No./5 Neil degrasse Tyson ruins your favourite films

After the film-puncturing astrophysicist’s recent five-day Twitter rant, we assess the best and worst of his quibbles

TITANIC’S SKY IS WRONG!

After watching Titanic, Tyson emailed James Cameron to say that the star field at that point in 1912 in the Atlantic was inaccurate. “There is only one sky she should have been looking at,” he wrote, “and it was the wrong sky!” Ever the stickler for accuracy, Cameron put a new sky in the re-release.

GRAVITY’S HAIR IS TOO FLAT! ELSA’S HEAD IS BIG!

Sandra Bullock has a cropped hairdo in Gravity to avoid a complex CGI dilemma. Not good enough, says our favourite astrophysicist. “Why did Bullock’s hair, in otherwise convincing zero-g scenes, not float freely on her head?” he tweeted. Tyson would later grudgingly admit that he enjoyed the film. “Not that anybody asked,” Tyson tweeted in late February, setting himself up for a fall, “but if Elsa from Frozen has a Human-sized Head, then she has Horse-sized Eyeballs — occupying 4x the normal volume within her cranium. I’m just sayin’.” Which would be a good point, if the concept of caricature and artistic exaggeration hadn’t existed for several centuries!

STAR WARS IS TOO NOISY!

In 2015, Tyson took to Twitter with a common bugbear: too much space noise. In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, “the TIE fighters made exactly the same sound in the vacuum of space as in planetary atmospheres,” he wrote. But he has acknowledged that it is fantasy, which allows for creative licence.

ARRIVAL’S ALIEN LANGUAGE IS BACKWARDS!

Tyson also broods over linguistics. “In the film Arrival, nobody wondered whether the circular patterns drawn by the creature were backwards. The septopoid Alien drew them from the other side of a transparent glass wall.” But if it’s an entirely unknown language, does it matter?

MARRIAGE STORY’S TITLE ISN’T CORRECT!

Then came Tyson’s fretting over titles. Marriage Story, he claimed, should be called ‘Divorce Story’: “‘Goodfellas’ should instead be called ‘Badfellas’; ‘Bad Boys’ should instead be called ‘Good Boys’.” If only he understood dramatic irony as much as collapsing supernovae!