• Home
  • Assertions
  • Poetry
  • Programming

Record and Reverie

General things I find interesting

Feed on
Posts
Comments
« Xcode Filling Log Files
Decline of Local Bookstores »

Wall•E

Jun 28th, 2008 by Graham Booker

Some friends and I went to see Wall•E last night. It is definitely the funniest movie I have seen all year and I’m glad to see that Pixar hasn’t gone too far downhill. I was afraid that Disney would attempt to destroy them, but it seems they haven’t succeeded quite yet.

On the other hand, the movie did have a lot of technical point which were severely wrong.

  • One scene had a space ship traveling through a large sphere of satellites to get away from Earth. You cannot have a sphere of satellites in orbit and expect them to stay up for a year, much less 700. They’d crash into each other and change their orbits.
  • Even with satellites in the same orbit, you cannot have them sitting within a meter of each other for the same reason.
  • Rotating a ship in space doesn’t change the gravity experienced on the ship (to get any gravity in the first place requires creating it yourself, but that’s another issue).
  • The movie shows a spaceship dumping a large chunk of trash into space. While this make be a convenient means of waste disposal, the sheer mass of disposal shown is completely impractical for a space ship of that size. It would have lost it’s entire mass to trash within a year and it was supposed to be there for 700. What happened to conservation of mass?
  • And the biggest issue: I seriously doubt that humans have the ability to trash the planet to the extent shown in the film, even if we wanted to. We just don’t have that kind of an impact on our environment. Besides, even if we did, rather than sending the entire population to space while cleaning up the planet, wouldn’t it be more practical and cheaper to just send up the trash for disposal?

There are a few more issues; but if you ignore the distortion of science and reason, the movie is quite enjoyable. The sad thing is, the movie could have adhered to both science and reason without destroying the major plot points.

Posted in General

2 Responses to “Wall•E”

  1. on 03 Jul 2008 at 10:24 pm1Push Eject

    I took my twin three-year-olds to see it this past weekend and thought it was pretty darned great too, physics be damned.

    Still… what’s up with AC3 in Quicktime, huh? 😀

  2. on 03 Jul 2008 at 10:28 pm2Graham Booker

    Yeah, I’m going to see it again soon. In hindsight, I think that the physics was better than most movies out of Hollywood.

    AC3 in QuickTime is basically in holding until Apple does something right for a change.

  • Recent Posts

    • Fighting with Sync by Microsoft
    • How to Not Recruit
    • Thrashing Server
    • Firewall Ban Activated
    • Turn the Firewall Around
    • Decline of Local Bookstores
  • Archives

    2021
    2020
    March 2020 (1)
    2019
    November 2019 (1)
    2018
    June 2018 (1)July 2018 (1)December 2018 (1)
    2017
    January 2017 (2)June 2017 (1)August 2017 (1)
    2016
    June 2016 (1)August 2016 (1)
    2015
    January 2015 (1)February 2015 (1)December 2015 (1)
    2014
    June 2014 (1)July 2014 (1)August 2014 (2)
    2013
    February 2013 (2)March 2013 (1)April 2013 (1)June 2013 (1)November 2013 (1)
    2012
    April 2012 (2)May 2012 (1)June 2012 (1)November 2012 (1)
    2011
    January 2011 (1)October 2011 (1)November 2011 (1)December 2011 (1)
    2010
    February 2010 (2)April 2010 (1)June 2010 (1)July 2010 (1)August 2010 (1)September 2010 (1)October 2010 (2)December 2010 (3)
    2009
    January 2009 (1)February 2009 (1)March 2009 (2)May 2009 (1)July 2009 (3)September 2009 (1)
    2008
    January 2008 (1)February 2008 (4)March 2008 (1)April 2008 (6)May 2008 (1)June 2008 (3)August 2008 (1)September 2008 (2)October 2008 (2)December 2008 (1)
    2007
    January 2007 (1)February 2007 (4)March 2007 (5)April 2007 (4)May 2007 (1)June 2007 (6)August 2007 (3)September 2007 (3)November 2007 (3)December 2007 (4)
    2006
    January 2006 (4)February 2006 (10)March 2006 (4)April 2006 (6)May 2006 (2)June 2006 (4)July 2006 (1)August 2006 (1)September 2006 (4)October 2006 (6)November 2006 (3)December 2006 (3)
    2005
    October 2005 (6)November 2005 (13)December 2005 (1)
    2004
    February 2004 (2)March 2004 (1)April 2004 (1)May 2004 (6)June 2004 (6)July 2004 (3)August 2004 (2)September 2004 (1)November 2004 (5)
    2003
    September 2003 (1)October 2003 (3)November 2003 (1)December 2003 (1)
  • Categories

    • Breakaway (5)
    • Family (4)
    • Friends (2)
    • General (148)
    • Nature Pictures (8)
    • Politics (2)
    • Programming (41)
    • School (11)
    • SysAdmin (8)
    • Teaching (2)
  • Tags

    AC3 Ads Code Frontrow Java Objective-C Open Source Perian Perl permissions plex plugin RSS Sapphire School Servers ZFS

  • Pages

    • Assertions
      • Female Friends Who Won’t Date You
      • Not Dating Friends
    • Poetry
      • Curtis Staying Over
      • Girl Questions
      • Scaring Girls Off
      • Summer’s End
    • Programming
      • Fire Development
      • Kyocera Ringtone Converter for the Mac
      • Perian
      • Text Compression

Record and Reverie © 2021 All Rights Reserved.

WordPress Themes | Web Hosting Bluebook