6 'Brilliant' Movie Scientists (Who Suck At Their Job)
Here at Cracked we hold our heroes to a higher standard than most. Especially our fictional heroes because, well, they have the freaking advantage of being fictional. Yet, so, so many of them still manage to screw it up.
For instance, look at some of the most brilliant scientists in movie history and you find a bunch of guys who should never have been allowed near a Bunsen burner. Like:
#6.
Tony Stark from Iron Man
Why He's A Genius:
Tony Stark built a killer battle suit, which was badass and all. But then Jeff Bridges found the prototype and built a bigger, far more awesome suit. As a general rule, when you get out-scienced by the guy who played The Dude in The Big Lebowski, you'd better have something else up your sleeve.
Preparing to activate his White Russian arm cannons.
Stark's ticket to movie science credibility was actually located in his chest: A tiny, stable, almost limitless energy source. So powerful it can do the job of massive generators and jet engines simultaneously, and can go years without refueling. So simple it could be slapped together out of spare parts by two guys in a cave.
It's the miniature arc reactor, a device that by all rights should've revolutionized the world. Give the man a Nobel Prize!
Why He Should Not Have Been Allowed To Do Science:
The more you look at Tony Stark, the more you realize he developed the mini arc reactor only to play God, or at least a shitfaced version of Shaquille O'Neal's Steel.
We'd so pay to see that movie.
Case in point: After first discovering this world changing energy source, he makes exactly one more arc reactor, and uses it to power his pizza-colored murder suit. He doesn't make any demonstration models for his company. Hell, he doesn't even draw up any blueprints. In fact, he's so damn Howard Hughes about the whole operation, that he instructs Pepper Potts to destroy the original model, rather than turn it over to his company's engineers to mass produce and solve all of the world's resource problems forever.
Wait a second. Who throws away the only backup power source for the machine that's keeping him from having a heart attack?
Comic books have a name for brilliant scientists with nearly debilitating Messiah complexes. They're called supervillains.
#5.
Dr. Henry Wu from Jurassic Park
In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs weren't resurrected by the rich old guy (he was just the CEO), Samuel L. Jackson or even the mailman from Seinfeld. No, Dr. Wu, the guy responsible for all those scene-stealing sauropods, only got a measly 10 minutes of screen time. Ouch.
Why He's A Genius:
Dr. Wu fulfilled every child's dream of seeing a real live Triceratops. He also fulfilled every Internet denizen's dream of watching two lesbian T-Rexes bumping uglies in an orgiastic fury.
Tyrannosaurus-Sex!
Why He Should Not Have Been Allowed To Do Science:
Wait, lesbian T-Rexes? Yeah, remember, Dr. Wu bred all the dinosaurs as females to prevent any prehistoric hanky-panky. He also spliced the dinosaur DNA with frog DNA. Sounds fine, except that after discovering hatched dinosaur eggs in the wild, it took Allen Grant five seconds to figure out that certain species of frog can spontaneously change sex in the absence of a mate.
And Dr. Grant was just a paleontologist--his job was to dig up dino bones. The man was a frog gene novice. How in the hell did this eensy-weensy detail elude Dr. Wu, who spent his career reverse engineering all those 65-million-year-old killing machines?
Perhaps he was distracted by his own handsomeness.
But the frog DNA flub is just the slack-jawed tip Dr. Wu's mentally retarded iceberg. No, his most unforgivable fuck-up was to breed Velociraptors.
Raising intelligent, sickle-toed murder-lizards for a children's theme park would give even the most bastardly supervillain pause. Remember, no one had ever heard of Velociraptors before the release of Jurassic Park, so unlike the carnivorous T-Rex, there was no money in breeding them.
So why the hell did Dr. Wu need Velociraptors? The only logical explanation is that he needed extra contestants for a little pastime we at the Cracked offices like to call "Lasersaurus Battle Derby."
#4.
Dr. Otto Octavius from Spiderman 2
Note that we're not criticizing Dr. Octavius for becoming the supervillain Doc Ock later. That was his own choice and we respect that. No, we're talking about before, when he was a scientist yet somehow quite a bit more dangerous to the world than when he took up supervillaining.
Why He's A Genius:
Dr. Octavius devised a renewable fusion energy source from the radioactive isotope Tritium. Despite the immense power generated by this reaction, the only safety gear required was a set of off-gray pajamas...
...and four metal tentacles partially controlled by the Doc's brain, and partially having minds of their own.
Why He Should Not Have Been Allowed To Do Science:
Quick question: What do the New Mexican desert and the Soviet steppe have in common?
If you answered, "They're reasonably safe places to test nuclear devices," then bingo. If you inexplicably added "but a quaint prewar loft in the middle of Manhattan would also do nicely," then you're either Doctor Octopus or the world's evilest interior designer.
The gamma accelerator should always match the drapes.
Let's put it this way: As of the last U.S. census, New York City had perhaps 26,000 people per square mile. A nuke's effective radius is about six miles. By our rough comedy article math, approximately 2.9 million people would be instantly obliterated if the good doctor paused to scratch his ass.
Mind you, this figure doesn't even account for those millions in the outlying area sickened by radiation or horrifically mutated by fallout. On the plus side, New Jerseyans would barely notice, as they're used to living in a miasma of toxic crap.
Ah, another spring morning in Hoboken.
What's even stranger is that of all of the guests and press present for his experiment, no one suggested moving it to Los Alamos instead of conducting an unstable, free-floating nuclear reaction in what was basically a Pottery Barn showroom. Even Peter Parker--the guy whose alter-ego is supposed to protect the city--didn't say a damn thing. He could've ended the movie right there and saved us an hour of staring at Alfred Molina's man-boobs.
But the most damning thing is that when his "evil" robotic arms take over (turning him into Doc Ock) and subsequently recreate the Tritium reaction at the film's climax, even they had enough sense to move the freaking experiment to an abandoned wharf away from from a heavily populated area.
When your criminally insane prosthetics displayed a greater concern for human life than you, you are a shitty scientist.
Yeah but Ghostbusters is awesome
ReplyTony Stark invented the badass murder suit and its power source in a cave with exactly one guy to help him. Staines - following Tony Stark's prototype - had a team of scientists working in a state-of-the-art lab building a slower, bulkier, more vulnerable and generally cumbersome version of the suit that's useless without a power source they can't replicate. So he eventually just steals it from - oh, yeah - Tony Stark. All this while Tony's working on a much-better version of his original design.
ReplyTony did his own work and it was better. I fail to see how he was "out-scienced" by Staines.
The cops who got me hadn't seen Ghostbusters, either. Suffice to say, they were not understanding.
Reply#5 Dr. Wu's failure to know about frog genetics isn't his only big failure. Dr. Wu should also have genetically modified a failsafe into all the dinosaurs so that they wouldn't eat humans, at least unless they were desperate. How? There are genes in all creatures with a sense of smell and taste including humans and dinosaurs which control what you find to smell and taste good or bad, and Wu could simply manipulate these genes so that the dinosaurs found humans to taste and smell bad to them, thus they probably wouldn't eat them, unless they were starving, which if they were being fed properly they wouldn't. Of course, Wu's first failure with the frogs that allowed them to breed would eventually remove this failsafe anyway.
ReplyHonestly, it was made a little more clear in the book, which really suffered when they made the movie. Wu wanted to put so much more work into the dinos, and to make them a lot safer (namely by removing the poison sacs on the fan-headed dinos that killed Nedry) but Hammond wouldn't allow one to be killed and autopsied because of the expense, and really rushed the development and breeding of all the dinos. He really got off easy in the movie, while guys who were right in the book (like Muldoon, the security guy who got taken out by the raptors) got seriously shafted. In the book Muldoon takes out a T-Rex with a freaking rocket launcher and blows away two raptors, and Grant himself takes out like four or five raptors himself. Forget the movie, read the book, it's way better. It actually makes sense that Nedry could take down the entire park on his own, because he had set this up like months in advance and had tied all the stuff together, and Hammond had put all his trust in Nedry and had refused to allow Muldoon to get any weapons that'd be really effective against the dinos, or more than two gas-powered jeeps. Hell, they didn't even know what would work on the dinosaurs, because (as I said) none had died yet and Hammond wouldn't let them kill one to autopsy it.
the ghostbusters don't belong on this list because they didn't just indiscriminately "bust" innocent ghost. i submit to you that the ghost they incarcerate are in the midst of a crime/crimes and therefore deserved at least some sort of repremand: library ghost - no crime, no incarceration; slimer - destruction of property, theft of food; stay puft marshmellow man - MAJOR destruction of property, copyright infringement; zuel - attempted murder, conspiracy to commit genocide, terroristic threats.
ReplyNOBODY steps on a church in my town!
Tony Stark made the iron man suit for himself....with his own equipment....in his basement. Why would anyone consult the company they own about a side project?
ReplyPst, comedy site...
Besides, he knew that something was up the minute those guys showed him that they were using HIS gear. After that, and after seeing a big "Stark Industries" logo on the thing that put the shrapnel in his chest to begin with, I'm not surprised he was hesitant to let anything get back to his company.
"Egon prolapses. End of the universe." Best line ever.
ReplyNot to argue with your logic, but maybe he wanted to breed velociraptors to use them as soldiers and sell them to the military (while using a chip or something to control their brain). Of course, he's still an idiot for putting them in a Kid's Park.
ReplyYou could reason he's an idiot for putting any dinossaur in a kid's park.
Well if we are going off the book, he was a theoretical genetic scientist who was offered a job to apply his theories by an extremely corrupt business man who cared nothing for the consequences of his actions, and the park was not designed for kids in the book, but to have something like 15k per day, and that is in 1980s dollars. He also realizes his mistake in the book, and helps to correct it, unlike in the movie where he just GTFO the island
#1 um... they actually did cross the streams...
ReplyOnly when the alternative was their world being destroyed. It was either Gozar's world or ours.
#4
Reply Hide All See All 3 Replies*Facepalm*
THAT'S NOT HOW NUCLEAR REACTORS BEHAVE!
Nuclear reactors are no where near as dangerous as people think they are.
Especially nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion reactors will need a constant energy input to get the reaction going. If the reactor takes any significant damage, the the reaction will stop and worse case damage the reactor.
A nuclear reactor DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE A NUCLEAR BOMB. Especially a fusion reactor.
Unfortunately, we don't have nuclear fusion reactors- we use fission. You still have a good point, though.
If you saw the movie, then you'd realize that it was clearly not a safe experiment.
Damn right. Even a fission reactor having a meltdown will never produce a mushroom cloud. The uranium used is nowhere near pure enough. Civilian reactors use 50% pure U-235. Military-grade reactors use 55%, usually. Nukes take 95% or more. Considering Doc Ock was using Tritium, a isotope of hydrogen which is used to boost the yield of fission bombs and make them into the H-bombs we know of today, it wouldn't even be close to a nuclear reaction.
What's more, a modern fission bomb uses several pounds of uranium or plutonium. What was used in the movie (or in real life) is several ounces of tritium. Even if that stuff was pure U-235, the reaction would have been relatively tiny.
As for a fusion reaction, ignoring everything I've just said? Sure, the resulting plasma breaches (those big loop-looking things that Octavius was suppressing before it went haywire) and fire would have destroyed the building and possibly a few buildings nearby, but judging by how quickly the whole thing shut down when Peter pulled the plug, New York would have suffered more damage from a dockworker letting out a good-sized fart.
Really, though, Octavius clearly didn't test any of his theories or make a test run in there, even with a microscopic amount of tritium, and Harry clearly didn't have any of the clearly numerous OsCorp scientists (whom we saw in the first movie walking around in lab coats) check the numbers, or say...realize that testing something with a huge deal of magnetism and heat in a building made of metal was a terrible idea. He could have picked the location better, but still, the fact is that New York would have been fine. If anything, the number of people Peter saved by shutting that thing down is limited to the people that were in the building at the time.
the ghostbusters should never ever be on this list. they were doing a service. its not like they were just running around looking for ghosts to confine, they were contacted becuase a ghost was haunting the living, ghost shouldnt have been an a hole in the first place. much like an exterminator does, they were exterminators of past lives, but they didnt wipe them out of existence, they just put them in the containment grid, hell, probably was a blast, chilling with other ghosts, probably orgy's galore
ReplyHave you seen what the container looks like? It's in the cartoon. For an image and a good article, you should look up "6 Classic Kid's Shows that Secretly Take Place in Nightmarish Universes."
One minor edit. While the streams up the ante from 18sq miles of NY, to, all of reality. The Ghostbusters remake (or originate depending) Doc Occ by setting up in the middle of NY. Thus solidifying their hold on #1 on this list.
ReplyIn regards to Tony Stark's messiah complex making him supervillain-ish: in the comics around the Civil War/Secret Invasion arcs, he for the most part IS one of the superhero community's worst enemies.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesWasn't the first time, either. In the classic "Armor Wars" storyline, Tony hunted down everyone who was using his tech -- friend or enemy, legally or otherwise. I love the guy, but his worst flaw isn't alcoholism, it's the belief that he can make everything better by taking control personally.
He's a narcissist. Definitely his biggest flaw.
but superheroes would be boring without character flaws
There's character flaws, and there's total jackass flaws.
I agree with you. Just want to say the Civil War arc got me to actually hate Iron Man; he imprisoning the heroes that didn't want to register with the government in the Negative Zone. He played a part in Cap "dying". Iron Man fought alongside villains, who obviously wanted the heroes to submit their identity, so they could kill them later on. I loved when Cap punched him in the face.
Lightsabers will of course always be #1 on my list of "Fictional Items I Wish Were Real That I Could Own" but a proton pack is a damn close second. Damn close.
ReplyYeah and if you have a single one, there is no danger in crossing the streams.
Lightsabers are so freaking awesome I've even seen them in stories in cheesy romance novels. Even porn for bored housewives cannot escape the might of lightsabers.
Fusion reactions don't create explosions. #4 makes no sense.
ReplyTo be fair, I'm pretty sure Egon doesn't suggest crossing their streams would un-make the universe/blow it up. Just that'd it simply kill the Ghostbusters instantly... Maybe.
ReplyAnd it turns out not to be the case anyway. So scratch that one altogether.
Stark refused to let anybody duplicate his arc reactor because he didn't want it to be used as a weapon. Guess what everybody who got their hands on arc reactor technology used it for.
Reply Hide All See All 7 RepliesExcept they might not have gotten that idea if Stark didn't, you know, make a weapon out of it first.
No, I'm pretty sure they would have gotten that idea anyway.
This. Actually, selling out on that s**t knowing the likely consequences would've made him a much worse scientist, at least from an ethics standpoint. (Arguably a better businessman, though.)
He should have given it to Iran. They're using nuclear power for civilian use only!
Free, universal power would do a lot to reduce the need for weapons. Why fight in the MidEast for oil when you have an arc reactor in your car?
Meh, ultimately wars are not about economy, but power.
True. Really, one of the first things anyone does when they get their hands on some new tech is figure out how to weaponize it. Arc reactors in tanks, planes, aircraft carriers, satellites, subs? One arc reactor on a Russian Kilo-class sub (diesel-powered, but almost totally silent on batteries because the coolant pumps on a nuclear sub always make noise) would give it virtually unlimited range, and since it has no moving parts, it's (presumably) totally silent. Stark could have eliminated global warming with the arc reactor, but he'd be turning warfare a hundred times deadlier in the process. Not to mention he's virtually eliminated heart failure (at least ignoring the palladium poisoning issue in Iron Man 2) as a cause of death.
I like the Ghostbusters way too much to condemn them in this way, even though the entry here on them is right. :P I always wondered what gave them the right to unconditionally imprison every ghost they encounter, good or bad.
ReplyThe moral of the story? "When you die, move on." If you hang around being a dick to people, your ass is going to ghost jail.
Expected Flynn from Tron to be here. He got kidnapped by his own program that tried to attack Earth. Pretty sure that means he shouldn't be a scientist.
ReplyNaaaahh, because it wasn't really Kevin Flynn's fault. :P Blame that meany Ed Dillinger for stealing Flynn's idea and giving the MCP too much power.
f*****g raptors.
Reply