In a recent video series, the outlet Inverse has been bringing in experts from various fields to discuss the accuracy of certain scenes or elements within movies over the years.
This week they brought in nuclear weapons physicist Greg Spriggs from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to comment on depictions of blasts in big-screen movies ranging from “Broken Arrow” and “American Assassin” to “The Avengers” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.
The most accurate depiction of the ones he saw were two Chris Nolan films – “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Oppenheimer”. In terms of the Batman film, Spriggs answered a question that has lingered about the sequence, which sees Batman using the Batwing-style vehicle to get it away from Gotham City.
Specifically, he confirms there would actually be no real lingering danger to Gotham City residents, saying that with the reactor detonating over the ocean and at a far enough away distance that there’s “very little” in terms of fallout.
He calls the depiction at the end of “The Dark Knight Rises” as “one of the better ones” of those he’s seen on screen but does have one complaint about the sequence’s accuracy: “The people that were standing on the bridge kind of felt a breeze. That happened a lot too soon – it would’ve taken a finite length of time for that shock wave to make it out there.”
He then goes on to give it a 7/10 rating – the same score he gives “Oppenheimer”. As for what film scored the worst? “Broken Arrow” with a 1/10.
