In the 1996 action movie “Eraser,” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the muscle-bound good guy who defies all odds to rescue the girl and make the world safe for humanity. You know the one, right. While watching it (again) recently, I realized two things:
- My love affair with Netflix may be problematic.
- The science was wrong.
Number One I can deal with. Number Two I can’t. I’ll get to that in a minute.
When astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson saw director James Cameron’s “Titanic” (1997), he realized the night’s sky was full of random pinpoints of light, not the actual star field the people aboard the sinking Titanic would have seen on April 15, 1912. Tyson called him on it, and when Cameron re-released “Titanic” in 3D, the star field had been corrected.
Although going back to correct stars for the North Atlantic wasn’t necessary (I mean, the movie still grossed $1.84 billion worldwide, right?), good for James Cameron.
The bad science in “Eraser,” however, is egregious.
When Schwarzenegger’s U.S. Marshal John “The Eraser” Kruger is drugged aboard a private jet by good guy-turned-bad guy U.S. Marshal Robert DeGuerin (played by the always spot-on James Caan), he shrugs off the effects of the drugs (I’m not even angry about that), blows the door, and makes his brilliant escape. The brilliance is how a 6’2”, 235-pound man can drop a parachute from a plane, jump after it, and catch up to the chute just in time to slip it on, pull the cord, and land without killing himself.
Our Friend Physics 1: Items of different weights fall at the same rate. Try it. Grab an orange, and a grape. Now drop them. It doesn’t matter how much more the orange weighs, the fruit will land at exactly the same time.
The same goes for a man and a parachute. Although wind resistance can slightly vary the rate at which objects fall, it’s not going to slow the chute, or speed up Schwarzenegger’s character enough to catch it.
Our Friend Physics 2: A private jet has an average cruising speed of 604 mph. Arnold jumped from the jet exactly eight seconds (I timed it) after he dropped the parachute. At 604 mph, eight seconds would put a mile and a half between Arnold and that big old bag of life-saving nylon.
Splat.
It’s easy. Get things right. Your reader may be an astrophysicist, or someone like me, an armchair science enthusiast who got most of his training watching old episodes of “Star Trek.”
It’s not hard. That whacky Internet can help, so can your local library, or better yet, your local university. Universities are filled with experts in almost every field who love to answer questions. In fact, we’re paid to do it.
And this doesn’t just go for science. Get everything right. I grew up on a farm. If I wrote what I was confident about, my stories would involve tractors, arc welding, and animal husbandry. It would get boring after a while.
If you’re going to write about police procedure, and you’ve never been a policeman, ask your local department if you can ride along, or hang out at the station. The same if you’re writing about a doctor, mechanic, airplane pilot, or sideshow freak. Just get it right. There will always be someone in your audience who knows when you’ve made a factual error, and chances are they’ll simply stop reading.
To quote another Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, “Don’t do that.”