A California conference votes Roland Emmerich's disaster movie the most scientifically flawed film ever made
2012, Roland Emmerich's gleefully comprehensive demolition job disaster movie, has been named the most absurd science-fiction film ever by Nasa and the Science and Entertainment Exchange.
The film, which was released in 2009 to groans of guilty pleasure and the healthy ringing of cash registers (it took nearly $800m from a $200m budget), was deemed the silliest and most scientifically flawed film at a conference in California.
Set on 21 December 2012, the film tells the story of John Cusack and Amanda Peet's marital reconciliation, against the backdrop of the end of the world – an effect of mysterious neutrino particles that lay waste to the globe's top tourist attractions.
It was, said head of Nasa's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission Donald Yeomans, an 'exceptional and extraordinary' example of Hollywood bad science. 'The film-makers took advantage of public worries about the so-called end of the world as apparently predicted by the Mayans of Central America, whose calendar ends on December 21, 2012,' Yeomans told newspaper the Australian.
Part of Nasa's gripe with the film, it emerged, was the mushrooming mailbags it had triggered. 'The agency is getting so many questions from people terrified that the world is going to end in 2012 that we have had to put up a special website to challenge the myths. We have never had to do this before.'
They also were unhappy with the use of neutrino particles, which in the film cause solar flares, earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis, but which in fact can't interact with physical substances.
The Day After Tomorrow (global warming, accelerated), The Sixth Day (insta-clones), Chain Reaction (bubble fusion), The Core (magnetic field trouble), What the Bleep Do We Know? (billed as a documentary) and The Volcano (LA sprouts a volcano) were also singled out for their factual shortcomings. Armageddon – in which an astroid the size of Texas is blown to bits to save our planet – was the most surprising inclusion on the damned list, as Nasa originally supported the film.
The agency had praise, however, for the attention to scientific accuracy exhibited in Gattaca (recruitment via DNA), Blade Runner, Metropolis and Jurassic Park.
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