cinema
top 6 worst movie physics moments
(edit) i’ve removed no.7 due to the fact that i’m incredibly stupid and should never consider making a film that involves any kind of physics. thanks for the heads-up. point taken.
nothing riles me more than having an enthralling movie ruined by a spot of bullshit-physics. you know the scene - a moment just so unbelievable you feel like throwing the director off a bridge to remind him that it’s actually impossible to spin round and grab onto the railing that quickly.
purely to vent some frustration here’s my top 7 6 worst movie physics moments. i’m sure you’ll disagree with my choices, feel free to offer your own favourites.
6. what the (bleep) do we know? - whole film
a film/documentary supposedly about quantum physics which has earned worldwide condemnation from physicists around the world due to the fact that it’s full of shit and is essentially pseudoscience. the first part of the whole film is below if you’re curious (later parts can be found here if you look hard enough) and there’s an interesting article about the film here.
5. speed - bridge jump
it’s a classic movie-physics moment and one i’ll always hold close.
fuck knows how the bus would go anywhere but down after leaving the edge. there’s no visible ramp or elevation on the tarmac yet the bus still manages to soar as if filled with helium. even at 200mph it’d have trouble making the gap.
4. the core - melting the golden gate bridge
this movie is full to the brim with scientific nonsense and to be honest i wasn’t sure which part to include.
here’s a clip of the golden gate bridge being melted by microwave radiation. read about the many other bullshit moments hither.
(by the way, if you want to experience every single shit-physics moment in the movie, bizarrely the whole film is on google video here)
3. die hard - firehose escape
yippee-ky-something.
i always had massive doubts about mclane leaping from the burning building, hose around the waist, magically managing to swing to safety. surely he’d fall straight down at immense speed and crush some internal organs?
yes, he would’ve. follow this link and you’ll see that someone has done the maths and proven mclane wrong.
2. independence day - virus transfer
remember when goldblum’s character helped to take down the aliens by installing a handmade virus onto the ufo’s computers with his laptop? holy fuck, that was more than genius. usb’s really are universal huh?
1. unknown movie - horse slide
please, if you know the name of this film let me know so i can find the director and shake his hand.
one of the funniest and least realistic chase scenes i’ve witnessed. first the horse falls over and visibly stops travelling, then we see a man on a fake horse sliding under a lorry after magically acquiring momentum from an unknown source. even a car manages to leap over the lorry shortly afterwards, good job it managed to catch that ramp at the right time.
also worth a look:
- hollywood science: car chases
- insultingly stupid movie physics, a brilliant and hilarious site
- bad astronomy, another brilliant site but focusing on shit astronomy in cinema rather than physics
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re: Tango & Cash
I think you have it all backwards. Dangling from a high voltage line, without being grounded, is how you would avoid being shocked. The high voltage has no path through you to ground (this is why birds sitting on exposed wires do not get shocked either).
In fact, if they WERE standing on the ground, and touched an uninsulated wire, they would be electrocuted.
The film with the horse - I don’t know exactly which film it is, but I believe it featured Shilpa Shetty, so it is likely to be one of the Bollywood films listed at the bottom this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shilpa_Shetty
If Cash and Tango were grounded they would have been electrocuted. It’s the fact that they aren’t* grounded that makes the stunt totally plausible with respect to the aspect you’re criticizing. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance; this would be through the cable, not through the people dangling from it.
Consider: birds stand on power lines (and on conducting telephone lines) all the time. Are they grounded? Nope. Are they electrocuted? Not so long as they don’t touch a second line or a ground.
Cash and Tango should be fine so long as they are wearing dry rubber-soled shoes or standing on a nonconductive surface when they initially grab the line. Once dangling from the line, they’re safe as long as they don’t touch anything other than that line.
As for Die Hard, your source models the fall as a free-fall followed by an instantaneous stop, both of which are far too strong assumptions. When John jumps, he’s forcing cable to unspool and the cable is dragging along the edge of the building. This introduces quite a lot of friction. Terminal velocity in air is much higher than terminal velocity while dragging a heavy hose over a hard edge and accellerating the spin of its spool. Then when he reaches the end, the spool breaking loose from its position and being dragged to the edge means he takes a solid second or more to reduce his already-slow descent rate to zero. In short, that part of the stunt was far more plausible than his surviving the fall of the spool afterwards. (which *would* be in free-fall and had to stop quicker than he did.)
point taken, not sure what i was thinking.
tango & cash is unscathed. i’m slightly retarded.
It always intrigues me when people say that a pair of spectacles would never be enough to disguise Superman as Clark Kent.
There is a freaking flying man who can lift an effing tank above his head!!!!
The phrase we are looking for is ‘Suspension of disbelief’ and it is part of the unspoken contract when you go see a movie that isn’t … earnest, serious, and (high mathematical probability) boring as old sand.
Semi-serious question time:
Using ‘Mr&Mrs Smith’ as an example, should we limit ourselves to critiquing the logic of movie physics, when the social dynamics are so blatantly more unbelievable?
(I love that movie, by the way. Its silly, and shows that being married can be kinda hot. But no one is ever going to say that its realistic.)
Have to agree with Glen about Die Hard.
The unspooling hose, plus the friction over the corner from such a large contact area from a flat hose, plus the final bit of stretch from an uninflated hose of that type when it become taught makes it all very believeable.
The calculations you quote are for a free-fall velocity plus no stretch in the hose.
If you want a bad physics Bruce Willis moment, pick anything from the second half of Armageddon. Their gravity assist jets on their space suits that would run out of fuel in minutes, but work even when they are rolling around, and they still have full gravity inside the shuttles without the suits on.
I could go on for hours on that one.
he horse-slide movie is called ,,Alluda Majaka in Telugu” or something like that… it’s from India :p
the dude with the mustache is some populair guy nicknamed chiranjeevi
(chimpanzee)…you should watch his miheal jackson -,,thriller” -cover on youtube!!! its fantastic
A double “amen” to your comments on “What the Bleep.” A “friend” convinced me to attend a free screening in Los Angeles several years ago, and I still wanted my money back when it was over.
I can’t believe how much money that film has made. It is two hours of complete horse shit.