13 Scientifically Inaccurate Movies That Fool Californians

Ask a Californian to name a scientifically shaky movie, and they’ll shrug.

Then they’ll defend a favorite that breaks the laws of physics in the first ten minutes.

The Golden State ships these stories worldwide and still believes half of them.

These are the movies that get the science flat wrong.

Star Wars

Every space battle that Hollywood dreams up comes with a roar, and Star Wars set the template that Californians still hum.

TIE fighters scream past, laser blasts crack, and the Death Star booms when it goes.

Space is a vacuum, though, and sound needs a medium like air or water to travel through.

No air means no sound, so a real space dogfight happens in total silence.

An explosion in orbit above San Diego would flash bright and never make a peep.

Armageddon

Armageddon sends oil drillers to blow up an asteroid the size of Texas in 18 days, and it’s a favorite in more than a few California living rooms.

But the math falls apart before the drill bites.

Splitting a rock that big and shoving the halves clear of Earth would take about the energy the sun puts out in a full day.

No warhead humans have built comes within a rounding error of that.

The errors pile up so high that NASA has used the film as a training exercise, asking staff to count how many they can spot.

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park taught a generation of Californians that a T. rex can’t see you if you hold still.

But if you were to freeze in front of a real one, you’d still be lunch.

Tyrannosaurus had forward-facing eyes and sharp binocular vision, so it saw depth and detail whether its dinner moved or not.

The movie’s Velociraptors miss badly too.

The real animal stood about knee-high and wore feathers, closer to a mean turkey than the scaly six-footer chasing kids through a kitchen.

The Core

The Core drills a crew straight down to restart a planet’s stalled center, and plenty of Californians nodded along.

The whole setup misreads how the planet works.

Earth’s magnetic field comes from churning liquid metal in the outer core, not from the inner core spinning like a top.

Drilling down there is science fiction on its own, since nobody has punched a hole even through the crust.

The pressure that deep would crush any empty cavern the heroes stroll through in seconds.

The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow freezes people where they stand as a superstorm sucks down killer cold, and it scared a lot of Californians in 2004.

The flash-freeze breaks basic physics.

Air warms as it sinks and compresses, so a column dropping from the upper atmosphere heats up on the way down, not the reverse.

Cold air also chills you slowly, because air carries heat away far worse than a solid does.

Nobody turns into a statue mid-sentence, and helicopter fuel doesn’t ice over in a heartbeat.

San Andreas

No movie hits closer to home for Californians than San Andreas, which cracks the state open and sends a wave over San Francisco.

Seismologists winced at nearly all of it.

The San Andreas is a strike-slip fault, meaning the ground slides sideways rather than dropping down, so it can’t raise the ocean floor to launch a tsunami.

The fault also tops out around magnitude 8.3, well short of the 9-plus monster on screen.

And the yawning canyon that swallows central California is pure invention, since the two sides grind past each other instead of splitting apart.

Gravity

Gravity won many awards, and Californians praised it for looking so real.

The orbits underneath the story don’t line up.

The astronauts hop from the Hubble telescope to the space station to a Chinese outpost as if they share a neighborhood, but the Hubble sits higher than the station and tilts on a different path entirely.

You can’t drift between them on a whim, and a single tug wouldn’t fling a partner off into the dark the way it does here.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson still loved the film, which tells you the science slips even in the good ones.

2012

2012 blames the end of the world on neutrinos from the sun that have “mutated” and started cooking the planet’s core, and it packed California theaters.

That sentence would make a physicist put down the popcorn.

Neutrinos don’t mutate, and trillions of them pass through you every second without leaving a mark.

They barely touch matter at all, so they can’t boil a core made of iron.

If neutrinos ever did heat things the way the film claims, the surface would fry long before anyone reached an ark.

Independence Day

Independence Day saves the planet when Jeff Goldblum uploads a computer virus from a laptop into an alien mothership, and Californians cheer every Fourth of July.

The plan makes no sense the second you think about it.

People struggle to make a printer talk to a laptop from the same decade, let alone a mid-’90s Mac talk to technology built light-years away.

A virus has to match its target’s code, and no human wrote the aliens’ operating system.

The odds of that upload landing are worse than the odds of the invasion.

The Martian

The Martian earns real praise from scientists, so this next part surprises Californians who love it.

The opening dust storm that strands Matt Damon couldn’t knock him over.

Mars has an atmosphere so thin that a 100-mile-per-hour gust there pushes about as hard as an 11-mile-per-hour breeze on Earth.

A real Martian storm would rattle the sand and barely tug your sleeve.

Author Andy Weir has admitted he knew the storm was wrong and used it anyway to get his hero stuck.

Twister

Twister sends storm chasers into the funnel, and its big finish has two of them ride out a monster by strapping to a water pipe.

Nobody walks away from that.

An EF5 tornado throws winds past 200 miles per hour, and the force of flying debris climbs with the cube of the speed.

A two-by-four or a fence post at that velocity ends the scene fast, belt or no belt.

The movie also hides its heroes under a highway overpass, which meteorologists rank among the worst places to shelter.

Volcano

Volcano erupts a mountain of lava out of the La Brea Tar Pits and runs it down Wilshire Boulevard, which Californians in the audience found close to home.

Los Angeles has no volcano brewing under it.

The tar pits bubble because buried plant matter rots and releases gas, not because magma sits below the city, and the film’s own geology adviser said an eruption there is millions of years away at best.

Most lava flows creep along at walking pace or slower, so people usually stroll out of the way rather than sprint for their lives.

A wall of the stuff chasing traffic through Miracle Mile belongs to the movies.

Die Hard

Die Hard turned the fireball into an art form, and action fans across California expect a car to bloom into flames at the first bullet.

Shoot a gas tank in real life and you’ll mostly get a leak.

Liquid gasoline doesn’t burn, only its vapor does, and a plain lead bullet carries no spark to light even the right mix.

A tank is short on oxygen too, so the fireball has nothing to feed it.

Testers have emptied whole magazines into fuel tanks and gotten a hiss and a puddle for the trouble.