8 Sci-Fi Movies Built On A Lie

While there is something magical as an audience to be toyed with and surprised by something truly unexpected in a movie, there's a fine line between a welcome surprise and an unwelcome one.

Given cinema is so often about keeping audiences guessing or looking to make an impact in serving up something out of the ordinary, taking too much of an advantage of your audience can backfire spectacularly. If rather than mixing up the truth or throwing in a curveball you end up making your audience feel lied to, then you're fighting a losing battle.

A mild bending of truth and logic? Sure, that's acceptable. But if your audience feels like it's been set up to look like an idiot, that's when it's a genuine struggle to win that audience back. This isn't something specific to sci-fi, of course, but it's the sci-fi genre that we're going to shine a spotlight on this time out.

Whether it was in the narrative, the marketing, factual inaccuracies, or some other sort of variable, here are eight science fiction pictures that were built on a throne of lies.

Waterworld has a special place in cinema history, with it often lambasted as one of Hollywood's most problematic pictures.

An idea initially conceived in 1986 from screenwriter Peter Rader, the film would officially be in some form of loose development from 1989 before it was finally released in 1995. But while the film did eventually swim its way to the silver screen, the initial budget of $100 million was blown out of the water when the movie ended up costing a reported $175 million to make.

That's enough about the production of the picture though, for there's one massive lie holding Waterworld together.

Set in the year 2500, Waterworld takes place at a time when sea levels have risen to over 25,000 feet, which in turn has sunk every single of the planet's continents and meant that the only way for humans to survive is to live in floating communities.

Putting a science cap on, and the whole premise of Waterworld just isn't at all possible.

Sure, there's always room for some liberties to be taken in sci-fi films, but there simply is not enough water in the Earth's atmosphere to make it possible for Waterworld's dystopian landscape to come to pass. Even if all of the ice caps melted, that would flood coastlines but leave any inland areas completely untouched.