What sci-fi movies get wrong, and what they get right.

If there’s one thing us STEM students love more than science, it’s movies about science; it's within these worlds that viewers can truly lose themselves. The goal is to find a film that perfects the balance between real and fake, just on this side of inspirational, without being unrealistic. These visually and conceptually fantastic movies don’t compromise scientific realism and still leave the viewer with a thirst to research more.

But, just as fast as sci-fi movies can draw audiences in, they can spit them right back out. Once you realize just how absurd the premise of a given plot is, you think to yourself, “that could never happen in real life.” 

The magic dissipates and the mountain of physics homework you were procrastinating with movie consumption, draws ever closer as the construct of cinema shuts down.

Below is a review of four movies. Some fostered scientific inspiration, with minimal inaccuracies and plots so incredible you lose yourself, while others would make any self-respecting scientist cringe a little at the screen. 

WARNING: Reader discretion advised. The remainder of this article contains plot spoilers so beware if you haven’t watched any of the movies below!

The Martian 

When rewatching The Martian, both author Andy Weir and director Ridley Scott’s attention to detail was immediately evident. Even if we are decades away from feasible space exploration to Mars, everything in the film seemed reasonably plausible. 

Weir explained during a talk at Google that the most important thing to him was ensuring the content of the original book was “as scientifically accurate as possible.”

In the film adaptation, botanist and astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after a storm forces his crew to evacuate the planet. His team, believing that he is dead, begins their voyage home, before quickly realizing that Watney is in fact still alive. In order to survive, Watney has to make an unlivable planet livable, through…science!

Perhaps the most glaring scientific misstep in both the book and the movie is cosmic and solar radiation — or lack thereof. 

Earth’s magnetic field deflects much of the cosmic radiation organisms would otherwise be exposed to. However, Mars and space lack this feature which means the cosmic radiation in the form of gamma rays, solar flares and other charged particles would have been able to breach the layers on both the suits and the spaceships that held the astronauts. The spacecraft in the movie has way too many windows for the journey to have been feasible for the astronauts.

But giving the creators the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the fictional NASA scientists created an ultra-reflective material to house the Hermes spacecraft and the living quarters on Mars, more advanced than the blocking technology we currently have. 

One of the main challenges Watney faces is trying to grow crops on Mars as his rations would not last him the duration of his stay. He utilizes his own organic material (i.e. his and his crewmates poop) mixed with nitrogen packets as makeshift fertilizer for the potato roots he hopes to grow on the Martian soil. 

He then synthesizes water by combining his hydrazine rocket fuel (N2H4) at high temperatures in an oxygen-rich environment. This reaction produces N2 and H2O, the latter of which he uses to hydrate his potato plants. 

At first, the reaction causes a large explosion which Watney credits to excess O2 in his breathing. This is definitely a plausible source for extra ignition, especially since the hydrazine is so reactive with air. This reaction is used in some real-life industrial applications, for example in generating thrust in rocket propulsion and scavenging errant oxygen molecules to prevent rust. The movie, however, did exaggerate the amount of water this reaction would have produced.

Additionally, the soil composition as detailed in the movie is pretty accurate to the reality of Mars.

The silica rich soil on Mars would be suitable for farming, but is missing the key organic component that exists on Earth. Therefore, Watney’s addition of his fecal matter makes sense as a fertilizer and could feasibly work in real life. 

Lastly, in an effort to save Watney, the crew of the Hermes used something called the “Rich Purnell Maneuver,” accelerating rather than decelerating when approaching Earth’s atmosphere. They then utilized the gravitational pull of the earth to accelerate them in the other direction back to Mars, thereby reaching Watney on Sol 561 (one Sol is a Martian day, i.e. ~1.028 Earth days).

Weir actually went into great details about the maneuver in a talk he gave at Google, where he used a simulation program called Orbits to correctly time the spacecraft’s trajectory. See the full trajectory here. 

Lauren Burke, a scientist at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, also analyzed the trajectory of the spacecraft in a 2015 research paper. After making the underlying assumptions included within the novel, Burke used computer simulations to confirm that the Purnell Maneuver was, in fact, physically consistent with universal laws and the fuel available to the Hermes spacecraft. 

The main inconsistency that Burke saw was that the new trajectory would have put the crew within Venus’s orbit, exposing them to high levels of radiation and temperature. But, as aforementioned, the strength and reflective quality of the materials protecting the astronauts are unknown. 

Just as Weir intended, The Martian is science fiction of the highest quality, utilizing a multitude of scientific processes to make the book as realistic as possible, while also showing viewers the realm of what could one day be possible: interplanetary space travel. 

Interstellar

In the fictional universe of “Interstellar,” blight has eradicated the existence of crops, leaving only corn dust storms that lead to errant pulmonary disease and the death of millions. 

One major plot point in the movie is the introduction of clumps of sand in distinct line patterns of varying thicknesses in a character’s bedroom, theorizing that gravitational perturbations can exist in nature. This idea that gravity can be “stronger” in some areas and “weaker” in others is worthy of dissection, as this opposes the accepted fact that gravity is a fundamental property of mass and energy, immune to manipulation. 

Another gravitational anomaly highlighted in the movie is the “wormhole”. In “Interstellar,” the protagonist group uses a wormhole to travel light-years away from Earth and seek potentially habitable planets.

A nice way to visualize wormholes is by drawing two points on a paper, folding the paper in such a way that the two points are on top of each other, and puncturing a hole through those two dots. A traversable wormhole does exactly this, warping spacetime like the piece of paper, to transport objects from one point to another. 

Theoretically, this idea is known as an Einstein-Rosen (ER) Bridge. However, ER bridges have not been fully proven, as any calculations have required negative energy density to ensure that the bridge would not pinch in and collapse. 

“Interstellar” works around these obstacles by stating that unnamed higher-dimensional beings have placed the wormhole and maneuvered gravity to aid humans in seeking habitable planets. This acknowledges the real-life impossibility of such events while allotting for the movie to evade such a clear plot hole — pun intended.

In addition to this theoretical “tunnel” — wormhole — that the main characters utilize as a travel shortcut, one character in particular, Joseph Cooper, accidentally enters a black hole called Gargantua.

However, in defiance of the theory of spaghetti-fication, Cooper is not stretched into an unrecognizably thin noodle — or at all for that matter. He does not get sphagettified.

Through Cooper’s highly unrealistic and unlikely survival, “Interstellar” can indulge in the fiction part of sci-fi, entertaining the possibility of what it would be like to journey through a black hole.

The black hole, Gargantua, quickly transforms into a tesseract, a four-dimensional object analogous to a cube, with the fourth dimension being time. In the tesseract, Cooper sees snapshots of his daughter Murphy’s bedroom from different times. This scientific interpretation of a tesseract, with one of the dimensions being traversable time, is a theoretical concept that we will never be able to experience nor prove, as humans are immutably 3-dimensional beings. 

Although Gargantua was devised so that no human would be spaghettified — unless they were closer to the event horizon than scientists in real life theorize would be necessary to instigate spaghettification — there are other parameters that the film missed when scripting its characters explore habitable planets around a black hole. 

Gargantua is descibed to rotate at a=0.998 with a mass of 100 million suns. It has an accretion disk that has gas rotating around it at very high velocities, causing the material to heat up and radiate in the electromagnetic spectrum. Most radiation that comes from accreting supermassive black holes is usually in the X-ray band. 

In a recent talk by Kip Thorne, the executive director of “Interstellar” and Nobel Prize laureate, he affirmed that humans in real life would have a hard time living on the discovered planet closest to Gargantua, Miller’s Planet due to the photons being blue-shifted when emitted from the accretion disk — transforming the photons to become soft X-rays.

Another possible planet for human’s fictional migration, Dr. Wolf’s Planet (furthest from Gargantua), proves to be a scientifically accurate representation of a planet that would be habitable in a system with a black hole and a main-sequence star — which could serve as the “sun” in the system. 

The film’s approach in creating an environment for astronauts to explore habitable planets, with a supermassive black hole at the center, has proven to be quite successful. Parameters such as, the spin of the black, mass, accretion disk characteristics, distance,and including a main-sequence star allows for this system to be within astrophysical limits. 

Surely, if higher-dimensional beings were so kind as to place a stable wormhole in our Milky Way universe then our interstellar travel to such an environment would be plausible. But as of now, humans would be unable to sustain such long travels with the limitations of our current technology. 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Both “The Martian” and “Interstellar” have presented many real scientific concepts, with mildly exaggerated or minimized facets in the name of science fiction. However, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” rests on the other side of the spectrum — fun and entertaining, but overwhelmingly incorrect in the sense of quantum science. 

Of course, the obvious unscientific part of the movie is the shrinking itself — if one was even able to shrink to the size detailed within the movie, their mass would remain constant, meaning that an enormous amount of pressure would be exerted on whatever material they stood on. 

The movie remedies this problem with the introduction of a fictional “Pym particle,” that reduces the user’s mass and density proportional to their shrinking. While convenient, this particle, of course, is fake and rendered useless in terms of real-life applicability. 

Additionally, Scott Lang, or Ant-man, encounters quite a few weird creatures in his journeys into the “quantum realm” (the “quantum realm” is not real, by the way). One of these creatures is a tardigrade, a real life animal found on the micrometer scale. 

However, the micrometer as a unit of measurement is much bigger than the size where quantum effects occur. The tardigrade, therefore, would not exist at such a small scale, meaning that the quantum creatures Lang encounters are not scientifically tenable. 

The movie also discusses a multitude of other quantum mechanical topics like superposition quantum entanglement and quantum tunneling. 

Quantum entanglement has arguably one of the most humorous uses in the film. In reality, when two or more particles become quantumly entangled, they remain linked, no matter how far away the particles are from each other. Observations of one of the particles can automatically provide information about the other, regardless of the distance between them. 

Ant Man and the Wasp, however, conflates this idea, in an “invasion of the body snatchers”-esque take on quantum entanglement. Another character takes over Lang’s body, becoming “entangled quantumly.” This plot point is completely unfounded as consciousnesses cannot become entangled, and therefore a person cannot take over another’s consciousness through quantum science.

Albeit, it does make for a pretty fun movie concept. 

The thing that Ant-Man and the Wasp’s adventure gets the most correct is just how weird the “quantum realm” is. 

Richard Feynman, a famous physicist and one of the greatest contributors to the field of quantum mechanics, is famously quoted in his 1964 lecture at MIT, saying, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” He explains that quantum mechanics is incredibly counterintuitive, with its central tenet being that observation changes the state of the particle, and that a particle can indeed be two things at once. 

“Quantumania” is not accurate scientifically in the sense of real quantum concepts, but it is true that the normal laws of physics wouldn’t apply in the theoretical and nonexistent “quantum realm,” and would take tolls on the human body. 

Even if there was a real “quantum realm,” no human would ever be able to experience it. But, as Marvel utilizes magic, super strength injections, infinity stones and a talking raccoon in its other franchises, the quantum realm doesn’t seem all too farfetched.

Arrival 

Director Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” opens with the appearance of alien spaceships in 12 places around the world. In reaction, the United States government hires linguist Louise Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly, played by Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner respectively, to communicate with the aliens and find out their intentions on Earth. 

Banks figures out the differences between the aliens' spoken and written languages, and starts to become well-versed in communicating with the aliens through writing. However, as the movie progresses, we find out that the aliens’ language is not linear in nature — it does not depend on time in the same way it does for humans. 

The aliens in the film look nothing like humans. They are heptapods with completely different mechanisms for eating, speaking, and communicating. This depiction is not only possible, but more probable than the humanoid figures aliens frequently shown as in popular media. There are trillions of combinations of figures with mechanisms capable of sustaining life, not exclusive to humanistic traits.

So, the movie gets the appearance of the aliens correct in a way, simply because they are so different from humans. 

“Stories of Your Life,” a short story by popular science fiction writer Ted Chiang, was the initial inspiration for the film’s production. Most of the scientific principles of the heptapods' consciousness and language are skipped in the movie, probably due to the time intensive nature of translating these principles for a wider audience. 

However, in the short story, Chiang goes into great detail about the non-linear nature of the heptapods’ perspective. He illustrates this by having Donnelly, the physicist, explain Fermat’s Principle, a scientific tenet that light will always travel between two points along the path that requires the least amount of time. 

This principle of least time is a central concept to the modern calculus of variations, which is used in physical mechanics to extremize any path (i.e. minimize or maximize any path). The heptapods understand this concept as elementary, even though in human style mathematics, calculus of variations requires a large understanding of vector and multivariable calculus. 

While the heptapods are able to digest Fermat’s Principle seemingly easily, they’re unable to understand comparably simplistic mathematical concepts from a human perspective, like algebra or arithmetic. Both of these processes take linear steps to get the correct answer.

This idea is the first clue that the scientists receive about the heptapods’ perspective of time; just like the light rays in Fermat’s principle, the heptapods already “know” their final destination.

The aliens have a simultaneous viewpoint of time, meaning that the past, present, and future are all interconnected and ongoing. This concept is hard to imagine, as the monotonically increasing state of time is one of the most central facets of the human experience — we will live and we will die, and we will experience many things in between. We do not know when they will happen, or how they will happen, but we must go through all of it to experience just some of it. 

Banks notices this anti-chronological quality in the heptapods’ writing system as well, which is shown as large black circles with small addendums denoting words or phrases. However, due to their previously mentioned simultaneous perspective of time, there is no linear order to their sentence structure.

As Banks spends more and more time with the aliens’ language, she too begins seeing her life in this simultaneous perspective of time, jumping to scenes in her past and future, as she currently experiences the present. Banks’ flashbacks and flashforwards lead to a climactic scene where she finally finds out the alien’s true intentions — to ask humans for help 3,000 years in the future. 

Banks’ experience is related to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a linguistic theory that says that the language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. This theory is also called the linguistic relativity theory, and is detailed in the movie when Banks first starts experiencing time simultaneity. 

The largest piece of science fiction is in fact Banks’ transition to a simultaneous time perspective: humans simply do not have the ability to experience time in this way. 

Exceedingly, “Arrival” tips more on the fiction side than the science side, but the principles utilized in the short story and film — the appearance of the aliens, the time dynamics, the linguistic theory — are all ongoing areas of study that could one day prove the real-life existence of aliens who experience simultaneous time. 

The point of “Arrival” was not for it to be incredibly scientifically accurate, but to instead display important ideas about the human experience and memory: How lucky we are to not know what comes next, to be endlessly surprised by everything as we experience it. 

Conclusion

“The Martian,” “Interstellar,” “Quantumania” and “Arrival” are just a few of the many sci-fi movies that push the boundaries of science. Theoretical questions are taken to another level of cinematic representation.

This doesn’t mean that directors shouldn’t go above and beyond with their imaginations, and if anything, we urge them to do so — but misinformation of scientific concepts can skew both the interpretation of the film and the audience’s takeaway when watching. 

Cinematic experiences can be elevated simply through connecting the theoretical scientific questions with unreal creative visualization, an experience in which the viewer can leave the theater with burning questions of the plot and how it connects to our world. Traveling to the quantum realm and using quantum entanglement to travel through a space almost instantaneously honestly sounds like an amazing ride –- but the strength of this viewing experience could have been further amplified if we knew that, someday in the future it could be possible.

In our opinion, science fiction movies’ primary responsibility is to serve as a catalyst for more impossible questions humanity wishes to solve, driving an excitement that traverses through the masses and makes our imaginations tangible.