Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

by Tom Rogers

  Producing oxygen from CO2 is a very expensive process from an energy standpoint, but plants are clearly willing to pay. The process is about the only way they can get the carbon they need for growth. Since plants can’t move around, they have to let the carbon come to them as CO2 carried by the wind. Plants have lots of surface area in their leaves for collecting solar energy, and so it’s no problem for them to collect the payment for their energy bills. Small mobile critters such as the nematodes have neither the means nor the need for withdrawing carbon from air or energy from sunlight. They can get all the carbon and energy they need from munching on plants. So, naturally, it makes all kinds of sense for them to waste energy creating an oxygen atmosphere for assisting possible competitors—such altruism.

  Ironically, the nematode scenes required that moviegoers remember enough science to know things burn better in pure oxygen. The scenes then sought to kill all further scientific reasoning with the yuck factor—seeing little critters with the charm of cockroaches crawl out of a dead person’s nose—along with the shock effect of seeing a burning critter cause a chain reaction of flaming nematodes shooting from random holes in a corpse. After that combination, who’s going to notice that the science is silly?

  By the end of Red Planet, the crew has mostly been eaten, murdered, or otherwise destroyed; the surface of Mars incinerated; the years of effort to establish oxygenating plant growth wiped out; and the hope of a new habitat for people gone. Clearly, the required happy ending is at risk, not to mention the future of humanity. But fear not! Having survived the ordeals, the two remaining crewmembers (a man and a woman) are headed back to Earth. They have not only found romance but a solution to Earth’s critical overcrowding and pollution problems: bring a flesh-eating, oxygen-producing nematode back to Earth— certainly the cure for overcrowding if not for pollution.

  Summary of Movie Physics Rating Rubrics

  The following is a summary of the key points discussed in this chapter that affect a movie’s physics quality rating. These are ranked according to the seriousness of the problem. Minuses [–] rank from 1 to 3, 3 being the worst. However, when a movie gets something right that sets it apart, it gets the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. These are ranked with pluses [+] from 1 to 3, 3 being the best.

  [–] [–] Spectacular combustion scenes, such as burning nematodes, that have no logical or reasonable scientific basis.

  [–] [–] Contrived happy endings with no logical or reasonable scientific basis.

  [–] [–] Lighting gasoline puddles by tossing in lit cigarettes.

  [–] [–] Blowing up cars by shooting the gas tank, especially when it’s done with a handgun bullet.

  [–] Clichéd brightly flashing bullet impacts.

  [–] Clichéd fiery car crashes.

  CHAPTER 19

  WARS VERSUS TREK:

  Forgiving versus Forgetting

  FORGIVENESS

  Interstellar space travel even remotely similar to anything in Star Trek or Star Wars would require a much deeper understanding of physics—possibly even the discovery of as-yet-unknown principles of physics—not to mention far more advanced engineering capability. Such travel makes for great stories but may be completely impossible. Certainly, with the existing knowledge of physics, the speed and energy required for these space flights are too high and the length of a human lifetime too short (see Chapters 7 and 10). Any movie in the space-travel genre automatically ventures into the hostile depths of insultingly stupid movie physics (ISMP).

  Venturing into such depths is not, however, automatically fatal; it’s like scuba diving—take the right gear, respect the dangers, and survive. Find some sunken treasure (for a movie: a good story line) and prosper. Under the right conditions, even the depths of ISMP are capable of forgiveness, but there must be reasons for it—good reasons.

  GOING WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE

  Star Trek has been plagued by plenty of half-correct science and mumbo-jumbo explanations, not to mention inconsistencies, yet is not just redeemable but also groundbreaking, at least for movies and television. To understand its significance requires a temporary digression from movies to TV in order to look at the conditions when Star Trek first appeared. The TV series that spawned the Star Trek movies made a an inventive shift from movie-TV tradition by featuring large unaerodynamic spaceships, built in outer space and designed to stay there, thereby eliminating the enormous fuel resources needed to lift such ships off the surface. By never entering the atmosphere, the ships did not need to be aerodynamic. The large ship size stemmed from the large travel times and distances of interstellar space travel, requiring enormous amounts of resources.

  Star Trek spacecraft again broke with movie-TV tradition by not using conventional rocket thrusters for propulsion. The starship Enterprise’s impulse engines are indeed thrusters but are supposedly powered by a fusion process similar to that used in the hydrogen bomb, albeit in a much more controlled manner. The ship’s warp drives were also a movie-TV innovation, barely conceivable within the known boundaries of physics. Still, the drives were created in recognition of the fact that conventional rocket thrusters—even upgraded fusion-powered devices—could not possibly provide the incredibly high speeds needed for interstellar space travel.

  Star Trek broke with movie-TV tradition yet again by fueling its spacecraft with the ultimate energy source: antimatter. True, using such a fuel is extremely unlikely but, at least, conceivable. It is also about the only conceivable energy source condensed enough to power an enormous spacecraft on lengthy interstellar space journeys.

  Some fictional inventions, such as inertial dampers and transporters, have no basis in known physics. The principles behind them are not even conceivable. However, without inertial dampers, it would take months to speed up, slow down, and make turns, even when traveling at rather sedate speeds like one-fourth the speed of light in a vacuum (see Chapter 10). Travel from the surface of a planet to orbiting spacecraft with any small-sized craft is already nearly inconceivable, so from a scientific standpoint, beaming up via a transporter is not much worse. From a story standpoint, beaming up is far better. It accelerates the plot.

  Shields Up!

  There is no known mechanism capable of producing the shields depicted in the Star Trek and Star Wars movies, yet without them every space battle would be a suicide mission. In fact, even space travel itself might be hampered. If a ship finds itself in an asteroid belt or other space junk yard, no problem: up go the shields and all is well.

  Since shields are so critical to the entire space-movie genre, let’s assume they do exist. A space battle is raging, and a fighter craft is now attacking a large battle cruiser protected by such a shield. The fighter would likely have a mass of around 15,600 pounds (7,091 kg), similar to an Earthbound F-16 fighter, and be approaching kamikazestyle at, say, one-tenth the speed of light—a sedate velocity for spacecraft. The fighter’s kinetic energy would be the equivalent of 763 megatons of TNT, or 7.63 of the largest-sized nuclear bomb ever made. Unquestionably, the fighter would be blown up before it got close enough to launch its weapons, but the debris from the fighter would continue forward and impact the cruiser’s shields. Naturally, the shields would stop the debris, but what about the kinetic energy they contain? It would have to be turned into something, and about the only choice is heat— enough to convert the debris into plasma—and a giant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) containing every form of electromagnetic radiation from radio to gamma waves. In the best case, the plasma and EMP would temporarily render the cruiser’s sensors useless. In the worst case, it would wipe them out along with the rest of the cruiser’s electronic equipment and crew who would be zapped by the gamma rays in the EMP.

  Energy, however, is not the only quantity that must be conserved. Momentum also must be conserved. The result is that even if the shields hold, the cruiser is going to get a mighty jolt. At best, the jolt will knock the cruiser out of position; at worst, it will send shock waves into its hull, tear
ing up equipment and injuring crew members in the process. In short, even if shields did exist, there would still be major problems to overcome.

  After the TV series debuted in 1966, Star Trek slowly developed as a cultural phenomenon. The TV debut happened at a time of widespread racial inequality—Martin Luther King had delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” address only three years before. Yet not only were the Enterprise’s crewmembers multicultural and multiracial, but if a character was Asian, the actor was Asian. By contrast, the famous TV series Kung Fu, from 1972, featured a half-Asian, half-Caucasian main character wandering the Old West in America armed only with well-honed martial art skills. A Caucasian with no previous martial arts background, David Carradine, was chosen for the role over world-renowned martial artist, Bruce Lee, an Asian.

  Star Trek used space exploration as a stage for exploring all kinds of human issues, including the effects of technology on people. The series exemplified equality and harmony existing in the midst of diversity. Yes, women did initially wear miniskirts, but they were also portrayed in nontraditional roles. Keep in mind that the second-wave feminist movement had just begun around 1960. From the beginning, Star Trek was closer to the more forgiving genre of science fantasy than science fiction.

  Quick Comparison: Star Wars versus Star Trek

  The two franchises include many different media; for brevity, the following will address only movies. There are significant differences between the first series of Star Wars movies and the final series, but they are not evaluated separately.

  Figure 38: Star Wars vs. Star Trek

  That’s not to say that Star Trek was always consistent with its own visionary understanding of the future, at least not from a technical standpoint. For example, in Star Trek IV, Kirk and crew hijack a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, time-travel back to the twentieth century, land in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, capture a pair of humpback whales, and fly off with them (a serious break with the tradition of keeping large ships in space) all without being detected by local residents. Okay, the Bird-of-Prey was supposedly cloaked and, hence, invisible when sitting in the park, but does no one walk their dog? Wouldn’t Fido be offended by having a spaceship in the middle of his relief area? Wouldn’t he, at least, want to mark it? Still, the movie remembers its survival gear, things like scintillating dialog and interesting characters. The movie prospers because it finds that most valued of treasures: humor with heart. It features, among other things, an outer-space alien, Spock—the epitome of logic and reason— wandering around unnoticed in a city with a reputation for creative illogic and a Russian (Chekov) claiming he’s a starship officer when caught stealing nuclear energy aboard an aircraft carrier during the height of the cold war—all in a movie about saving whales.

  Star Trek’s much used WWII submarine warfare model is conceivable but not overly imaginative. According to the model, large ships launch powerful weapons such as torpedoes against other similar ships. While these weapons frequently jostle the inhabitants—similar to a WWII depth-charge attack—the targets are rarely destroyed on the first shot. Such close-range battles would be little more than toe-to-toe slugfests, with few tactical possibilities, although the movies pretend to have them. About the only available battle tactics would be putting up shields and firing weapons. Once in a while, one of the combatants would be able to use trickery or hide in a plasma cloud, but that’s about it. More realistic space battles would likely be fought at great distances in a far more imaginative way (see Chapter 5). Still, although the lack of imaginative battles is a disappointment, it’s not enough to trigger a fall from grace.

  . . . IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY . . .

  On the other hand, the entire WWII aircraft-carrier battle model used by Star Wars is flawed, if not outright ridiculous. But in the original Star Wars trilogy, it worked. Why? Because the original was an inside joke designed to poke fun at Hollywood. The first movie came out in 1977, only three years after the Watergate scandal compelled President Richard Nixon to resign in shame, and only four years after United States involvement ended in the divisive Vietnam War. At the time America’s selfimage, as the land of eternal good guys, lay shattered, oozing self-doubt—an image reflected in movies. Characters, even heroes, had to be mixtures of good and bad. Seemingly, nothing could ever again be portrayed in simple terms. Star Wars landed on the era’s cynical pop culture like an artillery shell. The movie presented everything in the purest of black-or-white, good-orevil terms. Arguably, the greatest movie villain ever created— Darth Vader—for example, was totally black and totally evil (at least in the first movie). Although Han Solo may have seemed to be a mix, on closer examination he was merely a purehearted hero with attention deficit disorder. He might be distracted by personal interests, but given a chance to focus he’d risk everything for the cause.

  The original Star Wars trilogy was deliberately modeled after obsolete 1930s movie theater serials and used a WWII battle model from the most heroic moment in U.S. history along with light-saber-wielding knights as high-tech updates from classics such as Seven Samurai (1954) [NR] and Errol Flynn swashbucklers. These elements were extensions of both the trilogy’s positive tone and tongue-in-cheek humor. On that basis alone, movies from the original Star Wars trilogy deserve ISMP forgiveness. While they might look like science fiction, in reality they are a mix of parody and fantasy—a humorous yet heroic and altogether ISMP-forgivable mythology.

  THE MOTHER OF ALL ISMP LAND BATTLES

  Unfortunately, the second trilogy did not follow in the first’s footsteps. Episode I kicked off the downward decline with a clear case of amnesia. The movie forgot the source of its forgiveness: its roots with the original trilogy. For openers, it offered an unnecessary biological explanation for how the Jedi tap into the Force: “midichlorians,” a type of interstellar microbe. The little guys grant access to the Force after planting themselves in one’s cells—the more the better. Does this mean swilling a microbe-laced cocktail could make a person stronger in the Force? What about injections? Is the microbe airborne or sexually transmitted, and if so, why are Jedi required to be celibate? Apparently midichlorians fathered Anakin Skywalker. Did they also father the Force, or did the Force father the midichlorians? Was it all some happy cosmic coincidence? By explaining how the Force works, Episode I raised more questions than a child does in the fourth year of life. It moved the Force into the glare of scientific and logical analysis and, in the process, evicted the film from the forgiving genre of mythical fantasy.

  Having badly weakened its case for forgiveness, Episode I proceeded to take one of the goofiest characters ever created, a flop-eared Gungan called Jar Jar Binks, give him a major role, and then build the ISMP classic of all land battles around him and his species. The battle pits the bumbling Gungans against heavily armed, high-tech droids. The Gungans have a sophisticated forcefield technology capable of shielding their army on the battlefield, yet they ride around on beasts of burden. They have explosive devices that look like giant blue marbles but have to launch them with ancient-looking catapults. Do they put their knowledge of explosives to work and modify them into propellants for rockets and firearms? No, they use spears. Do they rely on stealth, harassment, or guerrilla warfare—tactics that, at times, have actually worked against technologically superior forces? No, they face off head-to-head with the droids on open ground—a tactic that’s usually disastrous when used against technologically superior forces.

  When droid tanks fire, their shots bounce off the Gungan force field. Yet droids can walk through the shield effortlessly. Apologists explain that the shields are somehow tuned to block high-energy blasts but allow everything else to pass. Okay, then why didn’t a few kamikaze droids loaded with explosives walk through and blow up the Gungans? Why didn’t the tanks drive up, poke their barrels through the shields, and blast the Gungans? There are dozens of ways the droids could have improved their battle tactics but didn’t.

  Yet, even with droid bungling, their superior technology
eventually proves invincible: the Gungans face annihilation—then they win. And how does this miracle occur? When the droids’ mother ship is destroyed, the droids shut down. Keep in mind that the droids use audible language over their radios to relay information and acknowledge commands. Aside from the illogic of quitting when winning, there was no one in the mother ship capable of giving the command to shut down, so why did they? Apologists answer that given the capability for independent action, droids might have rebelled against their leaders. Yet this doesn’t seem to have been a problem for Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, or most other leaders of major-sized military forces.

  Episode I clearly slipped from the state of grace established by the Star Wars franchise. On the other hand, with Gungan battles and characters like the flop-eared Jar Jar Binks, the movie looks too much like a Bugs Bunny cartoon to ever be taken seriously.

  THE MOTHER-OF-ALL ISMP SPACE BATTLES

  Episode II featured the usual assemblage of impossible gizmos, including small-sized craft capable of flying through the atmosphere, landing on their footprint, and making interstellar flights in less time than it takes to drive across Texas. When Senator Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) needed to go into hiding to avoid being assassinated, who does she entrust with her senatorial duty of defending the known universe from chaos? Jar Jar Binks (who, unfortunately, was not a candidate for assassination). Fortunately, we are otherwise spared from having to endure him. When Obi Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) wishes to travel to a mysterious distant planet and can’t find a record of it in the archives, he consults not the venerable Yoda, but a class of younglings (future Jedi). They give him their profound insight: “someone deleted it from the archives.” Gosh, do you think so? And then there is the movie’s theme: love is blind. Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) gets the girl, while incessantly whining and throwing tantrums. (What does Padmé see in this guy?) Episode II offered nothing unique with respect to ISMP, but then it offered nothing that made it forgivable. The movie’s worst break with its traditions was the inclusion of an unappealing main character—Anakin Skywalker, a mixture of good and evil.