Megan's Blog

War of the Worlds

Last night I went to see the Hollywood remake of War of the Worlds. It was an entertaining film, and some bits of it were actually scary, but I can't take a film with Tom Cruise in it seriously! Peter sent me a link to the Bad Astronomer's review of the film. He mentions most of the stuff that we spotted (how could humans not have spotted several large lumps of metal buried under cities?), but he didn't spot the bad astronomy at the start of the film. There is a shot of the Earth with the Sun appearing round the edge, and you see the terminator fly accross the surface far faster than it should. The Sun barely moves and yet the near side of the Earth is fully illuminated before long.