Via Backreaction, I find that there's a paper on the Arxiv titled "Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy," whose authors feel that the best way to counter bad pop-culture science is with equations:
(That's from a section discussing the bad physics in the ending of the first Spiderman movie. There are places where the math is thicker, but this gives a sense of the subject as well.)
It's a fairly long paper (28 pages, single column), and analyzes seven silly movie scenes in some detail. I normally hate this sort of thing, as I think it needlessly contributes to the reputation of scientists as humorless dorks-- after all, there are many, many reasons to object to The Chronicles of Riddick without needing to bring thermodynamics into the discussion.
They have an interesting take on it, though, approaching the various movie scenes as "Fermi Problems," and going through order-of-magnitude estimates to demonstrate the implausibility of the situations shown. In the alternate universe where I have infinite free time to develop a ten-week course around the idea of Fermi problems (tentative title: "The Science of Guesswork"), this would make a great final project assignment.
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Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick are actually decent movies. I never thought much of Mr. FaXXXt and FuriouXXX in anything else, but those two are nifty (with the second being much better than the first, which is of course unheard of except in Star Wars, Star Trek and...oh wait, maybe it's not as unusual as people think after all...).
My bigger problem with that portion of the Spiderman movie is the impossibility of M.J. being able to grab and hold on to the cable during free-fall. She surely had to have been super-humanly strong to perform such an impossible feat.
my six-year-old friend also spotted the problem with that scene in Spider-Man
i think it had more to do with his experience with ropes and lines than logical deduction, but still, he didn't need a complex equation to say "that would pull him sideways, wouldn't it?"
Is it possible that they are not humorless dorks, but rather humorous ironists (in the British sense)?
One fun event that happened here was a "meet-the-scientist" session straight after a scifi movie screening (Day after Tomorrow, iirc). It was a hit for the participants, although the poor scientist looked rather frazzled after having to field so many questions, most of which was out of his speciality too.
I thought the arXiv paper was excellent. I printed a copy for my wife, as both of us have used Sci-Fi movie discussions in Physics and Astronomy classes we've taught.
My son and I rather liked Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. Vin Diesel was sincere in his fannish enthusiasm. Not science, in any way, but graphic novel / game / costume kind of fandom. Which, when you attend a San Diego Comic-Con, you see rules the media, like it or not.
Mind you, some of the first panels that my son did, as professional (aged seventeen) were on the science in comics. He did a Westercon panel, I think. Or at least some programmed by the program chair of a Westercon.
We went to a great presentation last night at Caltech of Mars Geophysical Observer data (many terabytes of it!), with 3 PIs, and knock-sox-off ultra-high-res pictures. Geoff Landis later complained to Mary Turzillo about the False Color not being labeled as such. Still, Mars is spectacular, whether or not the gullies are turqouise and scarlet.
And even if there are no Arthur C. Clarke banyan trees being exposed in the CO2 polar cap ice. There are those lovely dark dry ice guyser remnants, and sculpted sand dunes with little sand dunes rippling on them, and -- whoah! -- dust devils 10 km high, visible from orbit. That's a factor of e in scale height...
Hmmm... I sense a potential NSF Chautauqua short course here...