Being that I’m the only person left on the planet that apparently hasn’t seen the Avengers movie it brought up a good blog plan in my head. I’m not much of a movie fan in theaters. I can’t tell you why I just have lost interest in seeing movies in theatres over the years. I can count on one hand how many movies I’ve seen in a theater in the past 5 years. I think you get the picture…I’m not big into movies in theatres. Anyway this leaves me playing catch up with all the other character movies I’ve missed for the lead up release to the avengers. I’ve watched the DVD’s of Iron man 1 & 2 before so that gave me a little background. Last week I checked out Captain America and came away impressed with that and this past weekend I watched Thor, which I thought had its moments and gave the backstory for the Villain in the Avengers movie. This summer the revisited Spider Man and Batman are scheduled for release as well.
So what does all this have to do with today’s blog post? I’m getting to that right now. Movies are fake, they have become increasingly fake as I’ve gotten older (maybe the theme for not wanting to cough up 10.00 for a movie on a 52 million inch screen) I’ve read “The Physics of Superheroes.”
I love this book. It brings about my point of the lack of detail that we accept in movies today. Almost at the end of "The Dark Knight," The Joker falls from the top floor of a building. In real world setting if you or I jumped off a building we would splat in 4 seconds. (Gives a whole new meaning to life flashing before your eyes doesn’t it.) Batman has enough time to see the Joker fall, react by drawing his grappling hook, fire it and save The Joker. The grappling hook would need to come out of the launcher traveling perhaps 1,000 feet per second, nearly the speed of a pistol bullet. Anyone who has ever fired any sort of anything (gun, paintball gun, crossbow, heck even bow and arrow) will be able to tell you about recoil. The recoil from the grappling hook launcher capable of firing a hook/cable combination that is “slightly” heavier than a pistol bullet would throw even a Gotham’s finest backward (heck the Hulk would get tossed a little I’d bet). Then the Joker was snagged in midair and his momentum halted in an instant, force equals mass times acceleration means a transfer of many hundreds of pounds to Batman, who is holding the other end of the grappling line. This would rip Batman's arm out of his shoulder socket instead of just grunting from the effort as he does in the movie.
This brings me to Spider Man; this reboot visits Peter Parker when he was still in High School. Those of us that are nerds (Raises hand) will instantly tell you that per the comic book Peter Parker received his powers in College, not high school. You’ll also know that his original love interest wasn’t Mary Jane but Gwen Stacy. The reason I bring this up it’s what I knew before I read the Physics of Superheroes. Gwen Stacy is thrown off the top of a bridge (much like the Joker previously) and falls. Spider Man Shoots his webbing to save her…one webbing….Like the above example this causes instant momentum stoppage. The force of the deceleration caused Gwen Stacy’s neck to be snapped killing her instantly which the COMIC BOOK went on to described in detail and helped launch the brooding Peter Parker.
Maybe that’s my reasoning behind the ho-hum in movies….the fact a .25 comic (I don’t know how much it was originally, definitely cheaper than the 2.25 ones now) can get a simple scene down better and more realistically than a multi-million dollar movie production.
I’m going to shut up and eat my popcorn and enjoy the Avengers now.
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