Cinema is full of classic villains. Arch nemeses who will hunt the good guys to the end of the Earth, bad guys who will always be messing stuff up for our heroes, antagonists to provide a sort of cosmic balance to our most celebrated protagonists. In Hollywood, the constant thorn in the side of our brave warrior "science" is a man known as "Roland Emmerich". Not only was he responsible for Independence Day and it's complete lack of a grasp on how computers work but he's since made a whole cottage industry of summer blockbusters that totally invent their own versions of physics, biology, and the environment. This is the man, after all, who has helmed Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012. Any one of those films on their own would be a crime against reason, but all of them, from the same man? What did rational thinking and empirical evidence ever do to you, Roland? Well to be fair he's not the only person in Tinseltown to deliberately futz the details of how natural disasters occur. Dante's Peak is mainly fantasy - and not just because it has the impossibly handsome Pierce Brosnan as a scientist (as if) - but 1997's other volcano movie, helpfully titled Volcano, was even more ridiculous. Because a volcano appearing beneath LA is never, ever gonna happen. You don't have much to worry about when it comes to the likes of earthquakes and volcanoes, so long as you're not already living somewhere that they're prevalent. The apocalyptic vision of 2012 obviously never came to pass (unless we're all currently in the afterlife, which would make sense, because writing about stupid movies all day is rather heavenly), and as for The Day After Tomorrow and all its eco-terror ilk? The melting ice caps will affect the planet's temperature, but it's not gonna freeze all of New York overnight or cause enormous tidal waves or whatever. That doesn't mean you shouldn't recycle, but it absolutely does mean you should question any "science" films throw at you.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
