I really love this film, but I've always thought there is a plot hole with the electromagnetic pulse thing. How is it that watches, computers, vehicles, ... get affected, but not the camera or its recordings? Or dr. Farber's lab (I guess that could be explained by its subterranean location)?
I wondered the same thing, and then it occurred to me -- it would be fine if it stored its recorded data on an analog medium like film (when Sam hands the recordings to his father it almost looks like small film cannisters).
It would have been nice if they had mentioned that, though, since my assumption was that it stored it digitally.
jcw.
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John C. Worsley
It is possible to shield Electronic devices from EMP.
So it's my guess that Farbers Lab was underground enough and shielded from EMP.
EMP is electromagnetic radiation and if strong enough it will destroy anything that is affected by light (e.g. undeveloped photographic film)or magnetism (e.g. audio tape, silicon chips and potentially the coils in electric motors)
Presumably, Sam/Trevor has some nifty little canisters to cart his data around in
not true. EMP will primarily just effect microchips, computers, communications equipment, other circuitry, and some heavy-duty electrical / grid equipment. unfortunately, some of this stuff is in pretty much anything at all electrical these days, including modern car engines, which is why the big deal was made about the truck being diesel. film and magnetic storage will be perfectly safe, unless you were close enough that you'd be dead and blown away anyway.)
yes, i think the idea was that the cave protected the lab. i have no idea if that would work or not, but it sounds possible at least.
unfortunately, it is totally unclear what could possibly have really cause an EMP in this movie... see my review for more details, but the only thing that makes practical sense scientifically is if the Americans used their own nuke on the satellite, but then why the heck over Australia of all places?
doh, didn't make the 1,000 word review cut, so i'll post it here instead:
It is pretty much completely physically inconceivable that a "nuclear" satellite could create a nuclear explosion, and thus a destructive EMP pulse. a nuclear reactor is NOTHING like a nuclear bomb. nuclear bombs are VERY hard to make, and can not just go off on accident. a nuclear explosion is incredibly difficult to engineer, which is the whole point of non-proliferation. even if you blew up an actual bomb using your own explosives, that would almost certainly not produce any nuclear explosion, much less one of significant size. It would be nothing but a "dirty" bomb unless it was armed and detonated itself as it was designed to be. In fact, a nuclear-reactor powered satellite has de-orbited before, Kosmos 954, in Canada in 1978. It was theoretically dangerous and a pain to clean up, but hardly a serious threat to humanity, much less THE END OF THE WORLD! Which reminds me, yes, on top of all this, there is no conceivable way whatsoever that even a worst case scenario like this could have resulted in more than a few lives lost and some (probably pretty minor) radiation contamination, but nothing even remotely close to "the end of the world" or ANYTHING like that. Plenty of nukes have been blown up in space; this is just ignorant science-phobic hysteria akin to the recurring fear of particle accelerators that crops up every time they build a new one. It is conceivable that the Americans in the film took the satellite out with their own nuclear weapon, and that's what caused the EMP, but that's hard to explain for several reasons. for one, sending a nuke to take out a nuke just sounds like doubling your chances of radiation reaching the surface and a bad idea... but much more practically, how and why they would have done this over Australia rather than in the middle of the ocean (the Pacific is right there, much closer and REALLY big!) I dunno, if that was the premise, they didn't explain it at all... and again, possibly a tiny bit of radiation contamination, maybe an international incident, but no freaking way the end of the world by any means.
Part of this plot point is that the world population is primarily ignorant (e.g. the Large Hadron Collider might cause a BLACK HOLE THAT SWALLOWS THE WHOLE SOLAR SYSTEM!). The Americans (in the story, set in 1999, while the movie was made in 1990) knew the satellite wouldn't "blow up" in the atmosphere and probably shot it down so it wouldn't irradiate a large area wherever it re-entered (i.e. you don't want a large amount of nuclear waste raining down onto the earth randomly). They (the US) told India to gain control of their satellite or they were going to shoot it down with a thermonuclear weapon (which would vaporize all the waste before it got into the atmosphere and the resulting radioactive fallout would escape into space). Such an explosion could produce an EMP over the blast area, however. I'm not sure it would be strong enough to cause the same effects as a ground blast a 10s of miles away (as was evidenced by the effects in the move), as the EMP would have been weakened by the ionosphere and geomagnetic field that lies between us and open space, but it may have had some similar effects. Also to note, EMP does its damage by inducing large DC voltage spikes in coils (like those found in cars, even hand crankers, and power supplies for electronic equipment) and some of the field effect transistors contained in the chips. So it isn't clear to me why the hand-cranker vehicles survived (perhaps because the voltages induced in the coils were not enough to fuse the coil and there wasn't any other electronics involved in the ignition circuitry), as it would have at least blown a bunch of fuses!
...Guess What S1m0ne! We have now entered an age where we can manufacture fraud faster than our ability to detect it
hardly a serious threat to humanity, much less THE END OF THE WORLD!
EMP doesn't effect magnetic tapes... Dr. Farber even comments on this! And yeah the lab is heavily shielded because they have to eliminate all EM noise (including the earth's ambient magnetic field) because the brainwaves are transferred via EM waves.
...Guess What S1m0ne! We have now entered an age where we can manufacture fraud faster than our ability to detect it