Read a Thorough Chart of Bad Space Science in Movies — Vulture
Read a Thorough Chart of Bad Space Science in Movies. The good news: Apollo 13 was totally accurate. You really can get three men back from the moon on the power it takes to run a coffee machine!
redaxe
And nary a Star Trek flick among them. I wonder if they didn’t want to embarrass the franchise with having had every bit of bad science in the chart, or if they were simply assuming that we already knew that was the case.
Also, I’m willing to give 2001 a pass on the moving slowly in vacuum, because IIRC that was done deliberately as a visual cue, so it’s stylized rather than merely bad science. (Kubrick set that style rather than following it.)
epi_lj
It’s a cute chart, but without even looking for them there are several obvious inaccuracies. For example, it dings the 1972 Solaris for showing that all planets have Earth gravity and that all planets have one planet-wide climate. In actuality, the entire movie occurs around one specific planet, they only depict a small portion of the planet, and although the book certainly doesn’t depict significant climactic variations, there’s also a solid story-based reason for why that planet might be very, very weird. (I’m not trying to argue that Solaris is a scientifically accurate movie — it doesn’t even vaguely try to be.) Also, the evaluation creates some false equivalences because you only see inaccuracies that are on the chart, making it look like 2001 (two checkmarks) and Sunshine or The Black Hole (three checkmarks) aren’t that far apart in scientific accuracy, whereas the latter films have billions of other scientific flaws that just don’t appear on the chart.
xuth
I had no idea that lasers were faster than light.
peteralway
I just watched “The Black Hole” for the first time last night. That checklist covered only a few of the least of its sins. Starting with the search for “habitable life.”
Hoo boy!
msminlr
Light blue text! Why’d they have to make it in light blue text?
You’d think nobody who wears trifocals ever watches Sci_Fi Flicks!
dan_ad_nauseam
How could they miss the “Am now weightless” report while the rockets are still blasting in Rocketship X-M?