10 Crazy Examples of Horrible Movie Science

Everybody's day was about to take a turn for the worse ...

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If there's one thing that crops up again and again as the Achilles' heel of Hollywood writers, it's science. Or, to be clear, accurate science. There's no shortage of go-to ideas for crippling a spaceship, say with a physically impossible conflagration bright enough to burn your retinas and loud enough to shred your eardrums to confetti. And there are also crafty (but still impossible) ways to save that same ship, like by blowing it right past the speed of light or shooting it through a wormhole created with a torpedo and some cinema magic.

For moviegoers, it basically boils down to this: The general population enjoys the spectacle of action-packed scripts. The scientific community wants to see the world in a way that's at least marginally believable, without any huge infractions against the basic rules of physics, math, biology and chemistry.

We can't undo all the factual wrongs in these movies, but we can explain just how preposterous they are in these 10 examples.

TITANIC

The sky in "Titanic" doens't look exactly like this, but you get the idea.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson is arguably one of the most popular debunkers of sloppy science. Much to Jon Stewart's chagrin (and hardly contained amusement) Tyson has pointed out on multiple occasions that the globe shown during the opening segment of "The Daily Show" is merrily whirling in the wrong direction.

But then there was the bogus skyscape seen above theshipwreck in "Titanic" – Tyson saucily took affront to that, especially because director James Cameron is such a stickler for details. According to Tyson, not only are the stars all wrong for that time and location, they're also mirrored from the middle. So the sky was basically a finger-painted Rorschach test.

Cameron was perhaps a tad irked by Tyson's so-called snarky reprimand, but, all the same, the 2012 rerelease of "Titanic" featured a much more scientifically copasetic starlight