Having spent a bit of time in the late 1990s working in
Hollywood on science fiction television production, I felt
some sympathy for both the critics and the filmmakers. I've
been in the position of arguing with a director over
scientific realism (in my case, he wanted to make the moons
of Mars appear as big in the Martian night sky as an Earthly
full moon); I've also seen where worrying too much over a
scientific detail can get in the way of telling a story (can
the super-advanced alien race interbreed with humans? On the
surface of course not, but then you start thinking about
what super-advanced biotechnology might enable, and how it
might work...). This tension is particularly acute when the
story being told involves a natural or human-caused
disaster: the structure of movies requires that you have a
lead heroic character throughout, so disasters that take
decades to unfold end up being compressed into a few days or
weeks; the limited time of a motion picture and the dictum
that you "show, not tell," make complex cause-and-effect
confusing at best for viewers, so events with multiple
causes and second/third-order, non-obvious effects get
turned into simple (if big) explosions; and big budget movie
audiences are conditioned to expect a relatively happy
conclusion, so the heroic character must be able to eke out
a victory, no matter how dire the straits.

If you're a moviemaker, and you want to destroy much of
the planet, you'd better make sure that (a) your hero is
attractive, (b) the disaster is easy to understand, and (c)
your ending is still happy. Now make that scientifically
accurate.

Josh Schollmeyer, in the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, explores this dilemma in an essay entitled,
"Lights,
Camera, Armageddon." In it, he looks at different
examples of movies telling stories about historical or
speculative events concerning nuclear and biological
weapons, and raises an important additional point: how
filmmakers present disasters (or potential disasters)
involving nuclear explosions or bioweapon releases reflects
the culture's zeitgeist. In the Cold War era, the use of
nuclear weapons implied planetary-scale destruction, as the
US and the USSR went toe-to-toe. However...

Today, we've entered the era of the
friendly, functional cinematic nukes. These nuclear
weapons aren't the proverbial "destroyer of worlds," but
saviors of humanity. They possess utility and a higher
purpose. Twice they've thwarted a giant asteroid from
slamming into the Earth (Deep Impact and
Armageddon); and once they helped reset the rotation
of its core (The Core).

...to the extent that nukes remain a
source of concern, they have perversely morphed into a
"localized threat"--not something that can lay waste to
a continent, but to a single city unlucky enough to be
targeted by terrorists. In The Sum of All Fears,
a nuclear detonation is reduced to a plot point. Little
attention is paid to the thousands of people who would
have been incinerated. While Cold War-era films like
Testament and The Day After depicted, in
sometimes agonizing detail, the slow deaths resulting
from radioactive fallout, Sum of All Fears
super-agent Jack Ryan stands on the outskirts of ground
zero shouting into his (miraculously working) cell
phone.

Schollmeyer also discusses efforts to craft movies about
bioterror and "dirty bombs" in ways that would be both
compelling and accurate. Smallpox failed in both
counts, while Dirty War -- by the same filmmaker,
Daniel Percival -- was far more successful as both art and
education. But it's one of very few films able to make that
claim.

People don't go to blockbuster movies to learn nuclear
physics, biology or environmental science; they go to be
entertained. The dilemma, then, is how to craft stories
which are as entertaining as possible without making those
who know something about the subject matter wince. Neither
Deep Impact or Armageddon could make any
claims of scientific accuracy, but of the two, Deep
Impact was sufficiently less egregious that many people
with scientific training could watch it without feeling
insulted. A fully realistic movie about an asteroid or comet
threat would either be fairly dull -- the asteroid/comet is
discovered in time, so a fleet of automated craft is
launched to attach to the body and give it a slow but steady
shove for ten to twenty years, so that it eventually misses
the Earth -- or painfully tragic -- the asteroid/comet is
not discovered in time, and there's nothing we
can do to prevent it from hitting. The end.

Similarly, a realistic version of The Day After
Tomorrow would have had the whiplash ice age happening
over the course of several decades or more, with a couple of
generations of scientists working on mitigation, politicians
debating solutions, and (eventually) long-planned evacuation
efforts well before the temperature dropped too much. That's
not Hollywood, that's C-SPAN.

It's likely that future global warming epic movies will
use climate disruption not as the focal issue, but as the
backdrop against which the more narrow, more immediate story
gets told. Just as 1960s James Bond movies didn't have to
explain the Cold War and the KGB every time, we will
undoubtedly soon see a day when movies have global warming
as something the filmmakers can assume the audience already
gets, with the heroes saving people from wildfires,
surviving mega-hurricanes, or fighting the goons of oil
industry villains.

Don't forget to recycle your popcorn bag on the way out
of the theater.