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Films that were critized for following science


Have you ever seen a person unwittingly critized a film for being scienfically logical? Such as say: a critic says a film is copying James Cameron's The Abyss becaused it used High-pressure nervous syndrome, which is a real life condition.





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There's a whole trope on TVTropes, "Reality is unrealistic". Most of them aren't about science, though. A few science-related examples :

In the movie Cloverfield they first used accurate measures for the head of the Statue of Liberty, but test audiences complained that it looked too small. For this reason they made it 50% larger than it really is. Even then some people still complain that it looks too small.

Cloverfield gets this a lot on pretty much everything the characters are shown doing, another major sticking point being that they can use their cell phones in subways. (Guess what? People do that, especially in New York City, where some subway stations actually go the extra mile to enable cellphone usage.) At this point it wouldn't be surprising to find out that if there really are giant monsters, they work just like Clover do just because people call him impossible.

The original plan in 2001: A Space Odyssey was to have Discovery fly to Saturn. To that end, Kubrick's special effects team tried to create a model of Saturn that was as realistic as possible. However, the more realistic they made it, the faker it looked! The rings looked like a flat band of metal foil held up by plexiglass. Thus, the trip to Saturn was scrapped in favor of a trip to Jupiter. Flash forward a decade-and-a-half, when Voyager 1 sent back close-up Real Life photos of Saturn and its rings — the rings in Voyager's photos looked exactly like the flat, "fake" ones that Kubrick's production team had abandoned!

Also, the Discovery was originally designed with large radiator fins, which is indeed realistic because spacecraft need a way to dissipate excess heat from the engines, life support, electronics, etc. However the production team chose to omit the fins because they looked too much like wings, and they didn't want audience members to think that the Discovery was intended for atmospheric flight.


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"There's a whole trope on TVTropes, "Reality is unrealistic"."

It reminds me of The Simpsons, when some film makers had come to Springfield to make a screen adaptation of Radioactive Man: A stagehand is painting a horse with spots

Martin: Uh, sir, why don’t you just use real cows?

Stagehand: Cows don’t look like cows when you film ’em. You gotta use horses.

Ralph: What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?

Stagehand: Usually we just tape a bunch of cats together.Radioactive Man: the Movie had to be abandoned, but in the real-life horror film Deadly Eyes, an adaptation of James Herbert's novel The Rats, dogs were put into "rat costumes" to play the giant mutant rats. In the novel it was explained that the mutant breed of rats were the result of radiation from nuclear tests. James Herbert thought the film was rubbish, incidentally.

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Interstellar

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Going through "worm holes" is not science. Round planets near wormholes is not science. Escaping a planet in a space plane is not possible without large rockets.

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I've never heard of people criticising a film for FOLLOWING science or being TOO Accurate or logical. It is usually the opposite people condemning a film for being too UNREALISTIC and NOT following Science.

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Only my film instructors, because you should never let facts get in the way of a good story.

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People sometimes do that due to not being knowledgeable in science at all. Example: any film that uses High-pressure nervous syndrome is called a rip-off of The Abyss.

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especially when it required a three stage booster to take off from earth.

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