Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Bad Astronomy Movie #7 - Star Trek: Into Darkness

This is the 7th in a series of 8 posts on my Bad Astronomy May Term course in which we watched several science/astronomy based movies and discussed the bad science in them.  Star Trek:  Into Darkness is the 2nd installment of the "new" Star Trek movies.  I loved this movie, as I did the 1st installment in the "new" series.  The nice thing about Star Trek is they try to do the science right or at the very least explain areas of impossible science.  For example, accelerating from rest to warp 6, will place so many g forces on the body that you will easily die.  Star Trek explains this away due to 'force absorbers' of some kind.  I'm okay with that!  They recognize the science is bad and no current technology can explain it, so they make up a new technology.  That's fine in my eyes.


There are a few areas of bad science in this movie.  For starters, there are several action scenes combining different events.  All are unlikely, but strung together are all but impossible.  There are a few scenes that mess up relative velocities and ignore air resistance.  Given the nature of the movie, I can be okay with that.  There are explosions and sound in space, two things that can't happen.  

Despite these areas of bad science, this movie is fantastic.  Plus it has Benedict Cumberbatch!  Can't beat that!!!

No comments:

Post a Comment