I think I’ve found the baseline, the object standard by which all bad movie science will forevermore be judged.
We went out this past weekend to rent some movies. Given recent events, I had a couple of requirements for the movies I would pick, to wit:
1) no dogs
2) no sad deaths of characters of species other than dogs
3) funny enough to be distracting, or
4) bad enough to be funny enough to be distracting
And so I picked Magma, Volcanic Disaster, a made-for-TV budget science fiction disaster flick, thinking it would be just bad enough, with CGI unconvincing enough, that Becky and I could give it the old MST3K treatment. The copy on the DVD box was enough to persuade me: Xander Berkeley plays Peter Shepard, a volcanologist who decides that something is wrong with the Earth’s innards and must persuade unimaginative and short-sighted government bureaucrats that the world will end Unless We Do Something.
So we took it home, and the first few minutes seemed to bear out my suspicions. Five anonymous, red-shirted geologists in the field in Iceland all get cinderized in really bad CGI lava that flows at approximately the rate of spilled Everclear on a warm day. Cut to Xander in front of the classroom, giving an “intro to volcanology” lecture to a class, and describing the science in rapturously hokey terms: the “blood pressure of the living planet” etc. And then we find out that this is the last class of the term. Why’s he giving the intro speech to the last class of the term? Because the writers clearly wanted the intro speech in there, but Doctor Shepard needs to leave on an emergency field trip to Iceland that week, so he gives the speech as an intro to the class the students mght be taking next semester. Bad continuity = amusing.
Okay. Enter the important stock character: the frighteningly intelligent, drop-dead gorgeous geology graduate student Briana, played by Amy Jo Johnson. She corners Xander in the hallway and talks herself into a spot on his field trip, the clinching argument being that she’s got enough moxie that she went out and bought tickets for the flight to Iceland already. The next scene, she and Shepard and three undistinguishable brown-haired and jokingly sexist male graduate students are aboard a chartered plane... you know, the one the Rock Studying Graduate Babe bought the commercial airline Air Iceland tickets for that she’d waved in the previous scene.
This is prodigiously bad writing, and I was happy in a jittery, nervous sort of way.
But the next scene suddenly goes deeply, deeply wrong, and I realize I’m in over my head. I didn’t believe my eyes. The single worst movie science mistake of all time happened, and then, just in case anyone watching had a non-blown synapse, the writers capped it off with a basic terminology goof of the half-understood jargon variety.
It was so bad I sat there stunned until well into the scene where Xander, back down off the mountain with his crew just as the whole thing asplodes — with no warning whatsoever! — is discussing his failed marriage with the wheelchair-sitting European-accented colleague. It took me that long to vbe able to move my remote hand.
I think we need to start an award of some kind for really bad movie science, and name it “The Magmas” after this ne plus ultra of the type. “The Maggies,” maybe.
I’m still going to try to make it all the way through the movie, but I may need some time.
An Ammonite! Classic!
Wow. An active Devonian volcano.
You’re right. Stunning. It’s completely gratuitous. Why would they inject such nonsense?
Maybe they just had an extra ammonite in the props department? Maybe they had three bucks left over in the bidget and they wanted to bling it up a bit? Maybe they just liked the sound of “Devonian?”
No, this all makes sense.
See, the supposed scientists are really a group of drug smugglers—that’s why the kabuki with the tickets (in case anyone is watching) and the chartered plane. They are going to make a pickup, but have to stay under cover because they aren’t sure whether one of the anonymous grad students is a Fed. So the Fed plants an ammonite in the place where they’re going to take samples, figuring, hey, if they’re real scientists, they’ll be like, WTF? Since they just go on with their half-memorized cover, the raid has been called in.
Unfortunately, Homeland Security being what it is, there was a massive overreaction complete with bombing, and by the time it was set up, the group was far away from the volcano.
There, you see?
What? Sounds fine to me. Did I mention I have a PhD in English literature?
I don’t get it. I don’t even know what ammonite is, or when the Devonian was. I think you’re giving typical SciFi Channel viewers entirely too much credit that they know fairly obscure stuff like this.
In contrast, the science of Mansquito is, as the kidz say, tight.
well, being a geologist by trade, id have to say it was possibly written by a young earth supporter, you know, dinosaurs walking next to man…..
ugh
OK, it’s definitely very bad, but I’m not quite sure it reaches the giddy heights of “worst movie science mistake of all time”... Although I’m having trouble coming up with anything worse right now - but then I try and stay away from movies that make me scream and clutch my head.
For the confused with no knowledge of geology: an ammonite is a kind of fossil, and fossils are not found in volcanic rocks.
I guess you’ve never seen Plan 9 from Outer Space, which includes the flabbergasting line: “a particle of light is composed of many atoms.”
Movies like this are why I’m usually pathetically forgiving of any movie that at least makes an attempt to get the geology right. Thus, my enjoyment of Dante’s Peak (though looking at Pierce Brosnan certainly doesn’t hurt).
I guess the worst part of bad movie science is that so many people who don’t know better take it seriously. I had a bit of an argument with someone about Volcano, scoffing of course at the idea that a volcano would come up under L.A. His reply? “You don’t know the power of nature!” Hello! I’m a geologist! I’ve spent years of my life learning “the power of nature!” Sigh.
“Voyage to the Center of the Earth”?
Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
THEM!
Hello? Are we all forgetting about The Black Hole? Giant spaceships made of plate glass? Styrofoam meteors bouncing menacingly down corridors? Telepathic robots? Robots that double as weed whackers? Yvette Mimieux uttering the immortal phrase, “habitable life?”
Debraji, I had a section in the post about the Verne title, but dropped it when I remembered the title under which the book was originally published was Voyage au centre de la Terre.) Decided to give them that one as a potential bilingual brain fart.
And John, prove to me that there are no telepathic styrofoam weed-whacking meteors. You can’t do it!
“An Ammonite!! Congratulations, Professor… your theory about the sudden disappearance of the KPT Bryce Volcano Gift Shop was correct!”
I’m a lawyer. I thought they sounded very smart.
Obviously noone here has watched “The Core” where “a team of scientists has to drill to the centre of the Earth and set off a series of nuclear explosions in order to restart the rotation of Earth’s core.”
The explanation of how they get there?
Scientist 1: Theres no way we can drill to the centre of the Earth!
Scientist 2: But what if we could?
“1) no dogs
2) no sad deaths of characters of species other than dogs”
Did you perhaps see “Eight Below” at some point? That was the stupidest, most depressing movie I saw in the theater last year.
I took care to rent Eight Below last year while Zeke was still alive for me to walk with afterwards.
Yeah, it was horrible. But it did redeem itself by having been cast with human actors who made the dogs look more professional by comparison.
This is known as the Cuba Gooding, Jr. Effect.
“The Core” is worth seeing just for the scene where all the pigeons go nuts. At one point a plate glass window shatters, if you freeze frame through it you’ll find the culprit is actually a fish. Cod I think.
Fossils in an active volcano? Yes, there is something very wrong there, but if that makes you stunned, you haven’t seen “The Core”. That’s a movie with so much science mistakes you don’t know where to start.
Someone mentioned “Journey to the Center of the Earth”—in that movie, evolutionary scientist Pat Boone, in the nude, grabbed a sheep and pulled it to his groin.
My favorite (I forget the title) involved finding a coelecanth (living fossil) and preserving it using gamma radiation (in the days before food irradiation became popular). A fly flew in the window, landed on the fish, and ate a little. It transformed into one of those giant dragonflies. Then a pussycat came in and ate a little, and turned into a german shepherd with huge canines. Finally, the Scientist came in and examined the fish; as he did so the jaw dropped down on his hand. Naturally, the scientist transformed into a Neanderthal.
Sounds like some seriously high-quality moviemaking. If this met your standards I must second the nomination for The Core where the “ship” is made of “unobtanium”.
Another favorite: “Solar Crisis” where a plucky crew (including a beautiful android who is a victim of mind control) drops a talking bomb into a solar flare to stop it hitting the Earth. And of course there’s “Volcano” where Los Angles stops an eruption with traffic barriers and fire trucks. All good stuff.
You really need to check out these peoples reviews of bad physics in movies…
I think they rated “The Core” as the worst movie physics ever…
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
“a particle of light is composed of many atoms�
This explains why bright light hurts your eyes when you have a hangover. The atoms sense your pain and hurl themselves as hard as they can against your vulnerable eyeballs.
Hello? The Day After Tomorrow? I don’t know about your alternative physics world, but in my universe, mammoths and RAF helicopter pilots don’t freeze like popsicles in mid-step because it’s cold outside.
Derek…
but what if it’s REALLY cold?
This was pretty stunning. Especially after talking about the “ongoing evolution” of the planet Earth.
I was all in the mindset of “wow, that is pretty amazing how new crust is always forming.” and then the ammonite! LOL!
But come on! Nobody mentioned Armageddon!?!?!
They get gravity in space by spinning the MIR space station!
Think you’re clever, don’t you? I’m from Whitby in North Yorkshire, England and our Jurassic cliffs are beautifully stratified and jam packed with ammonites. But that doesn’t fool me: our local Saint (Hilda who did such good work the date of easter and priest’s haircuts) put them there. She cursed snakes, which coiled up and died, having first buried a few hundred feet through shale. St Patrick banished them from Ireland. Maybe we just don’t know who did the good work in Iceland.
< humor >
Maybe Kent Hovind served as a geological consultant on this movie?
The ammonite was obviously put there to test our faith.
The lot of you are on a greased chute into The Pit.
< /humor >
I think it was “Angry Red Planet” in which the astro-men, traveling in rubber rafts through underground rivers under the surface of Mars, kept shouting their lines about the Dangerous! Current! and Treacherous! Waves! and how they were Not! Going! To! Make! It!, while rocking back and forth violently in an attempt to make a perfectly calm tank of water on a Hollywood set look blood-curdlingly perilous. Bad science fiction combined with bad acting and bad “special effects”. Humourlicious.
I have a special place in my heart for “What The Bleep Do We Know”. Their understanding of quantum mechanics…well, for a movie that was supposed to be about quantum mechanics, it was not good.
“The Core” was also an excellent example of the bad science movie. Although if I remember correctly, they did at least have the self-deprecating humor to call the material that they made their ship from “Unobtanium”.
I also vote for The Core as worst bad science movie. You also get to see what a bad scientist actor Aaron Eckhart is.
yrs, B. Dagger Lee
Sorry, but this “the pinnacle of bad movie science” is more like the pinnacle of hyperbole in criticism.
Because this in no ways compares to the scene in Godzilla where Matthew Broderick’s character uses a pregnancy test kit on some of Godzilla’s blood and is able to determine that this giant radiaoctive lizard is an expectant mother.
I, too, am more forgiving of The Core than is reasonable or seemly, due to the awareness of its own stupidity. “Unobtainium!” Ha! My favorite was the giant amethyst geode in the mantle. Melting point of quartz is ~1700 degrees C, average temperature of the core is ~3000 degrees C. Hmmmm….
Nobody forgot Armageddon. No matter how hard we try. I really liked the pointy asteroid, but my favorite scenes are still the beginning when Bruce Willis is chasing Ben Affleck around the oil rig with a shotgun. Why does the Bruce Willis character even have a shotgun on an oil rig? To shoot tuna? Pirates? Or just horndogs who are trying to get with his daughter? Also, “space dementia.”
There’s always “Deep Core”, where Wil Wheaton takes a magma shower.
Since no-one else has, I must mention - almost anything involving time travel, and films like Grouchy Tabby, Hidden Gecko or whatever the hell it was called, where people move in a way that is, um, impossible. The latter wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t know otherwise intelligent people who believe martial arts masters can actually do that shit.
And if I had a dime for every movie/show which refers to “light-year” as a unit of time, or talked about “the coldness of space”...
Aaron Eckhart a bad actor? Surely you jest. I wonder whether it was the material, rather than the actor. One need only watch Thank you for Smoking, In the Company of Men, or Your Friends and Neighbors to know that he’s not a bad actor.
I always thought that Star Trek took the prize for bad science. If we’re to believe what they say about the speeds at which the Enterprise travels, then any acceleration, even “impulse power,” would immediately have turned all of the crew into dark splotches of liquid on whatever walls were behind them.
But even I can get that a fossil in lava is really bad.
My vote for worst (non)science - Mission to Mars.
They weren’t even trying.
The Core was uber dreadful. I’m trying to think of movies that do use science well…and are entertaining…but I’m really coming up empty. Are there any? I can’t really talk since I worked on The Ice Pirates and Super Mario Brothers. Both incredibly dreadful.
I don’t know, Professor Dutch has done a lot of work documenting years and years of terrible movie science. Granted, 75% of the time, he’s nitpicking, but he has definitely identified some doozies.
I’m afraid I don’t know much science and so didn’t get the ammonite thing (although it makes a kind of intuitive sense). One of my favorite MST3K movies, if you’re looking for more light entertainment, is “Invasion of the Eye Creatures.” “They just didn’t care!!”
I love any old movie with computers. They thought we would have flying cars and space travel and cryogenics but wireless apparently never occured to anyone.
No, a really good actor can make bad material work AND take home a sackful of cash. Eckhart was good in Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, but he was terrible in the Core. whereas Stanley Tucci is good in everything he is in, including the Core.
“For the confused with no knowledge of geology: an ammonite is a kind of fossil, and fossils are not found in volcanic rocks.”
They are after the Noachian Flood fills the volcano with seawater, then subsides.
What? Hey, don’t throw things at me.
If we’re to believe what they say about the speeds at which the Enterprise travels, then any acceleration, even “impulse power,� would immediately have turned all of the crew into dark splotches of liquid on whatever walls were behind them.
They have some technobabble to deal with this, I believe it was called “inertial dampeners.” the idea has some internal logic - if they have artificial gravity generators (no idea how those are supposed to work, but assume they have them), then they could apply bursts of force to compensate the acceleration effect.
I’m not saying it’s plausible, just that they did think of it.
What they never did explain was how totally alien species, like vulcans/humans or klingons/humans or romulans/klingons, were supposed to interbreed.
jimBOB, I think there was some sort of Star Trek Universe “explanation” for the interbreeding. Something about humanoid life being seeded across the galaxy by some vanished alien race, as I recall.
I always yearned for “real” aliens in some of the movies. I wanted to see crewmembers who were Kzin, or Puppeteers, or Thranx. Something more than just humanoids with forehead ridges and funny ears. Even Odo was a cheat, I felt.
...
It’s not exactly Bad Movie Science, but : Couple of years back, I got to watching episodes of the original Superman series on TV.
In one of them, he went through the entire episode with a large stain on the belly of his Superman suit. It was like he spilled something on himself at lunch, and they just said, “Ah, screw it. We gotta get this done today.”
Hank Fox
You are thinking of “The Chase,” with Norman Lloyd. I always thought that “explanation” was worse than just leaving it hanging, since positing a common alien ancestry for humanoids makes a complete hash out of the massive evidence in our DNA that humans evolved in concert with the rest of life on earth, and not that we could have been dropped in place here by some bunch of alien Johnny Appleseeds.
Chris, “capped it off with a basic terminology goof of the half-understood jargon variety.”
What a hoot!
“if not Devonian”
Well then, young actor, which period - if not Devonian?
For those who haven’t geological time under their belt - and I fancy that everybody should have it as part of a primary education - the solecism is a bit like saying that a piece of evidence places an event in the 20th century, if not the Regency Era.
The stuff that stops me paying for films with any kind of fantasy content anymore, is the impossibilities of scale in movie mutants and monsters. CGI just makes it sillier.
Michael C Barbera did a good treatment of the topic not long ago:
http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/
Those overblown shooters in Starship Troopers would have been orders of magnitude more effective if they’d been swung like bats.
An astrophysicist friend of mine enjoyed Apollo 13 but complained that it was inaccurate because the docking would have taken three hours. I felt obliged to point out that I probably wouldn’t have accompanied him to see a three-hour movie called “Apollo 13 Pt I: The Docking”... (“Left a bit… Right a bit… Forward… Slowly, slowly… Woah, nearly hit the side there!”)
I’m starting to get a serious urge to see The Core now. Is it really worse than Armageddon?
Personally I’ve always liked the bit in The Abyss where instead of giving Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio CPR, Ed Harris instead slaps her and yells “You never backed away from anything in your life! Now fight!” and apparently brings her back to life by sheer force of personality.
Well, you could have a pinnacle of badness if you were evil—if it was something you aspired to.
In parallel, I’d say George Bush, after a lifetime of very hard work, has reached the pinnacle of stupidity.
mark,
Your coelocanth movie is Monster on the Campus (1958). It’s also a personal favorite of mine. I remember seeing it as a kid in Berkeley on KTVU’s Creature Features (anyone else out there remember Bob Wilkins?). Even as an eight-year-old, I was blown away by the film’s stupid.
Hank Fox writes: “I always yearned for “realâ€? aliens in some of the movies. I wanted to see crewmembers who were Kzin, or Puppeteers, or Thranx. Something more than just humanoids with forehead ridges and funny ears. Even Odo was a cheat, I felt.”
There was the one with the silicon-based lifeform lump that Spock mind-melds with.
Nan writes: “The stuff that stops me paying for films with any kind of fantasy content anymore, is the impossibilities of scale in movie mutants and monsters. “
Um, you are familiar with the meaning of the concept “fantasy content”, aren’t you? No, the giant war elephants of Lord of the Rings aren’t realistic, but then, neither is a ring of invisibility. That’s kind of the point of writing fantasy - you’re not limited to the conditions of the real world, it just has to be realistic enough for the plot to hold together.
Giant elephants, and for that matter, building-sized flying super-intelligent technology-using octopi aren’t realistic at all, but it’d be a damn shame if you couldn’t have them in movies just because the real world doesn’t allow them to exist.
Look, they’re just trying to emphasize that The Professor isn’t just some random so-and-so but a real big deal in the world of science. The fact is that if you actually strolled on up to the inside wall of the cone of a volcano and plucked zillion-year-old fossils off of it, all the world’s scientists’s eyes would be on you. As they will be on The Professor… provided he makes it out alive!!