2012 is in cinemas, in which Roland Emmerich oversees the destruction of most of the surface of the globe in a cataclysm. The film is, as you'd expect, completely bananas but kinda fun once you get past the stock characters and on-the-nose dialogue. But what really stands out in the film is the science. Now we're not experts, but we're nevertheless saying it's what's technically known as "well dodgy".
Aside from the fact that even NASA reckons we have nothing to worry about, our fairly basic grasp of physics suggests that the catastrophe, as described, doesn't quite hang together. We're told in the first five minutes that the apocalypse is caused by "mutated neutrinos" which start heating up the interior of the Earth "like microwaves". Now, kinda seems to me that a) sub-atomic neutrinos don't generally Hulk out and b) if there were powerful microwaves coming from the Sun and boiling the Earth's core, you'd've thought they'd give the surface a thorough toasting on the way down. During the film, without wishing to get into spoilers, there's a case where massive shifting of the Earth's crust takes place without disrupting any electrical or navigational devices in use at the time - not to mention that we're told that the Earth's magnetic poles have both shifted and swopped, without disrupting mobile phones or any military or government communication. Given that heavy rain seems to do worse, this appears unlikely.
Of course, in the context of the film, none of this really matters. Scientific accuracy is not the point, after all; it's producing some utterly brilliant special effects that give us tidal waves swamping the Himalayas. And the same is true of many of the most egregious examples of bad movie physics. Remember those ace space battles in Star Wars? With the lasers shining brightly and the fighters swooshing by? Only problem with that is that lasers shouldn't be visible when they're travelling in a vaccum, and there's no noise in space.
Then there are those endless action movies where the hero smashes through a plate-glass windown with barely a scratch, or the way that singe bullets can explode fuel tanks, or any number of other cinematic examples (as laid out here at the wonderful Movie Physics blog). But recent disaster movies take it to a whole other level. The Core inspired this takedown review on Aintitcool back in the day , a review so negative that the film's screenwriter felt moved to pen this response. And he makes some fair points, pointing out where the movie had extrapolated from existing evidence on the core and was actually more sound than it appeared, as well as pointing out how much worse it could have been. And of course Emmerich's previous film, The Day After Tomorrow, took nearly as many liberties with the Earth's climate as his current film takes with its crust.
The fact is that movie physics belong in a different realm, and that some of Emmerich's crazy, borderline-possible-at-best theories work better on screen than anything real would. The long slow deterioration that global warming is likely to cause wouldn't have worked half as well as The Day After Tomorrow (although The Age Of Stupid manages to walk the line between realistic and terrifying) and similarly a tidal wave hitting the Himalayas is worth quite a few "mutated neutrinos" (which even students of a 2012 apocalypse say are "pretty far down the list" of likely culprits). But what are your favourite, or least favourite, examples of bad movie physics? And what horrendous science mistakes have I made above, apart from sweeping generalisations?
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