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Bad Movie Physics
by Larry Camarota

You know you've seen it before. A person goes flying after being shot, or you see a laser beam whiz by, or perhaps you hear a loud scream from the next space ship over. All are examples of the extraordinarily bad physics that gets portrayed in movies.

The bad physics that you see in movies tend to fall in a few groups. The first (and most easily excusable) group is the bad physics that are unavoidable for technical reasons. The next group is the physics that are ignored for artistic or story reasons. Following right after is the physics that just somehow got missed. The last group consists of outright bull hoisted upon us by clueless Hollywood writers.

Sometimes movie makers have to include bad physics into their movie because of difficulties in filming. For example, most movies showing microgravity fail to do so, mostly due to a lack of gravity-less filming locations here on earth. Even this has exceptions though; Apollo 13 filmed its microgravity scenes in NASA's Vomit Comet. There are other times when actually getting the physics right would be detrimental to the movie itself. In Star Trek, the transporters were invented so they wouldn't have to shoot a shuttlecraft scene every time they went down to a planet.

It is also common for movies to include intentionally bad physics for artistic reasons. A good example of this can be seen in almost any modern action movie. There's always at least one scene where the hero performs major feats of acrobatics, relying on wires and the fact that we like a really cool fight scene to take care of the obvious violations of pretty much everything you learned in physics 1. Then, there is the physics violated for story reasons. Take the Matrix trilogy. The entire series is one giant violation of every known physical law, yet it always has the same excuse; the rules of the matrix can be broken by someone who knows them.

Some physics just doesn't seem to existin Hollywood-land; mostly dealing with guns. For example, if you shoot someone in this land of make-believe, they go flying backward from the momentum imparted upon them by the bullet; never mind the fact that the same momentum was imparted upon you when you fired the gun in the first place. Bullets also make great lock picks; you can ignore the obvious danger of ricochets and the fact that destroying a lock takes much more energy than you will find packed into a .45 clip. Finally, there are those long, drawn out battles in which both hero and villain each unload a few thousand rounds at each other, without once thinking about the sheer weight of the spare clips that they must have been carrying.

The most painful of all bad movie physics to watch is the kind that is utter and total baloney. A big part of this is because said baloney flows most readily in supposed science fiction movies. This utter destruction of physics in general can be seen in "The Core," which intuitor.com had declared to be the worst physics movie ever. From the get-go, the script seems to intentionally get everything it can utterly get wrong. The premise of the movie is that the earth's core has just stopped spinning, is destroying the earth's magnetic field, and letting deadly microwave radiation onto the earth's surface. To fix the problem, the U.S. government decides to send a manned craft made of something called unobtanium into the core to give it a kick-start with a nuclear bomb. This unobtanium, by the way, converts pressure and heat into energy, while being utterly resistant to both.

There is hope. Not all movies incorporate bad physics, and a large number only include the unavoidable garbage. Sometimes you get a glimmer of decent physics. For example, the television shows Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica both show space ships that don't flagrantly violate the law of conservation of momentum (a sadly common event for space shows).