The least accurate director in cinema history, according to science
It goes without saying that movies don’t need to be entirely scientifically accurate, especially the ones whose primary function is to entertain an audience.
Does it matter that the science in Michael Bay’s Armageddon is so laughable that it leads to a story with holes so enormous a rocket ship could be piloted through them? No, because the movie is a big, loud, cheesy blast from start to finish.
Naturally, though, some filmmakers are allowed to strive for more scientific rigour, if that tickles their fancy. Christopher Nolan, for example, prides himself on the science in movies like Interstellar and Oppenheimer (mostly) standing up to scrutiny. However, he’s not above fudging the details in the name of entertainment.
Similarly, Ridley Scott mightn’t give a hoot about historical accuracy, but give him a movie like The Martian, which is all about how science saves the day for an astronaut stranded on Mars, and he’ll strive to stick to reality as closely as possible. Interestingly, The Martian was so rigorous that famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson excitedly described its science as “balls-on accurate”, which isn’t exactly a descriptor many would associate with such a learned man.
Still, he loved how Scott adhered so closely to Andy Weir’s source novel, and noted, “The author was an engineer-turned-novelist. He did all the calculations, so the science is accurate”.
Fascinatingly, while Nolan and Scott fall on Tyson’s good side, and Bay was accused of violating “more laws of physics per minute than any movie” in history, there is another director whose flagrant and repeated disregard for science has always made Bay seem like a professor of mechanical engineering by comparison. That man gifted the world with the gleefully preposterous likes of Independence Day, Stargate, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012. Yes, we are talking about everyone’s favourite German disaster maestro, Roland Emmerich.
In his career, Emmerich has enlisted science, in very loose terms, to tell large-scale stories about wormholes in time and space, an enormous kaiju stomping New York City to smithereens, aliens invading Earth, climate change leading to a new ice age, and the ancient Mayan prophecy that the world would end in 2012.
All of these films played fast and loose with the science, but according to Tyson, Emmerich’s worst offender in this regard was 2022’s Moonfall, which starred Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson. It followed two former astronauts who travelled to the moon to investigate after it fell out of orbit, creating gravitational anomalies and seismic events on Earth. Once there, the intrepid spacefarers discovered the moon was built centuries ago by the technologically advanced ancestors of the human race to serve as an interstellar ark seeding life on Earth.
However, a rogue AI swarm began siphoning energy from the moon, leading to a baffled Tyson recounting how “a moon being made out of rocks” was living inside the hollow satellite, and “the Apollo missions were really…to feed the moon being”. Naturally, this was all wild sci-fi nonsense, and Tyson wasn’t having any of it. “The moon was hollow, and there’s a moon creature?” he scoffed, “Sorry, I can’t go there”.
Amusingly, Emmerich was also once accused of disregarding science in a historical context with his film 10,000 BC. Dr Dennis Stanford, a curator of archaeology at the Smithsonian museum, told Entertainment Weekly, “There wasn’t a scene that I saw that was anywhere near accurate”.
For instance, in the movie, prehistoric humans hunted woolly mammoths for sport, yet science dictated that mammoths were largely extinct by that point. The film also asserted that its main character could walk from a frozen wasteland and, in a matter of days, find himself in a baking hot desert, despite the fact that at that time, 30% of the entire planet was still blanketed entirely in ice. Oh, Roland.
