Love this movie. It was almost impossible to find a theater showing it when it came out. I love it for the story. Yea its a Si Fi film so I know its going to be over the top. But its a movie. Not every film has to be true life or based on facts. If you find it hard to believe then maybe you should go watch some MTV real life crap. Its a movie its going to be fiction and have some crazy concepts. I mean come on its called Science FICTION.
There is a difference between fiction and fantasy. Fiction means that a story is not based upon events that have happened in the past (or present). However, fiction should still try to tells stories of events that could possibly happen (at least make an attempt to follow the rules of reality as best as possible). Fantasy on the other hand doesn't need to follow any rule book of nature. Good science fiction, whether in print, audio, or video, typically does a very good job in not violating very many rules of nature. Actually the best science fiction I have read have been written by science-oriented authors, Issac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke for example. In terms of films, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original one), and Forbidden Planet are excellent science fiction (the astronomy in these movies is very accurate and much of the physics presented is possible). Examples of very good science fiction include most of the Star Trek movies (except for V and some of the Next Generation movies), many of the Star Trek TV shows (TOS and TNG), Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (the recent one), Dr. Who, and Star Wars. In the case of Star Trek, they went out of their way to get the astronomy accurate (though once in a while they would make mistakes) and when fans in the scientific community would point out the unrealistic physics in TOS, Roddenberry went out of his way to address these problems in TNG (i.e., Heisenberg compensators for the transporters and inertial dampeners to allow for the rapid accelerations experienced going to warp speed). In the case of Star Wars, there is a lot of fantasy mixed in with the science fiction, but since the stories are good, I can forgive the fantasy aspect of these films (though it would have been nice if Lucas also mentioned inertial dampeners at some point in one of the movies).
