Captain Seafort wrote:GrahamKennedy wrote:I actually show the Core to my science classes so that we can go through how scientifically absurd it is.
Out of curiousity, how many cock-ups are there in that film? I switched that part of my brain off after the "the core's stopped spinning".
God, I couldn't even begin to count.
The really aggravating thing about the "core stopped spinning" thing is this.
The core never stops spinning. Think about it, where would all the kinetic energy go? However, the magnetic field DOES die out and reverse every now and again. This is because the whole core doesn't rotate together as one big ball; there are all sorts of currents going every which way, but with an OVERALL movement more in one direction than the other.
When the field dies, it's because the currents become more random, so the magnetic fields they create oppose one another and cancel out.
And if they'd gone with that, it would make the solution MUCH more realistic, because your bombs wouldn't have to kick-start something the size of Mars. They'd only have to give the currents a knock, get them swirling slightly more in the same direction. Still pretty impossible, but far more feasible. So here, being more scientifically accurate would help the movie.
But they didn't do it. And you know why they didn't do it?
It's because they think you are too stupid to understand that explanation.
And that's what really aggravates me about movies like Armageddon and The Core. It's not that the writers don't understand the science - scientific advisors are cheap by hollywood standards, and scientists would fall over themselves to do something like that.
No. It's that they believe that we the viewer are too stupid to notice the crap they spoon feed us. Or too apathetic to want good quality movies.
And annoyingly, they are mostly right in this belief.
It wasn't always like this, you know. Look at Jaws, the first summer blockbuster. It's a movie about a giant fish for Pete's sake. But it's intelligently plotted, intelligently written, has good, well drawn characters, great dialogue... because the people who made that movie cared about what they were doing, and knew that we did too.
And then, at some point, people stopped caring. I hear people say things like "it's a blockbuster movie, what do you expect?" Well I expect quality, and if everybody else did too, we'd all get it.
*sighs*
Well that turned into quite a rant! I'll stop now...
