10 Science Facts That Will Ruin Your Favourite Sci-Fi Movies
John Hammond's T-Rex "facts" are just plain lies...
There's nothing quite like the sinking feeling which viewers get when a piece of beloved sci-fi fumbles a technical detail and ends up embarrassingly misrepresenting scientific reality.
What's that? It's got fiction right there in the name, and just because it concerns science doesn't mean it needs to shoot for unerring accuracy all the time?
Maybe so, but even the most intentionally silly sci-fi flicks need to build tension and get viewers invested in their characters, meaning they need at least a modicum of believability for the story to have any stakes.
After all, viewers may not now how the xenomorph developed acidic blood, but given how far away and inhospitable their home planet is, it's conceivable that even their body make up would be lethal to humans. Similarly, a recent WhatCulture list of wasted twists noted that if M Night Shyamalan's The Happening had offered an in-depth explanation for its killer plants, it may be fondly remembered as more than a laughing stock nowadays.
With that in mind, this list is here to uncover the most egregious scientific missteps, miscalculations, and outright fabrications which have the power to turn compelling sci-fi classics into unintentional comedies.
10. That's Not How Climate Change Works - The Day After Tomorrow
Okay, get ready to see more from repeat offender Roland Emmerich.
Bear in mind this is the man who made an Apple laptop connect to the operating system of an alien space fleet in Independence Day, when half the time iPhones won't even connect to each other.
2004's corny catastrophe epic The Day After Tomorrow does deserve kudos for being one of the first major blockbusters to take climate change seriously (sorry, Waterworld, but no one could take you seriously), as well depicting a post 9/11 New York destroyed human hubris rather than dicey metaphors for terrorists.
However, as the world is currently discovering since this film’s 2004 release, global climate change doesn’t happen over night (or even over the course of three whole days). According to climate scientists the film's apocalyptic vision of sudden global disaster would in reality occur over many years.
Say, at a pace that most of the Western world could comfortably ignore or outright deny until it's too late to fix...