When your film and physics class collide
Three months after everybody else, B. and I went to see The Hulk last week. We both liked Ang Lee’s previous movies and we thought it would be fun to see a big green guy walking the streets of San Francisco.
The movie is an unhappy mixture of bad psychology, silly computer graphics and overall green confusion. As we were coming out of the theater, B. told me about how absolutely crazy it was to imagine that such a big guy could just take huge leaps to move from one spot to another. I thought B. was a bit crazy to get hooked on this one detail, when all the rest of the screenplay was a big mess anyway.
Well, I’m afraid he’s not alone. Via Good Morning Silicon Valley, I found a Web site called Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. Mega-nerds do movie reviews with the physics angles in mind, and boy, it’s even sillier than the movies they comment on! Here’s what they have to say regarding the leaps B. was complaining about:
The Hulk’s ability to make these huge leaps is itself absurd. Yes, increased size typically does imply increased strength but as mentioned earlier, weight increases faster than strength. If increasing size also increased jumping ability then elephants would be able to out-leap impalas. The only solution would be for the Hulk’s muscle to become, pound for pound, several orders of magnitude stronger than human muscles. There’s no biological creature on Earth which has muscle even close to this level of strength.
That’s nothing. You should see the formulas they come up with to explain how bullets do not create bright flashes of light when they touch a surface. Or even better, read what they came up with about The Matrix.
