Over the years, Hollywood has become infamous for pushing the limits of realistic and believable physics for the sake of entertainment. There are many laws of physics that the film industry has found ways in which to exploit. The films in question this time have broken laws that pertain to momentum and the forces of impact. The three movies that will be analyzed in order of their release dates are: Speed (1994), Mission: Impossible II (2000), and The Matrix Reloaded (2003). Before we delve into our three culprits, first we will discuss the main ideas behind momentum and the forces of impact.
To begin, momentum doesn’t just depend on an object’s speed. Momentum is determined by an object’s mass and its velocity. The force of impact of an object depends on how large of a momentum it has and it is stopped. For instance, an object with a large momentum will take a small force applied slowly or a large force applied to quickly to stop it. The longer the impact takes, the smaller the force of that impact will be. With a basic grasp of these laws of physics, we can move on to the first film.
The first movie in question is Speed, an action-adventure film released in 1994. In this film, a Los Angeles bus is rigged with a bomb that will explode if the bus’ speed falls below 50 miles per hour. In one scene, the bus is speeding towards a 50 foot gap in a stretch of elevated freeway with nowhere else to go. The cop aboard the bus decides to punch it and try to jump the gap. They speed up to 67 miles per hour and somehow manage to safely land on the other side. The problem with this scene is the fact that the bus even makes it all the way across. Instead of flying across, the bus would begin to rotate downwards as soon as the front wheels left the freeway and it would plummet to the ground. The momentum of that falling bus paired with its quick stop would create a large enough force of impact to essentially end the movie right there. Luckily at 67 miles per hour, it actually rotates upwards as if flying off of a ramp, and it lands in one piece.
The first movie in question is Speed, an action-adventure film released in 1994. In this film, a Los Angeles bus is rigged with a bomb that will explode if the bus’ speed falls below 50 miles per hour. In one scene, the bus is speeding towards a 50 foot gap in a stretch of elevated freeway with nowhere else to go. The cop aboard the bus decides to punch it and try to jump the gap. They speed up to 67 miles per hour and somehow manage to safely land on the other side. The problem with this scene is the fact that the bus even makes it all the way across. Instead of flying across, the bus would begin to rotate downwards as soon as the front wheels left the freeway and it would plummet to the ground. The momentum of that falling bus paired with its quick stop would create a large enough force of impact to essentially end the movie right there. Luckily at 67 miles per hour, it actually rotates upwards as if flying off of a ramp, and it lands in one piece.
The second film that breaks some laws of physics is Mission: Impossible II which was released in 2000. Towards the end of this film, the protagonist Ethan Hunt and the antagonist Sean Ambrose, duke it out in an epic fight scene. At one point when the two agents are on motorcycles, they ride straight towards each other, somehow leap from their bikes, and collide in midair. Without trying to explain how they leapt from their motorcycles while moving at high speeds, most viewers can see or feel that this would never work. First we’ll assume that each man has a mass of about 80 kilograms, or 176 pounds, and that they are moving at approximately 50 miles per hour. Second, we can see in the clip that the impact is absorbed almost entirely on their upper bodies. The momentum of each man is stopped quickly and against another object moving quickly in the opposite direction. This force of impact should have caused some internal damage, and yet Hunt and Ambrose are back on their feet afterwards without a broken bone or scratch on them.
The third and final film that breaks the laws of momentum and impact is somewhat of a special case. Analyzing the laws of physics in any Matrix film can seem like a moot point since the trilogy is breaking them all the time. Nonetheless, some of the scenes seem to follow some basic physics to a certain degree. Our last scene comes from the second installment of the Matrix series, The Matrix Reloaded, released in 2003. In the film, Trinity falls out of a building and is caught by Neo who comes flying to her rescue. To first find out how fast each of the characters were moving, we’ll look at hints in the movie. When Trinity dreams about this event earlier in the movie, we see that she falls from the 65th floor of the building. She falls straight down without any horizontal movement and instantly dies when she hits the car on the street. Assuming each floor of the building is about eight feet tall, we can estimate that Trinity falls for about five and half seconds and is moving at about 120 miles per hour when she reaches the ground. Knowing that speed was enough to end her life, we’ll look at how fast Neo was flying across town to catch her. When Link first sees him flying, he states that whatever it is, “it’s moving faster than anything I’ve ever seen.” Assuming Link knows what the speed of a bullet looks like in the matrix code, we could say that Neo was moving around 1,700 miles per hour. Even if this isn’t the case, Neo is clearly moving fast enough to overturn cars and shatter windows as he passes. This means that he’s at least moving about 200 miles per hour. Knowing that Trinity’s impact at a speed of 120 miles per hour killed her, there’s no way she would survive Neo catching her and continuing to move at full speed. With his body mass, Neo’s momentum would, at the very least, kill Trinity on impact.
These three films: Speed, Mission: Impossible II, and The Matrix Reloaded, all contain poor depictions of the laws of physics, especially as it pertains to momentum and impact. But this doesn’t always ruin a film, as a lot of Hollywood films break these laws to their advantage as a stylistic choice. And in some cases, like the Matrix trilogy, breaking these laws is an integral part of the story. But when the physics of a scene in a film just doesn’t look or feel right, you don’t have to be a scientist to guess why.
