Scientific Fact or Cinematic Fiction

It’s surprising how easy people can believe stuff in fiction that wouldn’t be possible in real life, and
yet all it takes is a little reworking and people will eat that all up. When woven in with how the story
world and storytelling work, its rather easy to make an audience believe what the director wants them
to, especially with something people aren’t too familiar with, interacting with extreme heat. And when
the purpose of a movie is to entertain, who can complain?

The first scene comes from The Core, a movie that already takes several different concepts about the
Earth and does implausible things with it, be it from making a drill that can go to the center of the Earth,
to making the core stop and start spinning by nuking it. However the scene we’ll be analyzing is when
Braz Burns goes to manually override a particular function of the drill to preserve power.

In order to do this, he goes into a part of the drill that isn’t cooled. Here, it’s 9000 degrees fahrenheit.
He’s shown wearing a suit as he does his task, and then collapses after doing so, dying when the crew
allows the section to be filled with magma. There’s no way he would have survived long enough to
perform his task. Even with the suit he would have died the minute he stepped out. The air would have
vaporized his lungs. But at this point the movie has already set a standard so absurd that we don’t
question what’s going on. Most deaths from lava in movies occur when in direct contact with it,
not prior due to heat. In The Core though, with scenes like the crew being stuck in a geode as big as
a building, it’s easy to see why people don’t question it. Or rather, people accept that this is the movie’s
standard and roll with it because the concepts of the film are cool.

In a similar fashion, Gollum’s iconic death in Lord of the Rings is accepted, but isn’t nearly
as accurate. The audience feels a tension as Gollum dies watching his precious ring, but really,
he wouldn’t even sink into the lava. The density of lava is 1000 kg/m3 while the density of a
person’s body is relatively x1000 less dense.

Gollum would remain above the lava, burning alive, maybe even dead before he hit the lava, with
the ring sinking into the lava first as gold is denser than lava. But this would dramatically take away
from the climax that this scene gives, and someone sinking into lava is such a consistent move in
movies and other media that people have generally accepted that when you fall into lava, you sink
and die. But the ring falling in first and Gollum boiling on top, dead before he even hit the lava,
would be traumatic to say the least and it’s easy to see why this movie didn’t abide by heat or lava
physics here. It wouldn’t really fit the prophetic feel of the movie either, which pretty much calls
for a dramatic and more fantastical ending.

Going back aways, when science fiction and fantasy weren’t all that different, we have the old
work of Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth. In this 1959 classic the crew escapes
Atlantis by setting off an explosion that triggers an earthquake and they ride up the volcanic shaft
up to the surface on an old metal Atlantean disk of some sort.

Now, the work of Verne was written long ago, near the time when sci-fi was just becoming a genre.
By itself it’s not exactly inaccurate, by Verne’s time. So in context, the audience is already aware of
Verne’s outlandish stories, more fantasy than sci-fi in some ways and accepts it in the name of “it’s
a classic”. That being said, there are a number of reasons, aside from the obvious fact Atlantis could
not exist in the Earth’s core, for why this scene would not work and that these people would die.
For one, the metal disk is incredibly old. It would have more than likely have crumbled when things
started shaking. Metal also transfers heat very well. On the way up the shaft, considering the disk
didn’t crumble, the crew would have boiled as if on a skillet. And last to say the least, being shot
into the air from the volcano in Italy would have killed them, be it from the gases, or from the fall.

There’s a similar scene in the 2008 version, but instead of a metal disk, it’s a t-rex skull and they

ride on a plume of steaming water. Perhaps a little more plausible because the skull is presumably
not as old as the Atlantean disk and not as heat conductive but more than likely it would have killed
them as well.

It is funny in hindsight just how much these movies got away with physics. But be it in the

name of preserving its classical feel, to appeasing a more dramatic fantasy end, or just because a

movie’s already taken sci-fi by the collar and shot it dead there are many ways to cover up heat

physics. At the end of the day it’s entertaining and works within the story world's own parameters,

and isn’t that what makes a movie entertaining and believable in its own right?

When writing the paper, I wasn't sure if the topic I covered was complex enough to cover with just three scenes, so the outline has and added fourth movie that I didn't include here, the nuke scene from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. But I found when writing it that these scenes were indeed more complex, especially when comparing the different iterations of Journey to The Center of The Earth. Seeing how the movie was reimagined and also inaccurate in it's own right was fun.