- [Announcer] Hollywood doesn't have
the greatest track record when it comes
to getting the science in movies right.
Maybe all the writers and directors forgot
everything they learned in high school
when they were in film school
and couldn't be bothered
to Google anything.
It could also be that they just used
too much artistic license or maybe they're
just kind of lazy.
Whatever the case may be,
today, we'll take a look
at movies that portray themselves as
at least somewhat realistic
and fall seriously short,
rather than just calling
out movies that are
just blatantly ridiculous, like Flubber.
Number 10: Die Another Day
Die Another Day is the
20th James Bond movie,
and the last one that starred
Pierce Brosnan as Bond.
It is perhaps best known for
having extremely bad CGI.
However it did really
well at the box office
when it came out in 2002.
This means that audiences
probably cared as little
about scientific
inaccuracies as the creators
of the movie did, or
they could just get away
with it since everybody
likes James Bond so much.
In the movie, Bond goes to
North Korea, and in order
to stop him, North Korea
disguises one of their agents
as a fellow Brit.
How do they do this?
By simply replacing his DNA, of course.
Because that's how DNA works, right?
No, it turns out.
In reality, every cell in
your body contains DNA,
and it's totally impossible
to somehow switch it all out.
In the movie its claimed they
killed off his bone marrow
to make this transformation possible,
but in real life that's actually a symptom
of chemotherapy called myelotoxicity.
Myelotoxicity could kill
you, but it probably won't
transform you from an Asian
into a Brit, in case you were
actually considering
such a strange procedure.
Number nine: 2012.
2012 is a disaster movie
that came out in 2009
about how an ecological
catastrophe would strike
in the year 2012 and destroy earth.
If you remember, there
was a lot of media hype
at the time about the
end of the world because
of the whole Mayan calendar thing.
NASA received so many emails as a result
of people seeing the
movie and freaking out,
that they set up a whole website dedicated
to explaining why the science
in the movie is totally wrong.
Things start to get crazy
on Earth in the movie
when solar flares cook the planet's core.
In reality, this is impossible
because neutrino particles cannot interact
with physical substances.
On the website NASA made, they explain
to the paranoid people of
the world that in reality,
solar activity has a regular cycle.
Sometimes solar flares
can mess with satellites,
but that's it.
The world isn't going to
end because of solar flares.
Hopefully the paranoid
people of the world listen
to NASA so that the next
time we reach the end
of some ancient calendar something
like this doesn't happen.
Number eight: Lucy.
Lucy is a 2014 sci-fi thriller
in which Scarlet Johansson
takes a drug that allows her
to use all of her brain instead
of just the 10% most people use.
With her full brain
power unlocked, she gets
telekinetic powers and throws
people and objects around
for most of the movie.
Since its release, Lucy has
become the go-to example
for exposing what's known as
the 10% of the brain myth.
This urban legend states
that human beings only use
ten percent of their
brains, and some people
wrongfully think that
this idea was even thought
up by none other than Albert Einstein.
In reality, the idea that
there are parts of the brain
that are unused and could
somehow be activated is
not supported by actual science.
While there are legitimate mysteries
about how the brain functions,
modern brain mapping suggests
that all areas of the
brain serve a purpose,
just not all at the same time.
Number seven: Star Wars.
Star Wars probably has the
most memorable sound design
of any movie in cinema history.
Everybody knows what a
TIE fighter screeching
by sounds like, what a
ship's cannon sounds like,
what a blaster sounds like, and so on.
It's hard to imagine
Star Wars being Star Wars
without those sounds.
However, in reality, none of
these sounds should exist,
because there's no sound in space.
This is because sound
is vibrations in atoms,
and there are no atoms at
all in the vacuum of space.
For more Star Wars
inaccuracies you need look
no further than the twitter
of Neil DeGrasse Tyson,
who is apparently determined
to kill everyone's fun.
He has pointed out that
"BB-8, a smooth rolling
metal spherical ball, would
have skidded uncontrollably
on sand" and that "In
@StarWars #TheForceAwakens,
the energy in a Star is enough to destroy
ten-thousand planets, not
just a few here & there."
Apparently not satisfied
with debunking Star Wars,
he has also pointed out
that when they say they're
a billion miles away
from Earth in Prometheus,
that would in reality only
put them near Jupiter, not
in some other galaxy.
Thanks Neil.
Number six: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom
of the Crystal Skull.
In other George Lucas related news,
the fourth Indiana Jones
movie belongs on this list
for a few reasons, but
I'm just going to look
at the most egregious
example of nobody bothering
to look into the actual
physics of something
before they filmed it.
In the movie, Indiana Jones is stuck
at the nuclear bomb
testing site, but survives
the blast by hiding
inside of a refrigerator.
Is it time to stop
building that bomb shelter,
and just clear out the
fridge when you hear
the nuclear air raid sirens going off?
No.
Scientist David Shechner,
who apparently has
too much time on his hands,
has thoroughly explained
on the website overthinkingit.com
that a fridge is not going
to save you from a nuke.
Our adventurous archeologist
would have been vaporized.
Number five: Armageddon.
Armageddon is a 1998
disaster movie directed
by Michael Bay, who isn't
exactly a director praised
for his commitment to realism
and scientific accuracy.
In the movie, NASA sends a
bunch of average Joe guys
who work on a drilling rig
into space so they can land
on an asteroid and stop it
from destroying the earth.
Armageddon is so scientifically
inaccurate that NASA uses
it as a test - they have
people watch it and keep
track of how many errors they can find.
And there are a lot of errors.
When they first land on
the asteroid, there are
fires burning all over
the place, which would be
impossible in the vacuum of space, as fire
of course requires oxygen.
Later, a space shuttle takes off from
the asteroid horizontally,
like an airplane,
which also makes no sense.
Since there's no air in
space, the wings aren't going
to get any lift.
You can just blast off,
there's no gravity to stop you.
The heroes are also
told that they're going
to experience 9.5 Gs for 11 minutes.
In reality, untrained
people wouldn't be able
to stay conscious if
they experienced 9.5 Gs.
This of course raises the
question of why they're training
oil rig employees to be astronauts
and not the other way around.
Number four: The Dark Knight Rises.
The Dark Knight Rises,
the third installment
of Nolan's Batman trilogy,
is mostly remembered
for Bane's weird voice.
- [Bane] No one cared who I
was 'til I put on the mask.
- [Announcer] But should be
remembered for its poor science.
In the finale, Batman
uses his Batcopter to fly
a nuclear bomb out of Gotham
with less than two minutes left
to spare on the timer.
After an unnecessarily
long kiss given the urgency
of the situation, and a needless talk
with commissioner Gordon, Batman sets
off roughly a minute later.
It must have taken at
least another 30 seconds
to navigate out of Gotham City,
so a conservative estimate is he only had
around 40 seconds of flying
time to make up a distance
of 10 miles away, which would
be the minimum safe distance,
in that time.
That means his batcopter
must have traveled
around 900 miles per hour,
almost three times as fast
as the fastest helicopter in the world.
However, even if he did
manage to travel that fast,
Gotham is still going to be screwed
from the ensuing radiation.
Batman may have saved
Gotham from getting leveled,
but all its citizens are
going to have to move
out if they don't want to get cancer.
In other bad news for the caped crusader,
his grappling hook
doesn't exactly stand up
to science either.
In the movies as well as the
comics, he's able to bring
himself and others to a
complete halt from free fall
with the cable.
In reality, all this would
do is tear your arm right
off if you could manage to hold on.
If you've been falling
for three to four seconds,
unfortunately you're toast.
The human body just can't
handle that amount of force.
His batsuit must have provided
some incredible support.
Number three: Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park, the movie
that inspired a generation
of kids to care about dinosaurs, also gave
them some misinformation
about those giant reptiles.
Real velociraptors were
only a few feet tall,
a fact they may have
intentionally overlooked
for the movie since that really
decreases their scariness.
They also would have had feathers
just like their bird relatives on earth.
Turns out, the inaccuracies
keep piling up.
Utilizing cutting edge
DNA sequencing techniques,
some scientists at the University
of Manchester attempted
to extract DNA from insects
that had been subfossilised
in hardened tree resin,
just like in the movie.
Unlike in the movie, they
were unable to detect any DNA
in the samples, which were
between 60 and 10,600 years old.
So, if you had amber
samples that were millions
of years old like the ones
in Jurassic Park were,
your chances of finding DNA
are basically nonexistent.
Number two: The Matrix.
The Matrix is a great movie.
Lots of things don't make
sense from a physics point
of view inside the Matrix
itself, but we can forgive that,
because it's meant to be
a computer simulation,
and, of course, because it's so cool.
The plot is based on the idea
that after robots take over,
they hook human's brains
up to virtual reality
and just use the energy
that their bodies produce.
Using humans as an
electricity generator isn't
just sadistic, it brings
a whole new meaning
to the term "battery farming."
Still, it may come as a
relief if you were concerned
that robots will want
to use you as a battery
in the future like they do in
The Matrix or Rick and Morty.
This is not just unlikely,
it's fundamentally impossible.
They'll need more energy to
keep alive than they'll produce.
In reality, it would be a
terrible and inefficient system.
This is because the human
body simply doesn't produce
that much energy: only about
100 watts when it's at rest.
On top of that, humans
require a lot of energy
in the form of food to be able
to produce that 100 watts.
So the robots would end up
wasting a ton of effort feeding
all these people without
getting a lot out of it.
They would be better off using,
you know, a real battery.
Number one: Gravity.
In the 2013 movie Gravity,
George Clooney bravely sacrifices
himself to help Sandra Bullock
by cutting himself free
of the tether attaching
him to her when he starts
to drift away.
But in reality, there was
no need for him to do this.
He was attached to someone who was holding
onto a solid object, so he
would have just stopped drifting
soon enough.
Sandra Bullock could have
just pulled him back,
and then they both could
have worked together
for the rest of the movie.
The ever vigilante Neil
DeGrasse Tyson also pointed
out that in real life, most
"satellites orbit Earth west
to east," but in the movie
all the debris is going
east to west.
Who knew a film named
after a scientific term was
so scientifically flawed?
So, what other scientific inaccuracies
in movies do you know of?
Do you tend to let it
slide, or are you more
of a DeGrasse Tyson?
Let me know what you think
in the comments section
down below and thanks for watching!
(dramatic music)
