5 Movie Apocalypses That Would Defeat Themselves

5 In the Terminator Series, the Machines Have No One to Build Their Army

In the Terminator series, the American government ill-advisedly relinquishes control of their nuclear defense system to an unfeeling artificial intelligence programmed only to kill. It proceeds to do so indiscriminately, and mankind is reduced to a few scattered rebels fending off hordes of Austrian robots.

So, What's the Problem?

Who or what is building all those Schwarzeneggers?

At the time when Skynet initially nukes the world, it's still just a computer program drifting around the Internet. Sure, it has access to nuclear launch codes, but not to more delicate equipment like opposable thumbs. Even if we assume that, in the world of the film, Skynet is able to hack into and usurp control of every factory and power plant through the Internet, it's still inheriting a world of machines designed to be operated by humans. That means valves need to be turned, buttons need to be pressed and levers need to be pulled. And just in case you're assuming that Terminator takes place in some kind of post-valve world, these scenes from Terminator Salvation would seem to suggest otherwise:

If you're thinking that Skynet probably just employs a division of Terminators to operate its factories, you're missing the point -- the computer didn't have access to Terminators back when it killed off all the humans. In fact, the most sophisticated robot that Skynet had access to at the time, the T-1, was a goofy-looking tank with Gatling guns instead of hands that could barely fit through a doorway, let alone turn a valve.

It doesn't really matter how smart the computer is -- it can't recommission a car factory, for example, to start churning out Terminators. And even if it could, how is it going to mine the ore, refine the metal and drive it in trucks to those factories? You know, all that stuff that still has to be done by human beings with hands?

In reality, after it nuked everybody, Skynet would probably be left with very little to do in the few days it had to live before something important broke somewhere.

4 The Demographics in The Matrix Can't Possibly Match the Real World

In the Matrix universe, everyone in the world thinks that they're living perfectly normal lives within a normal (if slightly green-tinted) modern world, when in actuality they're living in a computer simulation and their unconscious bodies are really lying in tubs of pink goop. And, most importantly, they're living in a year that is decades later than anyone realizes.

So, What's the Problem?

There are two important things to know here. First, it's established that everyone in the Matrix looks pretty much the same way they do in the real world, sans body hair and a tan (they go out of their way to point this out, calling it their "residual self-image"). If you're a man in the Matrix, you're a man in the real-world pod. Black people are black, white people are white and Asian people are Asian. And Neo looks like the offspring of his parents, which means that when a baby is born in the Matrix, the genes were taken from parents in the real world.

Now, we know what you're thinking: "That means that every time a man has sex in the Matrix, inside his real-world pod a robot hand comes out and jerks him off and collects the semen. No wonder they hate us!" This is no doubt true, but it's not the point we're making.

The problem is that the demographics of the Matrix can't match up with the real world.

Remember, we know that the Matrix simulation has been running for at least 50 years (in Reloaded, we meet an old man in the real world who said he was freed from the Matrix when he was 11). That means that when it started, the simulation was pretending it was the year 1950, when the real world was around the year 2150. But the demographics and population of 1950 were hugely different from what they are even now (with Africa's population increasing at a much faster rate than, say, Europe's or Japan's), let alone what they'd look like 200 years into the future.

In fact, the numbers of European and Japanese children in the world are actually shrinking over time. Europe's population of children aged 0 to 14 has shrunk from 143 million in 1950 to 127 million in 2000, and Japan's has gone from 30 million in 1950 to about 18.5 million in 2000. In other words, the machines would be short millions of children and would be forced to take tens of millions of children from Africa and reassign them to be children in Europe and Japan and try to convince the population that they are their naturally born kin.

Considering that the Matrix simulation is so fragile that the vaguest idea that something is wrong with the world can break people out of the spell, this is going to be more than just a minor problem for the machines. At the very least, a lot of white women are going to have a lot of explaining to do.

3 The Monsters in I Am Legend Would Starve Within Weeks

I Am Legend is set 1,000 days after a virus has destroyed humanity. The seemingly lone survivor, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, lives in Manhattan and gathers food by day while fighting vampirelike plague victims called Darkseekers by night, in search for a cure to turn them back into regular, non-flesh-eating people.

So, What's the Problem?

After the violence died down, there shouldn't be that many Darkseekers left in Manhattan. Only around, say, 10. That doesn't leave many for Will Smith's experiments.

There are 1.6 million people in Manhattan, and the movie tells us that around 1 percent survived with immunity, while 9 percent became Darkseekers. So, what do these 144,000 monsters eat? It's safe to say that there's not a lot of goods being shipped in from the mainland anymore.

Obviously, the first thing they did was chow down on the roughly 16,000 people who survived without monsterfication. Now, the CDC says the average American weighs 176.5 pounds, so we have about 2.8 million pounds of meat. Assuming human meat has the same calories as pork (about 1,100 calories per pound), each Darkseeker needs to eat about 2 pounds of human per day. So, by feasting on surviving humans, the 144,000 Darkseekers would ensure their survival for a whopping 10 days before everybody starts going hungry.

OK, how about deer? We know they eat deer. At their most densely populated, 60 deer can live in a square-mile area. Manhattan has about four square miles of parkland, so, being generous, there's 240 deer in Manhattan. So, if the Darkseekers eat half of the herd and leave the other half to repopulate, we can get about 21,000 pounds of meat a year from the deer population (about 58 pounds per day), which is enough food for about 19 Darkseekers to survive. Also, there are lions on the island. The adult lions by themselves would eat 27 pounds of deer per day. All told, there's enough food on the island for 10 Darkseekers.

But this is all splitting hairs anyway, considering that Will Smith would have killed them all for his experiments. The cure that he develops is referred to as his 391st attempt, so considering he's most likely wiped out the species he was trying to save, that kind of makes him the bad guy in this situation.

2 Waterworld Doesn't Have Enough Water

In Waterworld, the polar icecaps have melted, covering the Earth entirely in water. Humanity has learned to adapt to a new way of life and now lives entirely on boats and floating settlements out on the open ocean. Kevin Costner plays our antihero, the Mariner, a mutant who can breathe underwater and has no real interest in helping anyone other than himself, even though he'll wind up doing it anyway, so essentially he's Mad Max with gills.

Their mission is to find one of the last, tiny little bits of dry land remaining on Earth, and some have searched for so long that they believe no such land exists.

So, What's the Problem?

If the polar icecaps melted, the oceans would rise only 68 meters. That's real bad news for Florida, Uruguay and Bangladesh, but it falls well short of the urine-drinking horror of Waterworld, where dirt is considered as precious as gold. In fact, this is what the world would look like:

Land wouldn't be a distant rumor, it'd be right where it always was.

The only plausible way that the events of Waterworld could take place is if all the people in this movie are somehow conned into believing they're living on a worldwide ocean. When you think about it, this kind of makes it a more interesting movie. After all, a lot of things don't really make sense if you accept the film's central premise at face value. Like where Dennis Hopper's band of pirates are getting their endless supply of factory-processed cigarettes.

If the story of Waterworld works at all, then everyone is the victim of some strange conspiracy, like those villagers who were trapped in an old-timey village in that Shyamalan movie whose title escapes us. Clearly, somebody thinks it's in their best interests to keep a bunch of people trapped out on the open ocean. Some people will pay good money for dirt and other crap that you can find on the ocean floor if you're the one person who can breathe underwater. Someone, for example, who is part fish and whose name is "The Mariner."

1 Planet of the Apes Doesn't Have Enough Apes

At some point in the future, mankind loses the eternal war between man and ape. Accidental time travelers return to Earth in the distant future to find that shit is completely messed up and the world is run by ape-people now. The scenario is slightly different depending on which version you're watching -- in the original series, humans start mass breeding ape slaves who eventually rise up against them and start a nuclear war. In the new Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a virus is created that simultaneously makes apes smart and kills people. And in Marky Mark's Planet of the Apes, a future ape gets a hold of a sports almanac and gives it to his younger self in 1955. Or something. We didn't see it.

So, What's the Problem?

No matter what version of the ape-pocalypse you subscribe to, there are simply too many people and not enough apes to enslave them.

There are currently 7 billion humans on Earth. Apes, on the other hand, are all critically endangered. There may only be around 350,000 of them in the whole world. Now, the Apes movies seem to be vaguely aware of this inequity -- in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, humans start breeding apes in 1983 to increase their numbers, and the world has been overrun with them by 1991. By this timeline, even if humans collected every ape female on Earth and forced them to have a baby every year, there would still be fewer than 10 million apes when the ape revolution occurs, and most of them would be children. As armies go, that's woefully inadequate when your goal is total dominance of every inch of the globe.

And even if the apes develop some kind of super-intelligence, we still have the guns and bombs and nukes and poison gas and, most importantly, vastly more experience at this "war" thing than the apes do. Somehow every version of the Apes franchise asks us to imagine the same scenario -- a relatively insignificant number of apes simply punches every man, woman and child on Earth to death while we just let them do it.

Now, the new franchise introduces a viral pandemic into the scenario, suggesting at the end of Rise that most of the humans are going to die to make way for the ape revolution. But they also only have a tiny handful of apes when the virus hits. Even a plague that killed 99 percent of humans would still leave 70 million people versus only a few hundred apes.

Yep, no matter which way you slice it, a Planet of the Cows is still infinitely more likely. Also, we really want to see that one.

For more film scenes that actually did come true, check out 7 Real Car Chases Way Crazier Than Anything in the Movies and 5 Real Bank Heists Ripped Right Out of the Movies .

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