Yes, it was silly. The kind of story you'd get if you locked a bunch of teenage boys in a room, gave them an unlimited CGI budget and Red Bull enemas, and told them they had one hour to produce a script. But so what. It's a big dumb popcorn movie and I'm okay with that. At least the director could hold a shot longer than 50 milliseconds, unlike many working in the blockbuster oeuvre (I'm looking at you, Michael Bay. Watching Transformers is like staring into a strobe light). And the two hours of subliminal military recruiting was lost on me. War, like parenthood, is something I will only ever experience vicariously from the safety of my XBox. Yvan eht nioj, indeed.
What I expect from a giant monster movie are giant monsters whomping on each other and on that note Godzilla mostly delivers. Yet, there was featured on screen an offense so offensive, an outrage so outrageous, a derog so derogatory, that it demands a response. No, I don't mean making me think the wife was Sarah Chalke. (Whatever happened to Sarah Chalke, by the way? Haven't seen much from Sarah Chalke since Scrubs. Why am I writing Sarah Chalke so much? I don't know. Sarah Chalke).
I mean a blatant misunderstanding of the LGM-30 intercontinental ballistic missile, also known as the Minuteman.
LabKitty will tolerate cute kids in your monster movie. I will tolerate random improbable coincidences that move the plot along. I will even tolerate Blue Öyster Cult not appearing on the soundtrack. But when a Godzilla film demonstrates a willful ignorance of basic nuclear physics, that crosses the line.
This aggression will not stand.
Much of Godzilla revolves around the use of Minuteman missiles to kill the monsters. Specifically, (1) the missiles are used as bait to lure the monsters out to sea, and (2) the hero must install an old-timey mechanical timer in the warheads because the monsters burp out an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which kills all things electronic.
Everyone clear on the premise? Good. Let's examine these two points beginning with the first.
The monsters in Godzilla love radiation like silly rabbits love Trix. In the movie, they swim all the way from Tokyo to Nevada and break into the U.S. nuclear waste repository for a snack (which, I guess, was supposed to be Yucca Mountain. Which, by the way, doesn't exist. Environmentalists got the project shut down. Because it's safer to have nuclear waste collecting at thousands of sites across the country in rusty barrels and shallow evaporating ponds rather than encased in glass and buried a mile underground in a salt mine. America: ignoring problems and hoping they'll just go away since 1776. But I digress).
The monsters then go chasing after a train carrying the Minuteman missiles to San Francisco (because, hey, free nuclear Rocket Pop). Here we must ask: huh?
The Minuteman warhead has a yield in the megaton range. That part the movie got right (well, sort of. IIRC, the movie specifically mentions the Minuteman III, which carries a W78. This warhead has a reduced yield (~300 kilotons) compared to those carried by earlier versions of the Minuteman having yields in the megaton range. Still, the W78 is no slouch). However, the screenwriters are confusing "large yield" with "contains oodles of radioactive stuff." This is wrong. The W78 is a true thermonuclear -- that is, a multiple-stage Teller-Ulam device. It's basically a big barrel of lithium deuteride with an atom bomb bolted to one end. While you wouldn't want to roll around in it, lithium deuteride isn't radioactive. Even an atom bomb isn't all that radioactive before it goes off; the fissile contents are a few kilograms of plutonium (a hollow sphere about the size of an orange). Plutonium is a prodigious spontaneous alpha emitter, but unless you eat it (or, yes, detonate it), it won't hurt you. Alpha particles don't pass through paper, so they certainly won't make it past the metal bomb casing. Long story short: there is nothing on the train that would attract the monsters.
A pile of nuclear waste is to a kudzu what a rotting moose carcass is to a dog. The monsters abandoning Yucca Mountain to go scampering after some missiles would be like Ben Sanderson abandoning a liquor store to go chasing after two teenagers on a moped waving a couple of Coronas. It would be like Charlie abandoning the chocolate factory to pop round the chemists for a tin of Jaffa cakes. It would be like a screenwriter wriggling free of a big pile of coked-up Laker girls in the back of his Lamborghini to drive to Hooters.
It's like grandaddy always said: When you're rolling around in a moose carcass, you don't go looking for snausages. (The person I marry will have that tattooed on them, hopefully someplace intimate.)<
Which brings us to point #2.
While the W78 warhead design is classified, LabKitty is in possession of a fairly-detailed description of the sequence of events that occur when a nuclear weapon is detonated, which I will now share:
Time: 0529:45. The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at thirty-two detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonation waves separately bulged, encountered inclusions of Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall of dense uranium tamper and became a shock wave and squeezed, liquifying, moving through; hit the nickel plating of the plutonium core and squeezed, the small sphere shrinking, collapsing into itself, becoming an eyeball; the shock wave reaching the tiny initiator at the center and swirling through its designed irregularities to mix its beryllium and polonium; polonium alphas kicking neutrons free from scant atoms of beryllium: one, two, seven, nine, hardly more neutrons drilling into the surrounding plutonium to start the chain reaction. Then fission multiplying its prodigious energy release through eighty generations in millionths of a second, tens of millions of degrees, millions of pounds of pressure. Before the radiation leaked away, conditions within the eyeball briefly resembled the state of the universe moments after its first primordial explosion.By what espionage did I obtain such sensitive information? Wikileaks? Edward Snowden? An FOI request? No, it's from Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. You can buy it on Amazon. (Note to screenwriters: you can buy it on Amazon.)
Let me repeat the portion of the summary salient to our discussion: ...The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at thirty-two detonation points simultaneously fired...
Rhodes is describing the Trinity device, tested in 1945. This design was weaponized as the Mark III. While it has since undergone many technical improvements, the Mark III is the template for all nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile, including those carried by the Minuteman. My point? An X-unit is an electronic device. Wires and stuff. If the monster EMP knocked out the timer thingy, then replacing it with a clockwork orange isn't going to make any difference because the explodey-part of the bomb won't work either. And if the bomb part is immune from an EMP, then the timer circuit would be also. You can't have it both ways.
You especially can't have it both ways when it's a nothing but a cheap plot device that only exists to put the leading man in harm's way for no reason. Syd Field might define drama as "pretty people in danger," but you and I know the leading man doesn't get killed in a PG-13 movie. If you wanted the audience to believe for a moment your main guy wasn't going to make it to the credits, you should have cast Sean Bean.
Sigh. It's like they just didn't care.
Epilogue
Whether it's confusing yield with payload, claiming you only use 10% of your brain (looking at you, Lucy), or putting winglets on a 717 (looking at you, Flight), blockbuster movies keep getting science wrong. Why Hollywood doesn't hire LabKitty for reasonably-priced technical consulting is beyond my understanding. (I have email and everything!)
Footnote: We use more than 10% of our brains because evolution. And 717s don't have winglets because shut up. They just don't.
Yes, I understand the irony of pointing out physics mistakes in a story about ginormous lizards who live in the Earth's crust and eat radiation. But just because you get to make up some things doesn't mean you get to make up all things. That's Screenwriting 101. Stanley Kubrick's 2001 was also pretty loopy, but by and large it got the physics right. That's because Kubrick did his homework. You, Godzilla scriptwriter persons, didn't do your homework.
In summary, I will only say this: if you guys make a sequel, and that sequel doesn't include Jet Jaguar, there's gonna be all kinds of trouble. LabKitty does not forgive a second transgression.
LabKitty points at eyes, then points at screenwriters.
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