The worst sci-fi movie of all time, according to science
Hollywood has always had a love-hate relationship with science.
In truth, it’s a classic case of “I don’t like you, and you don’t like me”. Most science-fiction movies, despite nodding towards scientific accuracy, heavily favour the “fiction” side of the equation. For the majority of audiences, this doesn’t matter—they’re simply looking for entertainment. But for scientists, who often find it impossible to switch off the analytical part of their brains, watching sci-fi riddled with inaccuracies can be an exercise in frustration.
For years, the movie that most scientists pointed to as the worst example of Hollywood bunk was Michael Bay’s spectacularly implausible Armageddon. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson – who is never afraid to share his opinions on the science quirks of movies – once tweeted that Bay’s asteroid opus “violated more laws of physics per minute than any other film in the universe”.
Amusingly, Tyson’s big problem with Armageddon wasn’t the same one-star Ben Affleck had with it. Affleck could never understand why NASA thought it made more sense to train oil drillers to be astronauts rather than train astronauts to work a drill, and he let Bay know about his confusion on the film’s legendary commentary track. Bay wasn’t having any of it.
Tyson, on the other hand, felt the idea of trying to drill into an asteroid to cause it to explode into a million tiny pieces was a scientific nightmare. Regarding the planet-sized asteroid hurtling its way toward a doomed earth, he told SiriusXM: “All you gotta do is just nudge it, and if you do that early enough, if you nudge it like one centimetre per second to the right, in space, there’s no friction, so it’ll just keep drifting to the right.” In this scenario, the asteroid would simply pass in front of Earth instead of colliding with it.
Tyson likened the notion of drilling into the asteroid to the same Hollywood drive for overkill – or, you know, drama – that James Cameron indulged in with The Terminator. Instead of Skynet sending a cyborg killing machine back in time to kill Sarah Connor before John Connor is born, he argued, “All you have to do is prevent your parents from meeting each other or have them have sex 20 minutes later than the other one. That will create a different zygote, and you won’t be born. So, the movies…get hyperbolic on their solutions to problems.”
In September 2023, though, Tyson laid eyes on a motion picture so scientifically wacky that it made Armageddon look like a documentary. Watching this maddening piece of disaster movie nonsense, which starred Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry, made him think, “Alright, I thought Armageddon had a secure hold on this crown, but apparently not.”
The film was, of course, Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, a truly nutty movie about the moon falling out of its orbit and veering onto a collision course with Earth. This causes gravitational anomalies and seismic events on our planet, but then things get truly crazy when the heroic astronauts and a conspiracy theorist discover that our moon isn’t all it appears to be.
Tyson described what happened next with gently building disbelief. He chuckled: “The moon is approaching Earth, and they learned that it’s hollow and there’s a moon being made out of rocks living inside of it and the Apollo missions were really…to feed the moon being.”
Without trying to sound like a nerd, Tyson’s description of the secret at the heart of Moonfall is actually a bit of an oversimplification. In the film, the moon has a Dyson sphere at its centre, powered by a white dwarf star. It turns out the moon was built by the technologically savvy ancestors of the human race as an interstellar ark designed to seed life on Earth, but a rogue AI swarm discovered this and began siphoning energy from the moon, which caused it to fall out of orbit…
Actually, who are we kidding? Tyson is bang on. According to science, Moonfall is definitely the worst sci-fi film ever.
