Hollywood and Bad Science

Well, this weekend I saw the high-octane action thriller xXx. Very stupid but a lot of fun. If you can turn your brain off. Watching Vin Diesel snowboard down a mountainside with an avalanche rushing right behind him was probably the high point of the movie's stupidity/fun. You know it's ridiculous, but you also go "Heh, that's pretty cool."

But enough about xXx. Before the movie started, I saw a preview for what must be the worst movie that will be in theaters this year. (Yes, worse than the not-showed-to-critics The Master of Disguise; yes, worse than the not-showed-to-critics The Adventures of Pluto Nash). I am talking about the movie The Core. You can follow the previous link to view the trailer, which I will now proceed to discuss. The premise of this movie is (get ready; it's a doozy) the following (from Movies.com): "A hazardous chemical spill causes some kind of imbalance in the Earth's structure that might lead to (get this) a complete planetary collapse. Our only hope is a group of "terranauts," led by Aaron Eckhart, and their experimental deep-Earth ship, piloted by Hilary Swank." OK, first of all, in the preview, they mention something about a disaster that occurs every 700,000 years. Uhhhhh, ok, Beavis. Then they go on to mention that the heroic group of "Journey to the Center of the Earthers" has to travel to the Earth's core (which has, get this, STOPPED SPINNING) to, get this, DETONATE NUCLEAR WEAPONS in the center of the planet to MAKE THE CORE START SPINNING AGAIN. Uhhhhhhhh. Excuse me, I have a question. Isn't detonating nuclear weapons, a, ummm, BAD IDEA? But... but... they're being detonated inside the Earth... they'll make the core start spinning again.. they'll... uhhhh... never mind.

How can Hollywood come up with this rubbish? How can a movie get made that will doubtless have technical flaws which could have been solved by a 5-minute conversation with anyone who has an IQ greater than that of a tangelo? Anyone remember The Net, starring Sandra Bullock, which had computer-related holes so big you could drive a truck through them? Or perhaps you remember the mega-blockbuster Independence Day, in which the aliens are defeated by taking a Macintosh and uploading a computer virus to the Mother ship. No one blinks twice at any of these problems. Why? Because the average American has the scientific intelligence of a cucumber. All you have to do to lose all faith in the common Man is see a couple of episodes of "Jaywalking" on The Tonight Show.

What happened to well-plotted, well-imagined, scientifically sound movies? Anyone remember The Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford? A wonderful film, highly accurate, free of any major technical flaws. Or the original Planet of the Apes, which painted a perfectly plausible (except for English-speaking monkeys), albeit somewhat fantastic, vision of the Earth's future? Even Jurassic Park isn't so terrible, as far as science fiction goes. Why can't we get movies like these? Even a so-called good movie like Signs has glaringly stupid technical holes in it. Is it really so hard to tell a story that is scientifically correct? Is science really so difficult?

For Hollywood, it appears to be.