Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction
One of the
most familiar laws of physics we feel in our everyday life is gravity, followed
by inertia. It's defined as a force of
attraction. Gravity is important for
keeping things in place and in control.
Without gravity we would have no weight.
We wouldn't even have a solar system, instead it would just be specs of
matter. Without gravity an object in motion would move at a constant regular
speed, it would never speed up or slow down.
If however that object was hit, how resistant it is to the change in
motion would be defined by inertia. If
we look at this in film the easiest way to see it would be when something goes
up, how far does it go before gravity pulls it back down and when it comes back
down how much force does it hit ground with when it lands? How does it's force affect the object it
lands on? Would it break it? Would it bounce off it? Would it push it in another direction? In other words: Speedy object goes up, speedy
object comes down, speedy object comes in contact with a larger more solid
object and bounces to a stop. Special
effects have come a long way and have allowed filmmakers to exaggerate, bend
and even break the laws of physics more realistically than ever before. However the mastery in the craft is how well
they can pull the viewer out of reality and make us believe that what we're
seeing is indeed physically possible. It's
not uncommon for a make believe scene to be completely believable. How believable these scenes are is based on
how well the anticipation to the climax is built up. To argue the point we can look at a few key
scenes from Event Horizon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Iron Man.
Event
Horizon is a Sci Fi Horror film that was released in 1997. It takes place in the year 2047 and the story
revolves around the mystery of a exploration spaceship named the Event
Horizon. Seven years prior to the
beginning of the story (2040) the Event Horizon set out to explore the outer limits
of our solar system and mysteriously disappears. Seven years later a decaying radio signal
just outside Neptune orbit gets received and is identified as the Event
Horizon. Upon receiving the transmission
a major space company sends out a search and rescue team to search and assist
the crew of the Event Horizon. Upon
reaching the Event Horizon, the rescue team finds that the Event Horizon is
empty and powered down, only having enough power to send out its radio
signal. As they search the Event Horizon
they find the captain of the ships corpse mutilated, frozen and floating in the
cockpit of the Event Horizon. Shortly
after, they power up the Event Horizon and restore gravity and when they do the
body falls, hits the floor and shatters.
The main problem
with this scene is that even though the body is frozen, it only falls a few
feet, probably no more than two to three feet.
We know that a flash frozen cadaver dropped from the same distance (a
waist high gurney) bounces, not break or shatter. In class it was demonstrated that a onion
frozen in liquid nitrogen would indeed fall and shatter. So why not a human body? Because the body is frozen the effects of
inertia might be more sever since it's not soft and able to absorb and distribute the energy
produced by the impact and distribute it like a normal soft human body would.
Even at best the body still won't shatter mainly because of the bone structure,
it may break in a few weaker jointed areas if dropped from a exceptionally high
location, but it will still bounce. To
test this Dr. Allfred from the BYU Physics department froze a turkey in liquid
nitrogen, and it dropped it off the roof of the building. It breaks into a few pieces but still remains
largely intact. If a turkey dropped from
a few stories doesn't shatter then it's highly unlikely that a human body would
if it falls from a few feet. A human
body falling from a few feet just wouldn't generate enough inertia to break
under the force generated by a sudden stop, if it would, us living unfrozen
bodies might be in some trouble with the amount of damage tripping over our
feet, or even just jumping could inflict.
Pirates Of
The Caribbean 3: At Worlds End is the final film in the original Pirates Of The
Caribbean trilogy. The film is about the
desperate struggle between the freedom that pirates enjoy as a major trading
company is trying to put an end to piracy and control the oceans. The main plot of the story revolves around
bringing a now dead jack sparrow back to life and getting all the pirate
leaders in one location to make a big decision on how best to handle their
current predicament, fight the company, free a heathen god that they trapped,
or stay in their hidden fortress to do nothing but try to wait the companies
armada out. But like a true story of
people who live dishonest lives, some have decided to side with the company and
of course Jack Sparrow is in high demand on both sides. In an escape scene after being captured by
the company, there's a stunt where Jack makes his way to the deck of the ship
where he takes a cannon, removes its restrains and readies it to fire. He ties a rope to the cannon and throws the
rope over a sail arm (as if it were a pulley) and holds onto it as he fires the
cannon and uses the force generated by the recoil to be lifted off the deck of
the ship he is on and hurled over to the deck of the Black Pearl.
The recoil
of a cannon is pretty powerful. I think
it's safe to assume that Jack Sparrow weighs somewhere between 160-200 pounds,
so I'll call it at 180 to be in the middle.
At first this looks to be impossible so we have to barrow from the laws
of action/reaction and recoil while remembering that inertia is how resistant
an object, in this case Jack Sparrow, is to movement when force is applied on
it. Recoil speed is (Bullet/Gun Weight
Ratio) x (Bullet Speed) meaning that the recoil speed of the cannon would be
one hundred times less than the speed of the cannonball Jack fires (as
explained in one of our class lectures).
With this in mind we need the recoil of the shot to be strong enough to
pull Jack off his feet, into the air and propel him to the Black Pearl. So if we fired a shot one hundred feet per
second using a thirty two pound cannon and twelve pound ball then (12/32)x(100)
equals a recoil speed of 37.5 ft per second or 25.6 miles per hour. This might be enough to lift Jack off his
feet with the use of a pulley. We can't
forget that Jack is standing still, and the rope isn't moving either and both
are pulled and propelled at that speed from a dead stop. Jack standing still holding the rope could
just fly with it, but because of the inertia generated by the sudden jerk, his
hand would probably get burnt by the rope making this a very painful
experience. If someone is willing to try
this I'd be very interested to see how it turns out.
In the first
Iron Man film, lead character Tony Stark makes many big jumps and many big
falls, and seems to walk away from each one with no injuries. At the beginning of the film we see Tony
Stark giving a weapons demonstration to the army to demonstrate the destructive
power of a new missile developed by his company. After the demonstration his army escort is
attacked by rebels in the desert and he is kidnapped and fatally injured by
some shrapnel which leads him to develop a small clean energy reactor that
powers an electromagnet to stop the shrapnel buried in his chest from reaching
his vital organs. With the reactor he
also begins to develop an armored suit to use to break free from his
kidnappers. In the final scene where he
escapes his kidnappers, he blows up their artillery and then presses a few
buttons to ignite some thrusters and flies into the air. As he's flying you see him fly clear of the
explosions and over the ridge of a mountain, and then crash. The time between take off to crash is
eighteen seconds, and we can see that he flies up into a arc, so we can safely
assume nine seconds from ground to apex, and nine seconds from apex to ground. In class we learned that it would take five
and a half seconds to fall forty stories, and three and a half seconds for
twenty stories. A large variable in the
scene is the suit, we don't know how much it weighs, and we don't know how well
it absorbs and distributes the force generated by the crash. But we do know that in reality Iron Man
wouldn't survive a ten story crash, which was something else that was explained
in class. We also know that the heavier
an object is the faster it falls and reaches its terminal velocity, and the
first Iron Man suit looks very clunky and very heavy (Tony Stark even requires
mechanical help to move in) which would cause Tony Stark to fall faster, and
decrease the amount of time it would take for him to reach his terminal
velocity. Chances are that there is no
way that Tony Stark could survive the crash, and one other important thing in
the scene to take into account is how he lands when he crashes. In the scene Tony Stark doesn't land on his
feet, he crashes face first, even if he survived the initial crash he would
most likely die from injuries resulting from the crash shortly after. But in the film, we see him stuck in the
ground as if he landed feet first and unharmed.
How
believable these scenes are is based on how well the anticipation to the climax
is built up. In Event Horizon we know
that the corpse is frozen and floating in zero gravity. But before the climax of the scene where it
drops, we see it many times as a plant to instill a certain amount of uneasiness
in the viewer, and when we find out that their turning the gravity on, we know
that corpse is going to drop. As we
predict this, we also get to see it happen, and maybe we are left with a
certain amount of uneasiness as it shatters and maybe even shock. In Pirates of the Caribbean 3 we see Jack
throw the rope over the sail arm and tie it to the cannon and know what he's
planning to do. Before he fires the
cannon he has a small conversation with the person in charge of the
company. He could have very easily just
ignored him and fired the cannon and taken off, but this small conversation
serves the purpose of dragging out the anticipation and making us wait to see
it happen. And when it does we're even
more entertained and are taken out of the moment and forget what might really
happen if someone attempted this. In
Iron Man we see this incredibly heavy and clunky armor suit take off and
fly. As we watch it take off there's a
certain amount of disbelief that this armored suit could really fly. As we watch it fly we realize there's no way
it can go very far and then suddenly its propulsion systems cut out and we get
to watch it do what we knew it would do when it took off which is crash. If these scenes were rushed they probably
wouldn't feel as real and might remove us from the film and remind us that what
we're watching isn't reality but a work of fiction and don't need to believe
what we're seeing because it is fiction.
And if an audience doesn't believe what their seeing is real, then
where's the entertainment value of a film, and what's the point of paying to
see a movie?
Final word count: 2,095
I tried to get the scene from Event Horizon that I talked about but unfortunately it is not posted on the internet and I don't have the film available in a format I can work from. But here's the test from BYU that I mentioned in my paper.
This is the scene where Jack escapes from the Endeavor
Here's the scene from Iron Man where Tony Stark escapes from the rebels. The scene underneath is a segment from a Mythbusters episode where they dropped 2 pigs from 600 feet on to pavement and into water and compare the damage each sustained. While not entirely accurate, these drops should give us a good idea of how severe the damage a real Tony Stark would have taken in his crash.
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