Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

I recall a high school physics class where my teacher had us watch a clip from Speed 2. The basic plot of this movie, if you've never seen it, is that a cruise liner is taken over by some madman who has rigged the controls such that the cruise liner is on an irreversible collision course, initially with an oil tanker. Later, the cruise liner is redirected and actually runs ashore at full speed into a coastal town. As the ship runs ashore, it's speed drops and you see cut scenes of the speedometer slowly decreasing as the ship plows through a pier, a road, and some buildings. All the while you get long clips of destruction below the ship and the passengers getting thrown around the deck violently.

In physics class however, we pulled out stopwatches. We had to time the boat from the moment it hit shore to the point it stopped moving. Every speedometer cut scene, we'd note both the time and the current speed of the boat. Then we plotted acceleration. The acceleration was obviously uneven. Worse yet, it was tiny. Cruise liners don't move all that fast to begin with, and this scene was horribly drawn out for cinematic effect. We determined that rather than the passengers getting flung across the deck of the ship, they should have instead been sitting on the deck sipping martinis with no worry over spilling a drop.

It was a fun exercise. At the time, it was also a great excuse to watch a movie in class. That physics teacher was Tom Rogers, one of the standout teachers in my personal education. He runs a website, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, where he reviews movies from a solely physics standpoint - sound in space, exploding cars, exploding bullets. It's all there. Including a rant about the new Star Trek movie, which I personally did not enjoy much. He's been interviewed on NPR and has a book out all about movie physics. Definitely a fun way to waste a bit of time.