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An Engineer Looks at Superheroes
Having an engineering degree makes it hard to watch superhero movies. Antman’s ability to shrink and grow, for example, is supposedly done by changing the distance between the atoms in his body. Therefore, no matter his size, he’s still 200lbs. Fine. Except that this 200lb man can ride on the back of an ant when he’s tiny. And when he’s 80ft tall, instead of floating off into the air like a hot air balloon, he’s heavy enough to smash a passenger jet when he falls on it.
The Six Million Dollar Man and the Winter Soldier had bionic arms that enabled them to pick up cars. Why didn’t their arms rip out of their very unbionic shoulder sockets, or why didn’t their backbones collapse?
And remember the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeves? At the climax, the evil Lex Luthor launches two nuclear missiles – one aimed at America’s east coast and the other at the west coast – leaving Superman with the dilemma of deciding which coast to save.
He destroys the east coast missile (well done, Chris) but can’t quite catch up to the other one, and Lois Lane, along with California, is obliterated. Okay, that makes sense. How does he solve this terrible problem? He flies faster than the speed of light and turns back time.
In other words, he can’t catch up to a missile lumbering along at the speed of sound – a mere 750 mph, depending upon temperature and air pressure – but he can fly faster than 186,282 miles per second, or 670,616,629 miles per hour!
No wonder kids avoid the STEM subjects in school these days!
Published in General
That was one of the major plot points for Dune, well at least interstellar travel.
I read A Wrinkle In Time as a kid, and kinda enjoyed it, but the idea of interstellar – even intergalactic and interdimensional – travel just by thinking about it, was always claptrap. Drugs or not.
Unless time is running backwards, in which case it would rise in the…wow, time has been running backwards the whole time!
In the comic book they wasted a year on that…stuff. When I loudly and publicly complained that they had effectively taken the Steve Rogers character out of their comics at the height of his popularity leaving MCU fans with no comics outlet for their interest in the character, the response I received from the creator was that he had a right to do that. I informed him that I also had a right, a right to ridicule him for such arrogant stupidity. Did I mention the sales tanked? Right when they should have peaked given the popularity of the cinema version of the character.
Was it just in the comic books, then? Well then maybe it’s a good thing I never bothered with comic books. And maybe the tanking sales convinced them not to bring it to the movies as well.
Well, that makes sense. It’s just physics.
But what’s up with that Elastigirl?!
The back in time thing is stupid. The movie loses me there.
Well they could have had Superman stop the east-bound missile and still have time to if not totally stop the west-bound missile, at least be in time to rescue Lois. But he had to save that train from derailing, and those kids’ school bus from going off the bridge… And apparently that had to “cost” him something, and then he has to defy his father…
Why?
Because Drama.
For me, it’s not about scientific accuracy (I mean, we’re talking about comic-book superheroes here), but about playing by your own rules. Even if you’re dealing with the equivalent of magic, you have to have rules for what the magic can and can’t do. It’s cheating the audience to suddenly have a character roll out a new power that has never previously been hinted at (like time travel) at the climax of the story. That’s a deus ex machina, and it’s a guaranteed way to lose the goodwill of the audience (at least if the audience is me!).
So, for example, I have no problem with the time-travel capabilities used by Stephen Strange in Marvel’s Doctor Strange. His powers (actually the powers of the Time Stone) have nothing to do with science, but it’s pretty clearly established what the parameters of those powers are, and at the climax of the film he doesn’t suddenly discover any new powers we hadn’t seen before.
As for Superman, we all know his powers, which have been well established for many decades. He is superstrong, superfast, and essentially indestructible; he has super-senses; he can fly; he has X-ray and heat vision. That’s pretty much it. So when he suddenly starts manipulating time, or erasing memories (as he does in Superman II) — with no previous hint that he had any such capabilities — that’s cheating.
In the comics in the decade before the movie Superman had used super hypnosis and broken the time barrier by flying really, really fast on many occasions. It was pretty bizarre though when the movie had him make the Earth travel through time. A psychotic break seems likelier, but that’s why my scripts never sell.
But that’s still wrong. He doesn’t make EARTH travel through time. HE traveled through time.
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlB1PcgkYLU
Over-powering people or things in super-hero or science fiction movies is sort of ‘mission creep’, in that what at first is done as something special eventually becomes a routine plot device that creates more questions than it answers for future scripts.
In Season 1 of the original “Star Trek”, the Enterprise had three time-travel plot turns, with “The Naked Time”, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” and “City on the Edge of Forever”, and in those cases, either the ship is almost destroyed by the time travel efforts or Kirk is mentally wrecked by the results. Jump to the end of Season 2 with “Assignment Earth” and it’s sort of “Ho hum, lets go back to 1968 and see what’s happening“, and when you get to Star Trek IV, Scotty’s giving away the technology for transparent metal, as if potentially changing the time-line of history from the 20th Century on is no big deal.
Same problem character-wise with Rey in “Star Wars”, in large part due to the feminist political demands of Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy. Because she was obsessed with having her hero be the baddest mofo force-sensitive being in the history of the galaxy, Rey kept getting more and more overpowered to the point she was boring, because she could defeat the trilogy’s main bad guy, Kylo, with one hand tied behind her back while sleeping in a barcolounger.
It’s tough for script writers to resist the idea of coming up with new abilities to permit new story plot points, and as a stand-alone one-time thing, it might work. But for something that studios and networks want to be a continuing series, it ruins future stories, either by removing drama from the character or making any drama not worth caring about (i.e. — Why don’t the Trek crews just go back in time and fix things whenever something bad happens, or why should we worry about Rey when we know nothing in the universe will even be able to temporarily defeat her?)
I understand that one of the challenges J.K. Rowling made sure to address in the Harry Potter novels was consistency in what could and could not be accomplished via “wizarding.” I appreciated that she kept certain limits on the powers her characters could exhibit.
Short answer: Paradox.
There’s also something about this in the movie “Dimension 5” with Jeffrey “Captain Christopher Pike” Hunter, 1 or 2 years after he made the first pilot for Star Trek. I think it was supposed to be the pilot for a series, and the potential disaster mentioned never occurred within the movie but probably would have later if it had become a series.
Superman originally couldn’t fly, he could just jump really high. (“Able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound”).
I agree. But the forward in time movie Time After Time with Malcolm McDowell is pretty good. In it H. G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper into the future (of 1979).
Fun film.
You’ve seen it? It’s a secret favorite of mine. And the science is all exact and scrupulously followed. Not like Star Trek at all. Dilithium crystals? Bah!! Give me levers and colored lights every time.
Today’s non-mutant, merely human, “real life” superheroes and supervillains are computer hackers. NCIS Special Agent, Timothy McGee, for example, can hack into the CIA’s computers in just a few seconds. Thomas Gabriel, the baddie in Die Hard 4 (Live Free or Die Hard), was able to control the nation’s entire infrastructure.
With chip implants becoming the new big “thing,” Hollywood’s next set of supervillains will be hacking into people’s brains.
They got into something like that in the started-out-great Fox series Dollhouse, starring the yummy (but apparently bat-guano lefty) Eliza Dushku. Especially in the second season.
Note: AnyONE Can Happen!
It’s based on the Henrik Ibsen play?
Doubtful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollhouse_(TV_series)
What? Physics? You’ve never seen a Warner Brothers cartoon?
I’m also an engineer and I am going to point out why the Six Million Dollar Man didn’t have those problems, and you’re going to feel stupid for not recognizing it. Because he was in slow motion. Duh.
It’s fair to say that no one knows. That was the single stupidest scene in any movie I’ve ever seen. I remember watching that movie the first time and I just couldn’t believe anyone could be so stupid to write that in the script, but I’ve continued to be amazed at how many people, even in a joke, talk about that as something that’s credible.
The physics teacher at my high school was kind of eccentric. He had a theory that ammonia would neutralize CS gas, so when the helicopters were dropping tear gas outside, he would set pans of ammonia in water around the classroom.
The biology teacher was also but differently crazy. I still remember the way he taught us how the endoplasmic reticulum was arranged inside a cell: “Take your girlfriend’s stocking and stir it into a bucket of manure.”
My junior high biology teacher caused a scandal around the time I was in college. He married an 18 year old former student of his. Since the word among students was that he was having sex with former but still under age students, the main surprise was the “married” part.
Really? I gave up and couldn’t stomach watching the last movie. Sounds like I didn’t miss much.
Poul Anderson’s classic essay On Thud and Blunder is relevant outside heroic fantasy, the genre he wrote it for.
Anderson’s degree was in physics and his father was an engineer.
Ever read “Man Of Steel, Woman Of Kleenex?”
Wasn’t it David Warner as Jack the Ripper?