6 Classic Movies That Get Ruined By Grade-School Science

6 You Could Probably Outrun A T-Rex

With a massive body and incredible bite strength, the Tyrannosaurus Rex reigned as the apex predator of all apex predators. And she's an inescapable threat in the movies, tenacious enough to smash through walls and fast enough to run down any meaty human. If T-Rex wants you dead, you're dead. In the first Jurassic Park, one of them chases down a jeep going 50 mph!

Here's Why It's Bullshit:

Buzzkill scientists have analyzed T-Rex remains, and concluded that the A#1, Duke of New York, King of Dinosaurs was, well ... rather plodding, by predator standards. There is a very good chance you could survive an encounter with one simply by running away from it at your normal human speed. Every healthy adult in the Jurassic Park franchise had decent odds of surviving if they left on foot with any kind of urgency. Paleontologists' best estimates place a T-Rex's top speed around 16 mph, roughly the same as the sustained top speed of the average human, and considerably slower than the average CrossFitter.

We aren't as vulnerable as movies make us out to be. Humans evolved to run over distances, and can even theoretically beat a horse in a marathon. Large animals take longer to build up speed, and are gassed in no time. And large animals aren't built like a cheetah or greyhound, instantly running down prey. A T-Rex would be something closer to a Saint Bernard trying to catch a tennis ball rolling down a hill and giving up on it after ten yards. A cranky ol' T-Rex huffing and puffing after Jeff Goldblum as he casually hustles away would be a very different movie, but ... not necessarily bad?

You can try this "leaving in a hurry" defense against a lot of big animals still alive today. The size-to-endurance ratio is a consistent principle of biology in elephants, hippos, and rhinos. Large size is a disadvantage for predators. Smaller, tastier prey like us have a huge metabolic advantage. T-Rex's prey was believed to consist of other large, bumbling dinosaurs, like hadrosaurs or triceratops, or maybe even each other. The point is, a T-Rex chasing after a single human would be like you chasing a speeding taxi because you left a French fry inside it.

5 Andy Dufresne Should Have Died In The Sewage Pipe

At the climax of The Shawshank Redemption, after 20 years of digging and planning, only one more thing stands between our hero, Andy Dufresne, and justice: a long pipe filled with five inches of fetid sewage. All he has to do is low-crawl through 500 yards of wretch-inducing filth to win his freedom. Here's one of the most iconic scenes from the internet's favorite movie of all time.

Even schlepping through shit can be made majestic by a Morgan Freeman voiceover.

Here's Why It's Bullshit:

No human could survive that five-football-field-long crawl through a poorly ventilated sewage pipe. Noxious vapors like ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and methane gases would displace all of the oxygen. All that ammonia would sting his eyes to the point of blindness, and all that methane would kill him in minutes, probably before he even knew it was happening.

Methane inhalation fatalities occur all the time, thanks to faulty pipes in basements, landfills, and agricultural cesspits. We aren't supposed to breathe poison, is the point. When oxygen levels dip to 12 percent or lower, you black out and die before you even have time to drown in diarrhea. Though the movie still works if you imagine the beach was a hallucination as Andy's brain was choked by poop fumes.

Similar jailbreak attempts have been attempted using steam pipes, drainage pipes, and tunnels connected to sewers, but no one has ever made it through 1,500 feet of a 18-inch pipe full of raw sewage. Such attempts have happened, and they all ended about as badly you'd think. A 2003 jailbreak in Brazil is the most gruesome example -- at least six, maybe 13, prisoners asphyxiated in their daring attempt. The fumes were so dangerous that their bodies had to be retrieved with a backhoe. The point is, if you're in prison, enjoy it, because it beats sucking lethal shit gas in a pipe.

4 The Kids In Honey, I Shrunk The Kids Would Have Suffocated To Death Within A Few Agonizing Minutes

Honey, I Shrunk The Kids had everything you could want from a kid-shrinking adventure film. They made friends with an ant, flew on a bee, and gorged themselves on a giant cookie. Lawnmowers and sprinklers became life-ending apocalypses, and after 90 minutes of watching children taken to the very brink of death, they all came together as a family.

It was really normal for '80s movies to put children in unspeakable danger just to see what would happen.

Here's Why It's Bullshit:

The kids are shrunk down 10,000 times their normal size, and that means their cells are also reduced 10,000 times. The issue is that the oxygen, water, and countless other elements they need to live remain the same size. And having a water molecule 10,000 times larger relative to your blood vessels is no small thing. A slight fluctuation in the chemistry of a cell or the surrounding molecules can have catastrophic consequences, like cells bursting -- or in this case, drying up.

Smaller molecules, like water, slip into and out of semipermeable cells in order to create a balance. This is called osmosis if you're a nerd, and hydro-fucking if you like to party. But if the molecules were suddenly 10,000 times bigger, the discrepancy would be fatal. An absence of water in a red blood cell causes it to shrivel and malfunction. Any number of substances that need to be expelled might be too large to exit cells, and only the smallest molecules or ions would have access into them. It's only a question of which compromised bodily process would kill them first. The second Rick Moranis miniaturized his kids, they were doomed to a grim fate. Think less Disney, and more David Cronenberg nightmare.

3 The Blood Farming Operation In Fury Road Would Poison The War Boys, Not Save Them

In Mad Max: Fury Road, Max happens to be a universal blood donor, which makes him a mobile blood bank for any road warrior lunatics who might be missing some. That's why the irradiated War Boys use him for quick transfusions so they can stay alive long enough to die a death worthy of Valhalla.

This information now qualifies you for your post-apocalyptic medical degree.

Here's Why It's Bullshit:

"Universal donor" doesn't mean you can exchange blood at will, like swapping out a half-chewed piece of gum. Blood has two primary components: red blood cells and plasma. The universal donor type for plasma (the liquid part that acts like the broth for the red blood cells, facilitating easy flow) is actually AB, and you need special equipment to separate plasma from red blood cells before you can safely inject it into a needy patient. Imagine taking the filling out of a Twinkie and replacing it with the ingredients for the filling of a Twinkie. You mash in corn syrup, industrial lubricant, white house paint, and 84 types of preservatives. It's like that, but far more complicated and less delicious.

An emergency transfusion might save Furiosa's life temporally, but unless she then immediately gets a transfusion from the right donor, she is in for a world of pain. We're talking "filled with angry bees" levels of agony. Doctors call this acute hemolytic reaction. Most of the War Boys would die from clotting complications or organ failure long before they had the chance to impress King Immortan Joe. Their glorious deaths would be more of a painful, wheezing, bed-ridden affair. A botched transfusion recipient experiences breathing problems, heart problems, excruciating muscle pains, nausea, hypertension, severe bleeding, and a series of symptoms the medical community describes as a "feeling of impending doom."

While you can overlook Academy Award voters and viewers for missing this, it's strange that writer/director and former physician George Miller never noticed.

Nothing sends down a chill down a surfer's spine like a shark fin jutting out of the water. Great whites are the terrors of the seas, able to smell a drop of blood from a mile away and packing 20,000 more teeth than they need to shred you into human poke.

The Jaws franchise did for sharks what Halloween did for the William Shatner mask industry -- a dead-eyed beast was turned into public enemy number one overnight. To this day, most people think of themselves as a shark's favorite food.

Here's Why It's Bullshit:

We're not really in a shark's food chain. Only younger sharks feed near the coastline, and juvenile great whites risk breaking their face on your durable human femur. Their jaws are surprisingly flimsy, secured to their heads only by ligaments and cartilage. We are the human peanut brittle to their shark dentures.

Mature sharks don't eat humans -- we're "too bony," and take days to digest. Sharks eat fat to survive, and filling up on a skeleton-rich diet like people could kill them. They need a massive intake of calories, and that's only obtainable in animals rich in hundreds of pounds of fat, not scrawny '70s teenagers. Essentially, if you're fat enough that a shark wants to eat you, you're only in the water because something terrible has happened already.

A stomachful of humans might even result in brain damage, as a great white needs that blubber to warm its body in order to maintain homeostasis and keep its brain functioning. Statistically, people tend to survive attacks because sharks (regardless of their size) suck at eating us. Rather than devouring prey whole, marine biologists say they engage in complicated eating practices, and the shark that kills an animal isn't necessarily the one who eats it. Sharks are also quite picky, and known to puke at will. If a shark did eat a person, license plate, or errant oxygen tank, it would not be lurking around looking for co-eds to eat; it would be vomiting its guts out and leaving a zero-star review on Land's yelp page.

1 Batman's "Nonlethal" Arsenal of Tools Is Pretty Lethal

Batman carries any number of devices ready to incapacitate, electrocute, or tie up his enemies. And aside from the time he blew up a man dick-first with a bundle of dynamite, he uses all these devices to take criminals down without murdering them. For instance, here's a six-and-a-half-minute video of him fucking people up with grappling hooks alone.

Here's Why It's Bullshit:

People die, and not infrequently, from chokeholds and blows to the head, and that's most of Batman's day. When joy-killing scientists calculated the amount of force that Batman's grappling hooks would apply to the bodies of criminals, they concluded that most of them would likely end up dead. If you're looking for realism, the 1966 Adam West series is more accurate than the Chris Nolan movies ever were.

Batarangs are no better. Boomerangs were designed as deadly weapons by Aboriginal hunters, and aren't much different than throwing a wrench at someone's head. You do that at ten different heads, and at least one of them isn't getting up. Basically, every graveyard in Gotham has an ever-growing "Batman" section.

Doesn't mean Batarangs aren't still really cool to have sitting around on your desk.

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For more nonsense Hollywood science, check out 6 Famous Movie Scenes With Horrific Scientific Implications and 6 Futuristic Movie Scenarios Already Disproven By Science.

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