Category Archives: Movie reviews

I have mixed feelings about this movie.  It has some great physics in it, things no film has tried to portray this accurately before.  But it also has some far-fetched aspects and Hollywood touches that detract from the overall experience … Continue reading →

I really like this movie; it’s the closest any feature presentation has come to showing what the life of an astronomer is really like. That’s probably because the movie is based on a novel written by the eminent astrophysicist Carl … Continue reading →

Assignment: After reading Ch. 24 of “Bad Astronomy” by Philip Plait, write a blog review of tonight’s feature film commenting specifically, citing scenes and examples, on how this movie stacks up against Plait’s “Top Ten Examples of Bad Astronomy in Major … Continue reading →

Thematically, this week’s feature deals with the morality of having scientists design and build weapons of mass destruction. Many scientists who do this hide behind one of the moral shields presented in “Fat Man and Little Boy”: the scientists are … Continue reading →

There is plenty of bad physics in this movie, enough that we could make an assignment of just trying to find as many examples as we can. However, there is a deeper issue in the movie – that of global … Continue reading →

This week’s feature film was Ad Astra, which, by the way, is a fantastic title for a movie. It’s Latin for “to the stars,” though it is commonly part of a longer phrase, “ad astra per aspera” or “to the … Continue reading →

OK, there are plenty of things to criticize about this movie from a physics perspective, but at least they get off on the right foot. The opening sequence describes pretty well the event most scientists believe killed off the dinosaurs … Continue reading →

You could substitute just about any action movie here. Anything starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, etc. should do fine. They all have the same cliches and the same bad examples of physics. The two … Continue reading →

I’m not really interested in entering into a debate on where this particular movie ranks in the “Mission Impossible” pantheon. I do feel this one has a stronger cast of characters than I remember from the earlier ones. Ving Rhames … Continue reading →