8 Movie Myths That Have Nothing to Do With Reality

Watching movies isn’t the best way to learn new things, but they’re still a popular resource. The number of people who watch movies regularly is much bigger than the number of those who like documentaries. But sometimes the reality in movies is twisted to make the story more interesting, which is why many people believe myths they see on the big screen.

We at Bright Side love movies, but we think we should be more critical about the information we see on the screen. We want to debunk some popular myths to prove our point.

The sun is not yellow.

Sometimes, movie creators don’t like showing things that are different from what people believe. The sun looks yellow to us because the planet’s atmosphere distorts the color. But if you go to space, the truth is the sun is white —unless you’re a movie character, of course. The sun is always yellow in movies, even when people are in space.

DNA can’t be stored in amber for a long time.

For example, in Jurassic Park, scientists were able to extract a dinosaur DNA sample from a mosquito that bit it and was in a piece of amber. Of course, this is nothing more than the creators’ imagination because DNA decays, and amber isn’t the best way to store it. We can’t extract the DNA of real dinosaurs today (for better or worse). But if we are going to look for it, we won’t find it in amber.

Instant communication over long distances is impossible.

Movie creators think that if we can talk to people overseas in real-time, we can also speak to astronauts who are far from Earth. We have bad news: They are breaking the laws of physics. We could talk to someone who’s on the Moon. But if we’re talking about someone who’s on Mars, for example, it would take light about 12.5 minutes to cover the distance between Earth and Mars.

Sharks can’t sense a drop of blood from miles away.

Predators do have a great sense of smell, but it’s really exaggerated in movies. Even though some sharks can sense blood from far distances, it’s not likely they can do it from another part of the world. And, according to experiments, human blood doesn’t interest them much — at least no more than other mammal blood does. But we don’t recommend going into the water if you have an open wound anyway.

Lasers aren’t visible in space, and they travel much faster.

Have you ever thought about why the troopers from Star Wars are not very good fighters? It is not their fault — they have very bad weapons that are slower than bullets. You don’t have to be Neo from The Matrix to be able to dodge them. But in reality, lasers travel at the speed of light, and they’re invisible if there are no things that reflect light. And there are no such things in space.

Mice don’t like cheese.

It is not clear what gave birth to this myth, but today, mice and cheese seem to be synonymous with one another. Most likely, this is the last thing they will eat if given the choice. The BBC even conducted an experiment: they offered mice cheddar, grapes, and peanuts. The first thing the mice ate were peanuts, sometimes grapes, and never cheese. Maybe the cheese wasn’t fancy enough.

There’s no such thing as photographic memory.

Many characters from movies and TV series have the ability to memorize everything perfectly, like Mike from Suits, and Lisbeth from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. However, there’s absolutely no evidence that this is possible. The only thing that is remotely similar is a good autobiographical memory, which fewer than 100 people in the world have. But this is not the same thing. The people with such an ability learn things just as well as others, but they can recall what they had for lunch at 10 years old.

You can’t turn your hair blonde from dark without discoloration.

We don’t know what these wonderful things that movie characters use are, but they somehow don’t do any discoloring. They just use the hair dye and their hair turns white. The problem here is that the dye won’t be able to color dark hair instantly. And most likely, you will end up with exactly the same color as you started with. And don’t do it without gloves like the Red Sparrow character did.

What other mistakes do you often see in movies?