Genuine artists don't tell stories, they allow stories to tell themselves, and what emerges is thus both beautiful and true. However, not everyone who makes movies is an artist, even when their (let's face it) complete bullshit is incredibly fun, witty, or even fascinating. So, being a huge movie geek, I thought it would be interesting to examine what would happen if certain famous movies were to occur in real life.
Note: Some films I describe from a physics perspective, and others I just describe to show realistic human behavior. Some I break down into several scenes, and many times if one scene were realistic then those that follow couldn't have happened, so I treat each as independent.
- Explosion of Death Star in Return of The Jedi
No proper description is given of the dimensions of the second, uncompleted Death Star, but we can assume from its namesake, design heritage, and apparent size relative to other craft that it is at least on the order of the original - the size of a "small moon." Even accounting for an average density significantly less than that of solid rock, since most of it would consist of air or empty space (corridors, piping, ducting, etc.), we can reasonably state this is an awesome amount of mass - likely hundreds of times more, even in an incomplete form, than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
So we have this gargantuan amount of mass in orbit around Endor - a populated world with an ecosystem - and it suddenly goes kablooey. In the film, all we see is a big cloud of glowing smoke in the sky beneath the dancing Ewok tribes, but if this were real they wouldn't be dancing for long. As this is apparently a very energetic explosion (it must be to blow up something that big, that fast), it would move outward from the core in a compressed spherical shell of plasma, compressing the matter in front of it and adding its mass to the expanding shockwave. Thus the mass that directly reaches Endor from the explosion would hit nearly all at once.
As the Death Star must be close enough to Endor to be in orbit, a substantial percentage of this shockwave (call it 10%) would plow directly into its atmosphere, while a more substantial minority of the mass would end up in various decaying orbits or Endor-intersecting elliptical trajectories. The majority of the mass would orbit the primary gas giant planet, along Endor's orbit, and would either decay into the gas giant, collide with Endor over time, or be ejected from the system. This means that soon after the explosion of the Death Star, half of Endor would immediately be pulverized and its atmosphere set on fire, and the whole of the world would continuously be sandblasted over millennia by the rain of debris from the moon-circling debris cloud and the primary-circling cloud. All life larger than microbial would be annihilated within minutes to hours, and even microbes would be iffy after a few years.
In other words, the liberation of the Galaxy would come at the expense of a horrific act of genocidal terrorism, sterilizing an entire world and exterminating those oh-so-cute little furry bastards. Maybe the Rebels should have considered a more subtle approach.
- Field of Dreams
A guy hears a voice saying "Build it, and they will come." He initially dismisses it, but it keeps repeating. He then attempts to find the source of the voice, but finds he is alone, and that it sounds about the same no matter where he is. So, he decides he is imagining it and ignores it. If he hears it when someone else is around, he asks if they hear it - and when they do not, he feels confirmed in his conclusion. Just to be certain, he gets an audio recorder and press Record the next time the voice begins, but predictably hears only silence on the recording when he plays it back. This convinces him to see a doctor, who either finds a tumor in his auditory cortex or refers him to a psychiatrist who then diagnoses him with schizophrenia. In the latter case, he ends up on an antipsychotic that makes him muddled, tired, sexually impotent, and forgetful. His wife leaves him, and the court awards her sole custody. He commits suicide.
- Ghost
Guy grabs would-be robber. Robber shoots guy. Guy dies. The End.
- Ghostbusters
Peter, Ray, and Egon go to the library to investigate the elderly librarian's account of an apparition. They find nothing out of the ordinary. The librarian is taken to a hospital, and is found to have had a stroke.
After the guys are thrown off campus, Peter gets involved in shady business practices and is indicted for fraud, is raped in prison, and then becomes an alcoholic fry cook who dies alone in his apartment. Ray's naive attempts to pursue his hobbies keep him from ever finding steady employment, which keeps him largely celibate except for the occasional call girl, but he does make a few loyal friends whom he regularly meets at his favorite dive restaurant. Egon eventually wins respect in mainstream science, and does everything he can to bury his record of involvement in paranormal research. The real Dana is a stuck-up yuppie ****, and raises her children to be Republicans who look down on all of humanity that cannot afford to live near Central Park. The real Walter Peck, however, is a conscientious, idealistic person trying to protect the American people from toxic pollution through his work at the EPA.
- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
a. Wonka opens door into candy wonderland.
But it sucks because everything is sticky, and ants are everywhere.
b. Augustus Gloop falls into chocolate.
So an adult jumps in and saves him. As the adult performs CPR on Augustus, Wonka screams at them for corrupting his precious chocolate, apparently not caring that a kid nearly drowned, and gets decked. The kids start crying. Guy grabs Wonka's purple hat, throws it into the chocolate, and says, "There's your fucking chocolate, you sick shit." Security is called and the guy led away in handcuffs, and the goons drag Augustus and his mother along with him.
c. Oompa Loompa songs following misfortune.
After one of the kids has apparently met his or her demise, the Oompa Loompas begin singing clever little rhyming ditties to mark the occasion. Physical altercations and screaming follow, including racial epithets against orange people and more general insults against midgets. Someone demands to know "What the fuck is wrong with you little freaks? Are you having fun with this tragedy?!"
d. Wonka dismisses Charlie for taking Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
Grandpa: That's not a binding contract, it's some silly-ass nonsense signed by a bunch of 8-year-olds because you told them to. We'll see what a grownup court of law thinks of that. Feel free to show up to court in your purple felt suit, you fucking clown.
Wonka: ...I said Good day, sir!
Charlie gives back his Gobstopper, but Wonka is too enraged to notice or care, and screams at them to get out.
h. Wonka gives Charlie the factory.
The other kids launch a class-action lawsuit alleging gross criminal negligence during their tour of the factory, and win a multi-million-dollar award. Charlie, being a child, and having zero experience in business or life, runs the business into the ground and becomes fat and diabetic from eating his own product. Slugworth buys the company for pennies on the dollar, but Charlie still makes out like a bandit because he never paid a cent for it. As a teenager, he spends his days and nights club-hopping, snorting coke in bathroom stalls, and banging sleazy women twice his age. He stars in a few B action movies, but poor acting and general unreliability on the set make him the butt of jokes. He goes into rehab, and then releases a tell-all book about his experiences at the chocolate factory which is wildly successful and leads to a movie franchise. Wonka, now an even more eccentric recluse, sues his protege and wins substantial royalties.
- Back to The Future
a. Background events not shown.
Doc Brown attempts to get plutonium, never comes close. Is arrested by the FBI and sentenced to several years in prison for the attempt.
b. Attack by Libyan terrorists.
Marty attempts to escape the Libyans by diving into the DeLorean. They swiss-cheese it with machine gun fire, leaving his bullet-riddled corpse to be found by the police. The terrorists themselves are cornered and gunned down 50 miles away when their van - recorded on mall parking lot security cameras - is spotted at a gas station and police surround it.
c. Initial attempt at time travel.
Marty gets to 88 mph and nothing happens. The DeLorean crashes, and Marty dies because he was going 88 mph, not wearing a seatbelt, and driving a piece of crap. The crew who cleans up the mess laughs their asses off - a bullet-riddled crackpot on the ground near the wreckage of a plutonium-contaminated DeLorean full of useless, non-functional quack gadgetry, "time circuits" set to 1955, and a dead teenager in a radiation suit behind the wheel. Even if backwards time travel is theoretically possible (which has not been established), 1.21 gigawatts is most certainly not sufficient to achieve it. The entire output of a star larger than the Sun for a period of a year is closer to the mark, and you still couldn't go back to a time before the time machine was built.
d. Marty's 1950s mom horny for him.
I'm sure lots of 16-year-old girls in '50s suburbia were so uncontrollably sexually predatory that they tried to jump every random, weirdly-dressed guy who comes into their field of vision. The fact that he's totally freaked out by her, and often seems incoherent, must also be huge turn-ons. But then, who can resist that oh-so-awesome '80s style? Sorry, no go.
e. Fight with Biff.
Marty punches Biff, who easily recovers and decks him. Biff then proceeds to beat him senseless. Funny thing about being a foot taller, having 50 more pounds of muscle, and probably being a practiced fighter while Marty is supposed to be a regular kid - it means Biff wins. Marty may decide he just plain has to kill Biff to ensure his parents still get married, but not being knowledgeable about whacking people he gets caught and gets the chair.
f. Fading photograph.
You can't change your present by changing your past. If you can change your past at all, it just means you've created an alternate universe, and it has nothing to do with the circumstances that brought you there. No fading photographs, and certainly no fading limbs.
g. Inability to remember where and when he is.
Constant slip-ups, inadvertent anachronisms, and silly references to '80s slang are supposed to clue you, the ignorant viewer, into the fact that the '50s were not the '80s. Basically, Marty's an idiot with the mind of a small child and a roaring case of ADD. Not only would he not be friends with Doc Brown, I doubt he would be friends with anyone. A complete spaz.
h. Going back to the future.
Having created a heroic basis for his parents' relationship, Marty then heads back to the new 1985...only to find that he has no idea where they live, who their children are, or even if they're still together. He must look them up in the phone book, finding they live in another state entirely. He himself does not exist because that particular sperm did not enter that particular egg at that particular time. He therefore never met his girlfriend, is not enrolled in school, has no family, and has nowhere to live - he must now crash at Doc Brown's place, who has been patiently waiting for him for 30 years (assuming Doc is even alive in this timeline).
As he is just a teenager, this is emotionally devastating - he will literally never see anyone he has ever known ever again: The parents he grew up with never existed, his siblings were never born, the Doc Brown he knew in the original '80s is gone, and the Doc Brown he came to know in the '50s was 30 years ago. The two people who would have been his parents are total strangers with an unknown family living an unknown life somewhere else, and would resent their lives being intruded upon.
Marty becomes a lonely nomad time traveler, hopping from Doc version to Doc version until he comes upon a timeline where Doc isn't there, and then even that friend is lost forever. He keeps running into himself, sometimes with several versions of himself at several ages being in the same place at the same time. It becomes so confusing he just stops talking to the other Martys, and eventually makes a determined effort never to visit the same place twice. He wanders through time and space, and dies alone.
Back to the Future: Part II
Uh, no.