Just read the review of Superman Returns. Right on. Modern comix assert, metaphysically, that his flying is a matter of "will," not physics. Okay. But if, as the movie states, he can fly "almost" the speed of light--in the first movie, he flies faster, in order to reverse time--why does it take him so long to catch up to the falling plane? This appears to be a narrative trick merely.

Also what happened to those furshlugginer crystals at the end of the movie? They were thrown out of the helicopter. Thought Superman was going to retrieve them?

Also, when he throws the new continent away into space, how come, according to action and reaction, his presumably lesser mass doesn't go zooming off in the opposite direction? Does his will allow him to plug directly into spacetime? Same question as I used to have when, in the early comix, he would push a planet around. Planet outmasses him, right?

Wouldn't it be fun to see a Superman who didn't violate physics right and left and whose capabilities were defined rather than sliding to fit the dramatic situation (he has to strain to lift the new continent--so if it had been just a little heavier, he wouldn't have been able to, right?).

My nomination for the all-time bad science in an sf movie: Total Recall. 1) Wouldn't people who have grown up in a translucent dome either have insured that ordinary bullets wouldn't penetrate the dome, 2) have forbidden the use of projectile weapons, or 3) have a deeply imbedded horror of activities that might breach the dome? But even worse, the scene near the end, when Arnold and friend discover the alien devices and discover that the core of Mars is made of water. What? Maybe ice-fifteen, under 70,000 pressures. A planet whose core is water? Then, just when they are about to suffocate, the atmosphere is restored. Ignoring the question of how they could recuperate from the distortions they were portrayed as experiencing (you try blowing your face up to twice its size and then reducing it and see how you feel), just how much energy would be released by the restoration of a planet-wide atmosphere within a minute or so? Wouldn't that "air" in fact be a superhot plasma?

Hi there.

Superman had a lot more wrong with it than just that. Just about everything in the opening credits was messed up as well

I've always wondered, since his suit was made from his blanket he had on the ship that crashed, and it doesn't burn or got holes in it when he gets shot, how did his mother cut and sew the fabric?

There is an "out" for Total Recall. It's possible that the entire thing this reall is a psychotic episode just like they try to convince him of when he sees that bead of sweat run down the face of that actor that played every funny looking alien on TNG that the guy the play Quark didn't take. If was all in his head then who are we to say what's real.

You'll be hard pressed to find a movie more packed with bad astronomy than Armageddon.

And finally... This need to be moved to small media at large. This section is for actual bad astronomy, not movies or TV shows.

But yeah, I agree with pretty much everything you mentioned there.

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Moved as suggested.

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Ma Kent unravelled the blankets and got the young Kal El to cut them to length by concentrating his heat vision on the thread.

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Well done, that man! I was about to post the same explanation. Remember the old DC Superman/Action comics? Every once in a while they would publish special issues with "origins" in the them. That particular item appeared lots of times.

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So Superman could like take off his own leg with his heat vision if he wasn't careful?

I asked that same question on the geek boards and got different answers. Something about taking apart the ship and making scissors and a needle.

How would he blink?

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An evil person would do the things I think up.

I believe it is safe to assume that Total Recall is all inside his head. At the start of the film one of the doctors loading the progam turns to an assistant and says "Hmm Mars with a blue sky.... that's different"

My memory of the film isn't 100%, but don't we see the female lead's face on a screen when they load the program?

I don't reacall that, but I do recall that there were a bunch of the images of the control chamber before it was ever seen. Now, possibly that was a suppressed memory from his character's former life, and maybe ot was loaded in as part of the program. I don't think there was ever supposed to be a direct answer one way or the other, from the writer's standpoint. I think that it's much easier to accept it all being a one giant hallucination than it is to accept the events were real.

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An evil person would do the things I think up.

On a related note, there was a fun little throw away scene in Superman: the Animated Series. Clark get up in the morning and starts to get ready for work. In the bathroom, he takes a look at the stubble on his face in the mirror, takes off his glasses, and proceeds to "shave" by relecting his heat vison off of the mirror onto his face. Goofy, and unpractical (the mirror couldn't have reflected 100% so would have been damaged), but funny and as good of an explination as any how the Man of Steel could groom himself .

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Thanks. Still learning my way around this site.

Agreed, but I thought the review did a good job of demolishing most of the flaws.

IIRC, one comic book (or maybe a cartoon tv show) episode had Clark getting a haircut by reflecting his heat vision off the barber's mirror and focusing it on the hair the scissors were "cutting".

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

Yeah, I thought of that, and so did all of the people I griped to about the movie. Okay, so the people who thought up the simulations are astronomically stupid (I like the ambiguity in that phrase). That helps? It's an out, but is it a very satisfying out? Does one really assume the movie-makers were so intelligent they deliberately contravened physics, or does it make more sense to think they really didn't know? I ask you.

Besides. I am, though inexpert in many fields, an expert in narrative. And I got to tell you, escape hatches like that are cheap, cheap, cheap. [Vague, thankfully, memories of students saying, Well he could have been . . .]

Hahaha well yeah, it's cheap. Cheap goes back all the way to to old Cliffhager serial films. There is no new thing under the sun. It was an Arnold movie There were guns and explosions... What else would a person expect? In Commando he knew an ambush was coming because he SMELLED the bad guys. I'm actually amazed they got any of it right. In truth, we make up a very small group of people that actually care in even the tiniest way that stuff like that happens. It's not very likley that there will ever be an accurate sci-fi movie. It's being discussed elsewhere in this section, actually.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

I remember those 'origin' stories too, Occam. In another one, they explained the hair/beard problem by saying the Supe's hair does not grow in Earth's atmosphere. No blowtorching necessary.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

I used to explain bad movie physics in terms of viewer familiarity with the physical rules that a given scene used. After all, a lot of physical rules are followed quite well in movies, arguably most of them. Stellar aging, we're not familiar with, but cars driving on roads, we are, so that's why we can have stars suddenly go dead but not cars flying. We can have a rocket launched from a planet reach the sun a few seconds after it's out of view but we can't have cellphones shatter the sidewalk and set the nearby windows on fire when dropped, because we don't have a natural feel for rockets and space travel but we do have a natural feel for what happens when you drop few ounces of plastic and metal.

But that explanation doesn't work anymore. Now movies defy even the laws of physics that everybody already knows from experience. We've all seen car accidents or the scenes where car accidents had happened shortly before, and seen that they didn't explode... and we've all seen fights, and seen that punches and kicks don't propel human bodies through the air a dozen yards away horizontally... but movies are doing those things routinely now anyway.

Ah, yes, but have you seen kung fu in real life?

All the best kung fu movies portray it as something mystical and a little bit supernatural (e.g. Iron Monkey, which contains the original King Kong Palm to which Drew Barrymore alludes in Charlie's Angels).

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Yep. I'm one of that small group whose members care, however, and I aint backing off these guys.

Even in films where the protaganist isn't a standard issue human they get it wrong in that, allowing for our super strong fighter, hitting someone else that hard is going to push the attacker back, and even if they are braced for it, often they are standing on dirt so they would slide away in reaction to the kick.

Another bugbear is that I suspect that an impact to the chest by a foot/fist would break a number of ribs, leaving the vicitim in severe pain, bleeding internally, and gasping for breath with a punctured lung. Hitting a human that hard is almost certainly going to kill them if they aren't taken to hospital within an hour.

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Or for example in one of the Die Hard movies, I forget which, when the protagonist is outrunning a flood down a water tunnel in a truck going 45 miles an hour, climbs on top of the truck and grabs a steel ladder that leads up an outlet to the surface. Anybody want to volunteer to hit a steel ladder at 45 mph?

Or the aerodynamics in that Harrison Ford movie in which he is the President and they send a rescue team up a chute from a smaller jet to Air Force One while both planes are in flight?

There are a few things I disagree with in this post, but I do agree with the overall statement.

I have studied several martial arts, and there are many things that they almost all have in common. Without a good stance, they are nothing. Looking at a side kick, which is one most likely to be used in a movie to send the opponent flying, the attacker raises their leg, turns the hips away from the target while rolling the knee back and down across the front of the pelvis until the knee is pointed mostly down at the floor. Then the leg is extended, with the focus on the heel of the foot and the intent of stopping that force about 2 to 3 inches inside the surface of the target. This is what the average person will see if they really pay attention. Parts that the average person misses, is what the other foot is doing. Not only it is no longer up on the ball of the foot to improve mobility, it is as flat to the ground as possible. The grounded leg is pushing off and into the target increasing the force of the blow from not only leg itself but a good deal of the body mass as well. This is to prevent being pushed backwards and off balance as much as it is to do more damage to the target.

Even a standard punch should be done by pushing off of the ground with both feet, while turning the hips slightly to add a rotational mass to the force of the strike. This is why it's so important to actually hit something when you practice. You can't really ever get the proper form by doing things in the air.

Now, a popper kick or punch should not push the target back at all. Ideally, the arm or leg remains very relaxed throughout the strike, and only stiffens up at the moment of contact. It should then be relaxed again and pulled back away from the target just as fat as it went in. This is called snapping the punch. Any force used to push the person away is considered wasted in a striking style. You don't want to chase them. Soft styles, like Aikido and Tai Chi are different. The goal there is to make the person too tired of getting up and running back to you to keep up the fight. Well, Tai Chi has a good deal of actual attacks in it as well, but the majority of the power for those attacks is taken from the force of the other person. There is a technique in Aikido which I learned as "static inertia". Segal does it in a few films, though I can't recall any specifics. Basically the attack comes in and the defender holds up an arm that the attacker runs into. The arm is held up straight out in front, as if signaling "stop". I got to be the crash test dummy the night this was introduced. I stepped in with an attack, with force. He held up his arm, braced by his body position and down through his feet. I hit his hand with my chest and bounced off, staggering back about 8 feet before I hit the wall. Hitting the wall actually hurt more. There was no real damage, and of we'd have been outside, there would have been none at all. It didn't even knock the wind out of me. Because I was moving, I did not have a solid stance, he did. If someone had seen that happen, they would have though I'd been hit with a car.

Another time I was sparring a guy that was about 60-80 pounds heavier than me. I was a higher rank, and sneakier, so I thought I show him that brute force can be overcome by technique. I had sparring for 3 months, and didn't have the technique. He had two kicks in his arsenal. One was the side thrust described above. I had planned to hit his leg down and to my right, stepping in behind it and coming right up his chest to catch him under the chin with a strike called a ridge hand. Basically a chop but with the thumb side of the hand. He threw his kick, I did my down and outward block to his leg. My hand stopped dead, his foot went right into my side, and he extended. It lifted me off of the ground and pushed me back about 3 feet in the air. It pushed me hard enough that I ended up taking about 3 big steps and two complete rolls to get stopped. He had kicked me right above the crest of my hip just at the lower end of the ribcage. Over the next week I had an ache that slowly moved through my abdomen from the right to left side. but nothing was broken. I can't say if he moved back or not as I had more pressing matters on my mind at the moment.

With Tai Chi, force is stolen from the attacker by deflecting it mostly away and rotating with it. An example needs two people, but is simple and fairly safe Bob is the attacker. He tries to push Jill by aiming his right hand hand at her sternum. Jill is very relaxed about the waist, and when the push comes, she brings up her left hand and guides his push to her left shoulder. At the same time, the friction from his push against her arm drives her left shoulder back which pivots her left hip the same direction. This bring her right hip forward, which brings her right shoulder forward, which is timed with the extending of her right hand to Bob's sternum. Bob's line of force for his stance went through the heal of his rear foot and the toe of his lead foot, Directly above this line was the path of his attack. When the attack was deflected to his right, it pushed him slightly back onto the heal of his right foot. Jill's counter push is almost perpendicular to this line. Bob is going away, and Jill put very little of her own force into the push. If she had extender her legs and pushed like she was performing a shot put, Bob may well have been airborne for a bit.

One last thing on the broken rib bit. Ribs are funny critters. In my time I've broken two, neither mine. In both cases, neither person felt that they were struck hard. In the first case I had pads on and did it with a punch. As soon as I hit him we both stopped and looked at each other. He said he felt a pop. On my end, it just felt like something very odd happened. As it turned out, it was just a matter of me happening to stumble on an instant of very good form. The force used probably wouldn't have broken a nose. The other guy was a kick. Since there are no pads on the bottom of the foot gear, you have to be especially careful with certain kicks. Like the first one, neither of us felt that it was a hard kick at all. It just happened to be a very "right" kick, where everything lined up well. Nearly everyone down there had been kicked much harder than that with no problems at all. Any kick that actually sent a person flying would be less likely to break something. The body isn't absorbing the force of the impact if it moves away. Like I was always told before test firing my dad's newest giant rifle. "Little guys fly further, don't drop it."

My nitpick this time comes from Spiderman. Given his superhero nature, I'm okay with him being able to fall of a bridge and grab cable to stop his fall. But, when he reaches out and grabs MJ's arm to stop her from falling, what keeps her arm from being ripped out of the socket? For that matter, when he does the same thing with the web, why doesn't the skin get ripped away?

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An evil person would do the things I think up.

Tog interesting post, however I don't think your points regarding what humans can do is so readily applied to the super strong movie fighters.

I've never seen a human kick/punch someone so that they fly back 30 feet or more with enough momentum to crash into a wall. A quick google finds that a human punch contains 1.2KJ [Rocky Marciano had his punch measured at a USA military base in 1955] The KE of a human flying back [100Kg, 15m/s] from a superhuman blow is 11KJ, its 10 times more powerful.

Likewise the momentum of the target is 1500 Kgm/s so assuming that the attacker takes 0.1s to overcome this they exert a horizontal force acting through the interface of their feet/ground of 1500/0.1 = 15KN Friction is going to be about 1KN [1x100x9.81] Any horizontal component of force is going to be a fraction of the vertical component. Our super human is literally going to have to jump into such a blow else they will end up flying backwards much like their target.

As to the effects of a broken rib, again the superhuman is going to deform the rib by a much larger amount, given that a danger of CPR is breaking a rib and piercing a lung its not beyond reason that a superhuman could punch someone that hard.

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the ego has crashed landed

I do actually agree with all of that. The punches as depicted in the movies are going to play out just about like you've stated. What I was presenting were real life examples that could be used as a basis of comparison, mainly because it didn't seem that you were taking into account the effect of pushing off of the ground. Just as no one would realistically push a car with just their upper body, no one (trained) would try to punch while airborne. Circular strikes being a notable exception.

When Jill hits Bob in the chest as he's off balance, the distance he was actually moved will be nothing compared to the stories the other bar patrons will recall the following night. By the time the story gets around town, she may have knocked him up to to the second story. Real storytellers would then need to make up something equally fanciful to compete with the "reality", and Chinese Opera is born. By the time western budgets get hold of it... well, it ends up here.

Again, one last thing on the rib. A lot of it depends on the speed of the transfer of force. I have fired a lot of guns, some very big. The 577 Nitro Express weighed 11.5 pounds and fired a 650 grain bullet at 1850 feet per second. This hurt a great deal less than a 20 gauge shotgun I had, despite the fact that even though I was leaning into it, it would stand me up straight, then knock me back two full steps. It was a huge push. The shotgun was not a push. It was a sudden, sharp impact. I think that if our super strong person were to deliver a full strength punch with proper form and focus, the target wouldn't move back at all. It would have to be scraped off of the attacker's arm.

By my way of looking at things, anytime the target is moved back by an impact, it was a push, not a strike.

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An evil person would do the things I think up.

is this for movies with bad physics or for bad movies with physics

And now consider the nutters who make a .600 Nitro Express 5-shot revolver.

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Granted is loaded down quite a bit, and is heavier than that rifle, but still... no.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Going back to martial arts, I once saw some video footage of Bruce Lee's "one inch punch". To illustrate the power of it, they wrapped a fellow in cushions (to make sure he didn't break anything), then Bruce "punched" him from a very short distance away. He was lifted off his feet briefly and fell over about 6 or 8 feet away from Bruce. Obviously, it would have been relatively easy for Bruce to cause him to overbalance (which is probably what caused most of the lateral movement), but that was still pretty impressive.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

I don't know if that would be possible, but the simple fact that this is not done with an inanimate object makes me suspicious that the target didn't help in the movement.

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