Before you roll your eyes and remind me they’re just movies I will still point the finger of shame at Hollywood for their low marks in Science (and History). Next to Fox News, American movies are notorious for purporting unsound myths as facts everybody believes much to the annoyance of intelligent people. Case in point, explosive decompression from the movie Outland; people or other living creatures do not blow up in the vacuum of outer space. If your morbid curiosity needs to be satisfied, see what would really happen by watching Sunshine or Event Horizon (the latter also gets fire in zero gravity correct).
The smartasses from The Onion‘s AV Club did a section today about the (in)validity of 15 different Apocalypses shown in movies over the last 30 years. To be fair, some of their choices are documentaries: An Inconvenient Truth, Flow and Food, Inc.; or wannabe documentaries (Left Behind). What was more amusing was the writers getting debunking/clarifying assistance from actual scientists, namely my favorite astronomer, Dr. Phil Plait loaned his expertise regarding the issues with asteroids. If you’re going to ridicule 1998’s Armageddon, you can’t leave Plait out of the fray! The bigger shock was to discover that one of the regular contributors has a PhD in Theology.
Check it out. Some of the answers were re-assuring because I’m not very knowledgeable about epidemics.