Physicist — and arguably cinematic wet blanket — Neil deGrasse Tyson has traditionally been quick to point out scientific inaccuracies in films, but he’s giving Halle Berry‘s 2022 dud Moonfall a top honor.
Well, dishonor, really: He says the movie co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich has dethroned 1998’s Armageddon as the movie that “violates the most laws of physics per minute.”
Tyson’s review of Moonfall, on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show, sounds like a bad Hollywood pitch meeting — but bear in mind, somebody bought this pitch: “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 visit, to feed the moon being.”
The scientist laughs, “I just couldn’t.”
Tyson continues, “I thought Armageddon had a secure hold on this crown” of the least science-y science fiction movie, “but apparently not.”
Armageddon posited there was a killer asteroid on a collision course with Earth, so it was up to a ragtag group of oil-working roughnecks — led by Bruce Willis — to go to space and plant a bomb in the rock.
In reality, Tyson explains, that’s far too complicated a solution. “All you gotta do is just nudge it, and if you do that early enough, if you nudge it like 1 centimeter per second to the right, in space there’s no friction, so it’ll just keep drifting to the right.”
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