20 Movies That Don’t Know How Science Works

There’s been a conflict between art and science in the film industry for as long as dumb people have been pretty. Some of the most dramatic settings and, let’s face it, sickest shit to look at — space, bombs, volcanos, etc. — are pretty complicated things that people dedicate their entire lives to studying. That means few of them end up writing movies. And that means screenwriters just kind of have to guess how they work, and they often get it hilariously wrong.

“Disaster movies are the classic paradigm of this,” user BardInChains recently told r/Movies. “They know their audience doesn’t actually know a damn thing about plate tectonics or solar flares or whatever, and so they are free to completely ignore physical laws to create whatever disaster they want, while making it seem like real science, usually with hip nerdy types using big words, and a general or politician going, ‘English please.’” 

They then asked, “What is the stupidest movie from a science standpoint that tries to be science-smart?,” and Reddit reported the movies that would give Neil deGrasse Tyson an aneurysm.