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Bad Science in Sci-Fi Movies

by Jamie Frevele | 1:43 pm, December 28th, 2010

I Love Charts io9 targets bad science tropes in movies, including the instance of sound in space, slow motion in zero gravity, and inconsequential breeding between humans and aliens. Is the assumption that aliens are not so different than you and I really bad science? Or that physics moves the way the writer wants it to? It is science fiction, after all. And how scientifically accurate is “Star Wars” really supposed to be?

While Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff got a “clean bill of accuracy,” a science fiction movie (hey, Apollo 13 wasn’t even science fiction!) that’s “scientifically accurate” could go over a lot of people’s heads. Or turn out to be incredibly boring if people can’t jump to light speed, dodge lasers, or communicate with aliens.

Or it could be astoundingly disturbing, like the “100% medically accurate” “Human Centipede.”

(io9 via I Love Charts via The High Definite via Neatorama)

  • Thoumyvision

    Pretty sure “Apollo 13″ isn’t a Sci-Fi movie, it’s an historical drama.

  • Fenngibbon

    The problem with this list is that it makes assumptions about some of these movies that you can’t make, such as the “All planets have one climate planet wide.” Other than the Star Wars films, I don’t think you can say that the other movies are making that claim. And even if they were, why can’t you have one climate planet wide?

    Also, are they talking about Stargate the movie or Stargate the TV show? Because in the movie, there’s only one alien, no trans-species interbreeding (the one alien took over a human body and everyone else is human), they don’t easily communicate (people on the planet only speak a form of ancient Egyptian), and, presumably, the alien took humans to work as slaves to this planet precisely because the environment (including the gravity) was compatible for them.

  • Hugh Jarss

    You missed the point with Contact.

  • Hahaha

    What’s a faster than light weapon?

  • Hahaha

    What’s a faster than light weapon?

  • Max

    Wow the inaccuracies of the list of supposed inaccuracies are astounding. I’m bored with pseudo-intellectuals proposing to know anything. The only column worth interest is “weird effects of exposure to vacuum,” and I’d be interested to know what the author of this list would consider an accurate portrayal. It’s probably as inaccurate as the things he considers inaccurate.

  • Qabala

    Planets with a completely frozen (like Titan), desert (like Mars), or oceanic environments are well within the realm of possibility. The only uniform planets that don’t make sense in sci-fi are the planets which feature uniform biology like swamp or forest planets.


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