!!!SCIENCE MOMENT!!!

I have no problem with almost everything here. Who knows, maybe some odd side effect to toxic waste could produce a good mutation instead of the much more likely bad ones.

The only genuine mistake involves the Daredevil's ability to dodge bullets because he hears them coming. I'm sorry, but no. Bullets travel faster than the speed of sound. They would arrive at your skull before the sound got to your ear.

I want to say something about physics and biology (which, like all sciences, is a mere subset of physics).

Biology first.

Narration and conversation at several points make references to mutants being the next "stage" in evolution and they compare their situation with the “conflict” between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Both points of view are inaccuracies based on the common misconception that evolution is some mysterious force driving life toward greater intelligence and that we (and now mutants) are the pinnacles of that achievement. In fact, evolution could care less how smart you are. All evolution cares about is how good you are at reproducing. If being dumber helped, then each generation of dumber people would produce more offspring until the human species was gradually replaced by a less intelligent breed (Hey, wait a minute…).

Thus, being able to freeze things like Iceman does is great fun but if it doesn't help you get a date or support your offspring to make sure they survive long enough to breed, then evolution doesn’t apply.

And the Neanderthal / Cro-Magnon situation is spurious as well. When modern humans entered Europe 30,000 years ago the Neanderthal had been living there already for at least 100,000 years. Within 5,000 years of our arrival the Neanderthal were gone. This wasn't a war or anything – we simply out bred them. We were better able to compete for resources (because we were smarter, but that part's still disputed) and generation by generation they declined and we increased. The situation in the movie doesn't fit the details very well.

And now the physics.

The fact is the powers possessed by these mutants clearly violates one of the most hallowed rules of science: The Conservation of Mass and Energy (neither mass nor energy can be created or destroyed – merely change form). In other words, where does the energy come from for Jean Grey’s telekinesis or Storm’s movement of huge masses of air? Are these things impossible?

No. But you have to assume that the basis for all mutant power is the ability to tap into some unknown energy source. What it is and what dimension it exists in is a mystery but if you assume its existence you can explain everything else.

If you had advanced space travel and the kind of quick spreading fungus / bio-weapon shown here, it would be a simple matter to seed the upper atmosphere with it and rain it down all over the Earth (a-la INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS - Feo).

The conquest these aliens seem bent on would happen quickly and without firing a shot. Proof, perhaps, that just because someone comes from a culture with more advanced technology doesn't mean they’re automatically very smart.

I was pleased to see no attempt to add to the ridiculous idea mentioned in the first film that the machines are using their unwitting human slaves as a power source. That's just plain stupid for a long list of reasons and they wisely skipped over it here.

On the other hand a lot of the computer references are as ancient as Tron. The story centers around a plan to get into the enemy “mainframe”, an idea right out of the 70’s.

Have these artificial intelligence programs not heard of distributed networks? Like, for example, the Internet?

The Internet has no “central” computer, nor does it need one. I find it hard to believe that these vastly more advanced computers would take such a giant step backwards.

Now, I'm not going to discuss the magical underground drillship. A half-crazy lone scientist inventing something essentially impossible is a staple of science fiction so that's fine. But I do have a problem when the movie makes scientific sounding statements that are just plain wrong. Here are the high points:

1. If there really were "solar microwaves" being held off by the Earth's magnetic field, why didn't they cook the Apollo astronauts when they ventured beyond the field's coverage? Why isn't Mars being cooked, since it hasn't got much of a field? The answer is that the sun doesn't produce much in the way of microwaves and that what it does produce isn't stopped by our magnetic field anyway. A magnetic field can only affect the paths of charged particles like protons and electrons. It has no effect at all on electromagnetic radiation like microwaves or visible light or ultraviolet light. It's our atmosphere – not our magnetic field – that filters out the harmful parts of the sun's radiative output.

2. The inner core of the Earth is a ball of crystalline iron about 2400 kilometers in diameter. A good way to get a feel for how much energy would actually be required to get it spinning again if it stopped can be found from calculating the rotational energy it has right now. This is the rotational equivalent of kinetic energy: the energy of motion. Plugging in the numbers reveals that the inner core has a rotational energy of 385 trillion trillion joules. That's equivalent to 96 billion megatons of TNT, so the mere 1000 megatons worth of nukes they bring along is about 100 million times too small.

3. Many times in the Earth's past the magnetic field has reversed its polarity, making the south pole the north pole and vice versa. During these field reversals (just the field flips – not the Earth itself) there are intervals of a few thousand years where the field collapses completely and the Earth has no magnetic field to speak of. None of these incidents resulted in the Earth being cooked by microwaves, and the fossil record doesn't show any evidence of mass extinctions during these times. The biosphere survived just fine.

4. An overlooked effect has to do with gravity. The deeper you penetrated into the Earth, the less Earth there'd be below you and thus the less of a gravitational pull you'd feel.

5. If you have a bomb, and you put a pile of explosives next to it, that will make the total explosion bigger. However if you have a nuclear bomb and you put a pile of plutonium next to it, that will only be a waste of plutonium. Nukes just don't work that way.

UPDATE:
What Direction Does Earth's Center Spin? New Insights Solve 300-Year-Old Problem

Sep. 16, 2013 — Scientists at the University of Leeds have solved a 300-year-old riddle about which direction the centre of Earth spins.

The monster in this monster movie is a member of the Streptococcus family, but you may know it better as the flesh eating bacteria. It's quite rare but when it does happen it usually enters the body through a cut or other injury. Once in the blood stream it infects the muscles and fat just beneath the skin and produces toxins that dissolve the flesh in a process called necrotizing fasciitis (be careful if you google those words, by the way, because you'll probably end up seeing some of the grossest medical photos ever taken). This is a life threatening infection and treatment usually involves immediate amputation of infected body parts.

And yes, the movie mostly gets the details right. This infection really isn't very communicable (unless an infected bleeds into some else’s open wound) but these kids ain't exactly rocket scientists so their ignorance (and terror about getting "the disease") is very believable. And the way they get infected is basically believable, although it requires some criminal negligence.

Giant spiders violate the square-cube law in the sense that spiders as big as horses wouldn't be able to support their own weight and would have a long list of internal problems like not being able to absorb enough oxygen to survive. But when the snooty professor is first told about (but hasn't yet seen) the big spiders, he snootily points out exactly those facts!

Later, when we learn that the giant spiders are some unknown underground species, all that's left for me or the snooty professor to say is that it's really unlikely but not impossible.

There is a scene where we discover that Nemo's great submarine is solar powered. Yeah, you heard me. Now that's not quite as stupid as it seems because they mention this when the sub is on the surface, charging its batteries with solar energy. But why would Hollywood writers choose solar power when (nuclear) there is a much more (nuclear) obvious choice (nuclear) that the U.S. Navy has been (nuclear) using for many decades (nuclear)?

Who can say?

My guess is that solar energy, while perhaps not the most obvious choice as a submarine power source, was the most politically correct choice. And by the way: in the original Jules Verne story Nemo's sub was powered by extracting electrolytes from the water. That wouldn't work but it still makes more sense than a solar powered submarine.

There is a standard plot device in thrillers involving turning on the gas on a stove and either leaving a candle burning or waiting for someone to light a match and thereby blow up a house in a huge fireball. Very dramatic and it would sort of work. It's just that it would take hours for the house to fill with gas this way, not the mere minutes that's usually shown.

I say frustrating because, since the movie never explains what happened, there's no science for me to analyze. If I had to guess I'd say some kind of terrorist-released plague was the culprit but the fact is it could be a lot of different things. Civilization is surprisingly fragile.

One of the very cool things about the original three movies is that, in spite of a lot of scientific hand waving, they never figure out exactly why this is happening. A virus? A vengeful God? Alien Space Bats? It just happens and people have to deal with it.

The remake takes the same approach but it does give a slight nod in the "virus" direction. I wasn't happy about that because there's no freakin'; way a virus could reanimate a dead body. Think about it. A typical zombie is wandering around for months or years, never eating or drinking. No respiration, no heartbeat, and yet they can move. They don't heal but they also don't decay (if they did they'd be bloated, liquefying messes in days). Something is animating them, maintaining their body in its present state, and providing enough biochemical energy for them to move around. I have no idea what could do that but it sure as hell isn't a virus.

UPDATE:
Writer James Gunn (DAWN OF THE DEAD [2004], SLITHER) responds:
"I don't see the problem in having zombies created with a bite. The bite never implies a virus. Vampires always make new vampires with a bite, so what's the difference?"

Kelly Parks answers, "Oh, yeah. That's right."

Feo Amante says, "Well so much for THIS freaking Science Moment!"

This science moment involves a personal experience connected to this movie. I was at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con and, while wandering around one day, I came across a panel discussion about STARSHIP TROOPERS 2. Actress Brenda Strong, director Phil Tippett and writer Ed Neumeier (and one of the producers, I think) were all there promoting the movie and taking questions from the audience. So I took the opportunity to ask (as diplomatically as I could manage) why the first movie did such a terrible job getting the science right, especially considering that it was based on a Robert Heinlein novel and Heinlein was one of the first "hard core" science fiction writers who always made a serious effort to get the scientific details correct.

The reaction? Confusion. They looked at each other and back at me and clearly didn't understand what I was talking about. They thought the science was fine. Which explains a lot about these movies and about Hollywood in general.

My only complaint is that the movie doesn't really make clear what a different world it would be if intelligent robots were everywhere. There is brief mention of people losing their jobs to robots, which would certainly happen. But think about the effect on the economy if the cost of labor was effectively zero.

Every product imaginable would become dirt cheap, effectively making us all millionaires. And the fast pace of scientific discovery we have now would seem glacial compared to an era when smart machines are designing even smarter machines. Some people call this rapidly approaching moment "The Singularity", because once it happens knowledge expands so fast that it's impossible for us to imagine what it would be like.

Today the subject is social science and although I am far from a qualified social scientist, I'm going to make a prediction. There will be more and more movies made about crime and social breakdown in France in the years ahead. And the tone of the movies will change from sympathetic to the rioters (like this one) to decidedly unsympathetic as things get worse. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

The science in question is geography. The "island near Antarctica" is called Bovetoya. This is a real island and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most isolated island (bare volcanic rock covered with glaciers and rarely visited by anyone) on Earth. But it's only "near" Antarctica if you think 1000 miles away is "near". The tip of South America is closer to Antarctica than Bovetoya.

The Megalodon (which means "big tooth") is related to the Great White shark but it was quite a bit bigger: anywhere from 60 to 80 feet long.

The movie implies that the giant underground cave containing the shark had been sealed for 65 million years (the end of the Cretaceous). This was unnecessary because Megalodons went extinct much more recently, probably within that last couple of million years (there are stories about Megalodon teeth that have been found and that may be only 10,000 years old!).

And speaking of the underground cave: this idea has shown up before (DEEPSTAR SIX, for example) but isn't very workable. There is life in the deep ocean but that ecology depends on the steady rain of organic material from near the surface. A cave would be cut off from this mana from heaven and it's hard to imagine enough life going on to support a population of very large predators.

The tooth of a Megalodon next to the smaller tooth of a modern Great White shark. ReefQuest Center for Shark Research

The one thing I liked about this movie (the one and ONLY thing) was how they explained the big snakes. The biggest anaconda ever measured was 28 feet long and the smallest of these monsters is easily twice that. But it is true, as the movie points out, that reptiles grow their whole lives so the older they get, the bigger they get. Which means if the local environment included an immortality-granting blood orchid as part of the food chain then some of the wildlife might live long enough to get really big.

A very short science moment because I can't say much without spoiling a surprise or two. So all I will say is to mention one of Clarke's Laws: "A sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic."