re: #24 freetoken

Oh, yeah, Meteor was another stinker.

They are more akin to 1950s science fiction movies (bugeyed monsters from beyond the black lagoon) than more modern SF flicks, which still mostly depend on the Western model of a hero somehow overcoming many obstacles to triumph in the end.

As for the scientific accuracy or lack thereof, if you peruse the credits of these flicks, most will include a “science consultant” or “science advisor,” a thankless job that basically requires the person to tell the filmmakers what they don’t want to hear, and will ignore anyway.

For instance, in Meteor, a comet (which are mostly “dirty snowballs”) supposedly shatters an asteroid (which are mostly stony or metallic) into many pieces, all of which somehow make a bee-line for Earth. Science advisor guy probably said, “Now wait a minute!” right about there. Setting aside the comet smashing an asteroid problem, orbital dynamics would suggest few if any of those pieces would come anywhere near the Earth, mostly because space is really big and the Earth quite small. But the writers needed some sort of cheap dramatic device to keep the audience in suspense, and what better way than to have a series of smaller impacts precede the big one?

Another trope of these flicks is that the Government always seems to have some kind of secret superweapon or spacecraft just lying about to deal with the pending disaster. See also, Independence Day.