the words of the brave Red
> Leader: "Lock S-Foils in attack position."  By spreading the
> wings, they placed the four guns into a wide rectangular kill
> box - making air-to-air gunnery easier.  

Don't you mean vacuum-to-vacuum gunnery?

Eirik wrote:

> By spreading the
> wings, they placed the four guns into a wide rectangular kill
> box - making air-to-air gunnery easier.  Yeah, I'm a geek.  So?

Wouldn't you want the guns along the fuselage axis, as close to the pilot's line of sight, as possible? If the Tie fighter is smaller (and it appears to me to be), and the pilot of the X-Wing is lining up behing a Tie and shoots, the widespread guns seem to decrease liklihood of a hit.

Or, maybe it's because the Tie's fly so erratically, you create a 'box' that if they fly out of, they get hit.

(Today's Badmovies.org lesson: how to overthink gunnery in Star Wars).

I would assume the guns on the fuselage would work quite well, considering that's where just about every fighter since WWII has the guns placed.  Of course, guided missiles seem to work better yet.

Bottom line:  They look way cool out on the wingtips.

I always figured the x-wings on an X-Wing were for gliding like a biplane if they have to ditch on Tattooene or something.

"Don't you mean vacuum-to-vacuum gunnery?"

Nice catch.  Thanks.  (sigh)

So what does this mean for the Naboo fighters? Maybe we should also discuss the aerodynamics of Jar Jar's ears.  I'd say numerous attempts at throwing him off a cliff would probably help us figure that one out!

["you in big doo-doo Jar Jar!'']

hmmm....

Maybe we better not open a can of worms on that one...

Oooh, can I be the first to throw him off the cliff?

Can't believe this one hasn't come up yet:
"I made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs."

raj wrote:

> Can't believe this one hasn't come up yet:
> "I made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs."

What's wrong with this? I've read people complaining that a parsec is a distance when Han seems to be referring to time, but I've also read a very astute counter-arguement (sorry, I cannot remember the web site).  It goes like this:

The Millenium Falcon used hyper light speed drives which we might assume work by 'warping' space-time (there's the link between time and distance, btw).  So, if his ship can warp space-time to a smaller distance, he has achieved a faster run.  The idea is that he's bragging about how SHORT he made the distance to Kessel.

Seems reasonable to me.  But I don't know how far a stationary observer would see the distance to Kessel to be, so I don't know if 12 parsecs is really all that good.

I've also heard that in Star War mythos the "Kessel Run" goes through dangerous space (black holes and such) and that to make the run short required a lot of skill

I've also heard it explained that Han was just trying to BS the locals to close the deal

Sorry, guys, I cannot resist.  Another "True Geek" story.  In my high school Physics class, the class was four or five guys and the ex-football coach teacher.  All of the problems we worked in class were made to involve throwing living things off of buildings or cliffs.  That dude knew how to make Physics fun and appealing to teen-age boys.

The Jar-Jar experiment is very, very doable.  I suggest the Indus River gorge, the largest single escarpment on the surface of the earth: 23,000 feet from top to bottom.  This will give him time to think about what he's done.

That's the beauty of geekdom. Any idiot can find fault, but a true geek can not only spot the mistake, but think of any number of rational explanations for it.

Kind of reminds me of the old Marvel "No Prize." Encouraged the kids to not just spot the mistakes, but to eliminate them as well. Quite a labour-saver for the folks at Marvel who answered the mail.



Post Edited (04-08-05 12:15)

I always had a problem with the X-Wings and Vipers not having any attitude control thrusters. They were shown banking and diving like airplanes. That don't work in space.

In Babylon 5 JMS based the design of the StarFuries on the X-Wing, but  the "wings" only served as a mount for the engines and thrusters. The four guns are mounted 2 above and 2 below cockpit mounted on the fuselage. They have the pilot in a standing position (supposedly you can handle the G-forces better that way).  Later they had a two person model called the Thunderbolt, which had wing extensions that could be flipped out for atmospheric flight and the crew sat in the cockpit.

The new BSG also addressed this, the Vipers can now be seen doing 180's using attitude thrusters. This makes a lot more sense than having to the ships bank and turn.  Ships in space can be a lot more maneuverable because they don't have to deal with that pesky atmosphere or gravity.

Well, Star Wars and the old BSG were space opera. Adventure comes before scientific accuracy. They wanted aerial dogfights with lots of loud explosions, for dramatic purposes. I prefer to judge them by that standard.

Really, it can be argued that they're not even real science fiction at all. There's nothing about the basic story of Star Wars that wouldn't work in a more earthly setting. It's timeless material, wrapped in sci-fi trappings. Do it all with regular guns and swords, ships and planes, and it would work.

I always thought he was referring to parsecs as time, not distance; sort of like using lightyears as a unit of time.  Haven't heard about this alternative explanation.

The new BSG also addressed this, the Vipers can now be seen doing 180's using attitude thrusters

Yet they can't mount a gyro-stabilizer of some sorta on a stupid camera

It's basically a western in space, at least that's what I've heard it compared to many times. A good classic good vs. evil story can usually be told in any setting.

Does that hand held camera movement make you whoozy? I think they were going for the Saving Private Ryan look, but it does get a little irritating sometimes.

I had a science teacher who did something like that, only with him, it was Gumby.  If he was explaining how the digestive system worked, Gumby got eaten by a lion.  How things melt?  Gumby gets locked in a car on a hot day.  Electricity?  Gumby gets hit by lightening.  Acids?  You get the idea.  He'd always draw Gumby and remind us that he hated the character.

You may not be that far off the mark, Eirik. While I have not seen it, though I did hear about it, there was a television program  from the U.K., in which a camera was attached to a man's sexual organ, which he then inserted into his girlfriend's or wife's sexual organ, so that one got a view of what sexual intercourse looked like from inside the woman. I kid you not.

Since "The Core" has been mentioned. This is my example. Not so much of a 'bad science" line, but of "bad science." Any film where they drill down to the center of the earth and find a lost civilization or, at least, some form of life. "At the Earth's Core"  being one example. Another example being "Journey to the Center of the Earth." Of course, "bad science" does not necessarily make these films or any film unenjoyable.

Does that hand held camera movement make you whoozy?

Just irritated because it's senseless.  I can almost sorta see it for interior shots to try to get an 'I'm an observer in the room looking from person to person" vibe, but doing it for exterior, long-range shots is just stupid.  If the brain/eye coordination was that bad over distance, wide receivers and outfielders could never catch anything.

The fact that all the external shots are done with computer and they have to intentionally prgram that shakiness into it is *really* inane.

Heck, I've seen more stable World War II aerial footage

What about C.H.U.D.s? Or Mole People. They may be mean spirited, but I'm sure they're just misunderstood. And they don't live in the center of the earth. Just below its surface. And they are completely illogical, unscientific creatures. Still, I look down drain covers for them every time I pass over one. Maybe one day.......

What about that whole schpeel that Eros goes through in Plan 9 from Outer Space ? He lost me on the stuff about heat from the sun.

Noise in space . . . Air in space . . .
Star Wars came out 11 years after the silent space of 2001.  Star Wars is/was more memorable apparently, as today all space operas feature loud noise in the vaccuum of space.
How very scientific . . .
Very little actual science exists in the modern science fiction film.
Eg:  All robot movies.  
The hardest thing to do in modern robot science is to have any robot navigate any given course & recognize anything blocking its way.
Every single robot movie has them all running around & negotiating tables & chairs like a regular person.  This ain't even nearly possible yet -- not for decades to come in the real world of science.
peter johnson/denny crane

http://www.culttvman.net/assets/images-EVENTS-2004/jjorlando2003Howwude.jpg

Ozzymandias wrote:
> What about that whole schpeel that Eros goes through in
> Plan 9 from Outer Space ? He lost me on the stuff about
> heat from the sun.

"First was your firecracker, a harmless explosive. Then your hand grenade. They began to kill your own people a few at a time. Then the bomb, then a larger bomb. Many people are killed at one time. Then your scientists stumbled upon the atom bomb. Split the atom. Then the hydrogen bomb, where you actually explode the air itself. Now you bring the destruction of the entire universe, served by our sun. The only explosion left is the solaronite."

So, the first explosive invented was the firecracker, followed by the hand grenade, and then the atom bomb. And it looks like we've completely misunderstood the way the H-bomb works. And let us not forget that the entire universe is served by one sun.

Classic stuff. And later in the same speech when he explains that "a ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms." Brilliant. But who could forget the highly scientific explanation of the solaronite:

"Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now you spread
a thin a line of it to a ball, representing the Earth. Now, the gasoline
represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the
gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily
travel around the Earth, back along the line of gasoline to can, or the sun
itself. It will explode this source, and spread to every place that gasoline, or
sunlight, touches."

The thing I could never figure out is if one solaronite will destroy the universe, how could they know it works? They obviously haven't tested one. How do they know, for a fact, that it would destroy the universe? Oh, I forgot. 'Cause they're so advanced.

trek_geezer wrote:

> Ships in space
> can be a lot more maneuverable because they don't have to deal
> with that pesky atmosphere or gravity.
>

Okay, I've never actually FLOWN a ship in space, but I have played around with
the orbiter simulator:

http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/~martins/orbit/orbit.html

Many, many a cpu cycle I've burned up playing this one.  Gameplay is not exciting like a first person shooter, but it's a gas.  Try to dock the space shuttle and IIS, or heck, even just get the Shuttle into stable low earth orbit!  

It ain't easy.

There's a sim for a fictional space "tug" called the Firefly, that one might use to move hardware around the spacestation (for contruction, for example).  You have to do all maneuvers by instruments, reading two radar screens that represent  orthogonal views.  Tricky.

I highly recommend this simulator (unfortunately, only for Windows last I checked, so I have to boot Windows to play), but fortunately, it is free.  It's my understanding that the underlying physics are accurately portrayed.



Post Edited (04-11-05 07:14)

Sort of a nitpick more than anything else, but in Star Trek:  The Wrath of Khan, when they're in the Mutara nebula, the Enterprise and Reliant can't see each other because their sensors are screwed up by the nebula.  But in all the external views, it seems that you can see through the nebula with crystal clarity if you just use the naked eye.  So, um, why didn't anybody think to just look out a freakin' window?  Both ships were covered in windows.

Um... yipes.  I think I may have seen that actually.  But in this movie the doctor doesn't see the girl until several days after the event.

There was a NOVA filmed back in the early 80's that documented conception, growth of the fetus and birth.  It used the predecessor technology to what is now used in arthoscopic (spelling?) surgery.  Anyway, I wonder if the movie you are talking about used some stock footage from the documentary?

Cheecky-Monkey wrote:

> Reptile once were amphibians, when life first made the huge
> jump from sea to land they lost they're gills grew legs, etc.
> they eventually evolved into reptiles, making amphibians a
> predecessor to the dinosaurs.
> I think.
> Can someone fill me in here?

Wellll....to some, thats a debatable way of looking at the history of life.
 My main point though, is the fact that the T-rex should have had a long stickey tongue, and hopping ability enough to catch the leads as it chased the jeep.
Short film...but a great scene!

Now that you mention it, I think that "not being able to see you if you don't move" thing is a frog trait. Notice they snatch flies out of the air, never a still one off of  a wall or something.

The first thing I thought of was not a movie but any talk show where scientologist extroardinaire John Travolta tries to intelligently explain privatized lower-space travel. He also has a hard time explaining his interest in it because he'll never admit that he believes Hubbard and his prophecetized aliens are just beyond our reach.