No one has ever gone to Michael Bay movies for logic or easy-to-follow filmmaking, to say nothing of science. But you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that actual physicists don’t think much about his most science-heavy movie, Armageddon. (Safe to assume that The Island, about clones, doesn’t know what it’s talking about either.) Still, at least it’s no longer the most physics-illiterate movie out there, thanks to a newish usurper of the title.
As per Deadline, everyone’s favorite movie ruining scientist (and sometime Steak-umm sparring partner), Neil deGrasse Tyson, went on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show, where he and his host talked about popular movies he can’t watch because they’re too bad at science. Cagle pointed out that his guests once said something to the effect that Armageddon “violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made.”
“That’s what I thought until I saw Moonfall,” deGrasse Tyson replied, referring to the most recent ridiculous blockbuster from Independence Day’s Roland Emmerich. “It was a pandemic film that came out, you know, Halle Berry, and the moon is approaching Earth, and they learned that it’s hollow and there’s a moon being made out of rocks living inside of it and the Apollo missions were really to visit, to feed the moon being, and I just couldn’t, so I said, ‘Alright, I thought Armageddon had a secure hold on this crown, but apparently not.’”
DeGrasse Tyson went on to deconstruct a film that actually has even more ludicrous plot developments than the moon threatening to destroy the Earth:
“All you gotta do is just nudge it, and if you do that early enough, if you nudge it like one centimeter per second to the right, in space, there’s no friction, so it’ll just keep drifting to the right. If you do that early enough, then you can have the asteroid pass in front of the earth rather than hit the earth, or you can slow it down so that it’ll pass behind the earth. Two ways you can adjust it. So, yeah. You know what it’s like? It’s like The Terminator thing where I want to kill your parents so that you’re never born. Really? All you have to do is prevent your parents from meeting each other or have them have sex 20 minutes later than the other one. That will create a different zygote and you won’t be born, so the movies go, in some cases, they get hyperbolic on their solutions to problems.”
DeGrasse Tyson is famous for tearing apart the logic of cheerfully stupid movies that most moviegoers don’t watch because they want things to make sense. That said, his deconstruction of Barbie was actually pretty civil.
(Via Deadline)