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When Arnold gets ahold of a Railgun



The 1996 movie Eraser stars Arnold Swarzanegger with classic over the top Arnold action. It was my first time viewing the film and I am glad I've experienced this masterpiece of awful CGI and even worse rule of following the Laws of Physics. But Hey, It's Arnold, so it's okay. It was a very good laugh and actually extremely entertaining. Arnold plays John Kruger who is a very skilled FBI agent(even though he's more of an independent) who is contracted to "erase" people who basically have an X on their head for any reason. He basically fakes their death and gives them a new identity in order to allow them to live their lives. He comes across a woman who is gets in some heat for helping the FBI receive secret info about illegal weapons blueprints. So Arnold must protect her with his godly like demeanors in which he can make any form of recoil non-existent. The whole movie is kind of revolved around this assault Railgun which can apparently shoot almost the speed of light and doesn't use bullets. As if its some kind of Star Wars blaster.
  

     Later in the movie Arnold gets ahold with not 1, but 2 Railguns in which he then uses to destroy all the bad guys by dual wielding. When the first two bad guys show up he starts rapidly firing the Railguns towards them. In the scene there is absolutely no recoil and when the bad guys get hit they fly back as if the shot caught them. This could be the longest dissection of this scene alone on how inaccurate this is. First of all the if this force is brought upon the bad guys the same would be into Arnold's shoulder. This is basic law of conservation of energy. Whatever energy that is placed on the subject should also happen to the person firing the weapon. That's why you don't see a .50 caliber rifle being carried around like it's a nerf gun. It would be very difficult to harness this type of force. Especially since it's traveling almost the speed of light. Secondly this "force"/"rail" being fired at the bad guys would probably not move them much at all. It would be so quick that it would go straight through their body. A normal assault rifle used in combat today fires a small bullet at 2970 m/s and rarely is the bullet left in the body. There is almost always an entry and exit wound. The fact that this Railgun is shooting hundreds and hundreds of times faster and launches the bad guys at basically the same speed is almost cartoonish. But Hey, it's Arnold, its okay. 

    There are many more scenes that could go into extreme detail on the falseness of this movie's physics such as the airplane scene, let's not forget the alligator scene, and many, many more that are some of the worst I've seen. 

Comments

  1. Be careful. It's the conservation of momentum that applies mostly in this case. Not the conservation of energy. They are not the same thing, and it's important for you, as a student of (movie) physics, to be able to distinguish them.

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  2. Oh, and don't forget to rank the movie physics using our scale.

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