The Worst Science Fiction Movie Ever?

February 8th, 2008

Last month I wrote about the ten best science-based science fiction movies, which was fun and made me think a lot about all the average to decent movies that still fail to make the science grade in one or more ways. It’s too easy to make a list of dozens of movies with the worst science (only including the ones making some effort to making the science plausible), and overwhelming to make it a list of only ten.

The Star Wars movies are fantasy, so we won’t even consider them, even the ones with Jar Jar. Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space is so bad it isn’t really trying. Ditto for Ice Pirates. Something like The Fifth Element has an amazing vision and isn’t trying to be scientifically accurate. Galaxy Quest is a fun farce, and again, not trying. Star Trek movies sort of try, but only fail in conventional ways, exploiting time travel and technobabble (although Star Trek V should be a contender for any “worst of” list). Serenity has a bunch of science problems but has heart. There’s a whole slew of science fiction movies to be excluded because they are really horror movies in disguise: Aliens 3+, Event Horizon, Pitch Black, Hardware, Aliens vs. Predator, The Thing, etc. Superhero movies are their own genre, too, and don’t try to make scientific sense. It’s the movies that are pretending to have a clue I’m here to take issue with.

That leaves a bunch of crappy crap, like Supernova, Johnny Mnemonic, Mission to Mars, The Core, Battlefield Earth, The One, Ultraviolet, Total Recall, Lawnmower Man, Starship Troopers, Independence Day, etc., ad nauseum. The average to bad science fiction movie falls into this category.

Surprisingly, however, I have absolutely no problem picking the absolute worst: Armageddon.

Where do I start? The answer is anywhere. There’s not a minute of this movie that isn’t affront to science or common sense.

According to Wikipedia:

The physics and scientific approach of Armageddon was criticized for its poor adherence to the laws of physics. This has led NASA to show the film as part of its management training program. Prospective managers are asked to find as many inaccuracies in the movie as they can. At least 168 impossible things have been found during these screenings of the film.

Ouch. The movie is only 150 minutes long. That’s more than one impossible thing per minute on average. I’m not the only one to target this movie a the biggest steaming pile of anti-scientific crap. Check out Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy, intuitor.com, and here and here and here. And I could go on. I love Phil Plait’s comment, “Here’s the short version: “Armageddon” got some astronomy right. For example, there is an asteroid in the movie, and asteroids do indeed exist. And then there was… um… well, you know… um. Okay, so that was about all they got right.”

What are my favorite (or most cringe-worthy) moments? When they talk about how only a few telescopes could even see the asteroid (no, even small telescopes could as in Deep Impact), and that you would use Hubble to study this. Hubble is slow to point and not a good choice for initial observations.

The one example I use over and over again in physics and astronomy classes is the “Russian space station” gravity scene, usually back to back with the excellent 2001 scene. The Armageddon scene makes many errors, the most fundamental being that they get the direction of gravity wrong. Every kid who has played on a merry-go-round knows which way they get pulled when spun, but not so the screenwriters or director of Armageddon. They have the understanding of pre-schoolers at best, and I’m being generous. They show many scenes, including very clear computer graphics, and it makes the whole thing seem like a bad dream where the laws of physics have vanished inside Michael Bay’s butt.

I’m being especially harsh because this is a movie that hundreds of millions of people have seen, that made hundreds of millions of dollars, and more likely billions in total gross to date. They try in this movie to be science based. They spin the space station for gravity. They use telescopes to get information about the asteroid. They pretend it’s based on science. And Bruce Willis may as well be drilling in my ass for black gold. Here in Wyoming we’re close to the oil industry (Dick Cheney has had dinner in my neighborhood at the University President’s house), and I know some guys who have worked on rigs. They tell me the drilling stuff is every bit as ludicrous as the physics/astronomy stuff.

I won’t even go into the “space madness.”

Armageddon is just a piece of crap. It isn’t okay that it’s “just a movie.” It pretends that it knows what it is doing, and shovels ignorance down people’s throats with the help of Liv Tyler’s child-bearing hips and Aerosmith’s whiny soundtrack. Sure, Steve Buschemi is a hoot as an insane sex-addicted genius, but he just plays one in the movies. And while Bruce Willis is one in real life, he plays the hero who couldn’t drill a hole with a viagra pill the size of a killer asteroid.

Sorry, I’m afraid discussing this movie makes me get like this. That is what makes it so bad. It drives scientists like myself insane. It’s “movie madness.”

Okay, I’m sure someone thinks some other movie is worse. Let’s hear it. I feel confident I can beat your Core with my Armageddon. If you have to go back to Cat Women of the Moon, you’ll just distract me. Mmm. Cat women…

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