8 Movie Plots That Could Have Been Resolved By Science In Minutes

3. Ultron Is Harmless (Or Dumb) - Avengers: Age Of Ultron

I pick on this movie a lot, but only because its f*cking stupid.

For science to solve the plot of this movie, you really wouldn't have to do all that much at all. Ultron's actions are motivated by the standard I-was-built-to-protect-humans-but-humans-are-a-danger-to-themselves schtick and so sets out to destroy them by, er, dropping a city?

Turns out that, for a supercomputer, Ultron is pretty bad at maths.

If the goal is global extinction of the human race is what you're after, you want to get as close to recreating something like the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. That asteroid was 10 km wide and came screaming from outer space at 20 km/s, the fragment of the earth's crust that Ultron threatens to drop from somewhere in the atmosphere is no more than a kilometer.

The impact would probably obliterate the town, but with around the same power as the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima. Not great, but not exactly world ending either - The Avengers were probably best focusing their energies on evacuating the tiny spit of land and letting him get on with it.