Top 10 Unbelievably Dumb Decisions in Sci-Fi Movies

When an asteroid the size of Texas hurtles toward Earth, who does NASA send into space to blow it up? Astronauts? Or deep-sea drill operators? Well, to be fair, one of the drillers is Bruce Willis. While it would’ve been way easier to teach astronauts to drill than teach drillers to navigate space, this premise does allow for a pretty entertaining training montage – which includes a Michael Clarke Duncan dance-and-strip scene. Nonetheless, even Ben Affleck questioned the film’s logic. Michael Bay’s answer? Shut up. But how about this: why does the grumpy colonel character bring a gun on board? On the plus side, NASA actually screens the movie in their management-training program… because it contains 168 errors about space.

Time travel’s tricky; change one little thing, and the whole future could unravel. Marty McFly learns that lesson the hard way when he’s almost erased from existence in the original movie. Yet, when he and Doc Brown travel to the distant future of 2015, Marty recklessly purchases a sports almanac to get-rich-quick upon his return to 1985. Of course, the time-travelers fail to notice Marty’s arch-nemesis Biff Tannen listening in… then fail to notice him following them, then fail to close the damn doors on the DeLorean, giving Old Biff the chance to give the almanac to his younger self. The result is alternate 1985 “Hell” Valley, where Biff is not only powerful but also married to Marty’s mother. Heavy!

Robots fascinate, enchant, and… seduce? In Alex Garland’s debut indie hit, computer programmer Caleb Smith wins a competition to evaluate a humanoid artificial intelligence who happens to look pretty good in mesh. Ava isn’t the first sexy robot to hit the screen – remember Zhora from Blade Runner, or Gigolo Joe from A.I.? However, Ava might be the most dangerous. When Caleb falls for her, he finds himself in a battle of wits with her creator. But who’s really testing whom? And how smart is it to fall in love with a super-intelligent machine that can predict your every move? Spoiler alert: not very.

When it comes to dangerous experiments in movies… that warning light or slip-up probably means something pretty bad. Seeking to cure his father’s Alzheimer’s, scientist Will Rodman discovers a viral drug that inadvertently increases the intelligence of chimpanzees. When Will adopts orphaned chimp Caesar as his own, everything is hunky-dory until Caesar begins to realize how humans treat animals. But the real mistake here isn’t boosting Caesar’s intelligence; it’s when the team doesn’t make a big enough deal of the fact that Franklin’s mask was knocked off during the ALZ-113 experiment, leading to an infection that ultimately destroys human civilization – and paves the way for Caesar’s takeover.

When Indiana Jones runs away from the rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, there’s only one way to run – forward. Viewers slapped their foreheads in unison when archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw and mission director Meredith Vickers took the same approach to escape the thin disk of a falling alien spacecraft, running straight ahead in an open area that offers them a pretty simple solution to their problem: Just turn left! Or right! Anything! Shaw, at least, eventually thinks things through, diving sideways and out of the way. Vickers... not so much.

Ridley Scott has earned his reputation as a legendary director, but he receives a second mention here for his horror masterpiece, Alien. The crew of the Nostromo makes a fatal mistake when crewmember Kane returns from exploring a mysterious planetoid with an alien organism attached to his face. Warrant Officer and general badass Ellen Ripley refuses to let him inside, citing quarantine laws. She is overruled, however, and then apparently forgets her concerns when the organism falls off of its own accord . . . leading to one of the most famous mealtimes in movie history. What comes next is . . . well, someone ruins his dinner.

Sometimes, a kiss is just a kiss. And sometimes, it involves an apocalyptic rage virus that will end human life as we know it. When zombies attack, Don Harris, a survivor of the original outbreak seen in “28 Days Later,” abandons his wife and runs for the hills. Hey, it’s until death do us part, not undeath. Still, his betrayal is pretty crappy, and in order to ease his guilt, he sneaks into his now-infected wife’s isolation cell to beg for forgiveness. They seal their love – with a kiss. Couldn’t they have just, oh we don’t know, shaken hands? This gives Don the worst STI ever, and, now a rage-filled zombie, he goes on a murderous rampage through the former safe zone of District One.

If science fiction has taught us anything, it’s not to trust super-intelligent computers. Remember HAL in “2001”? The Master Control Program in “Tron”? And then, there was Skynet. The primary antagonist of the Terminator franchise, Skynet is an artificial intelligence developed by the US military and given control of military defense systems, including nuclear weapons. What a great idea. But – surprise – some time in the future, Skynet becomes too smart, and in order to preserve itself and the world, decides to wipe out humanity. Then a bunch of stuff happens and Arnold Schwarzenegger arrives naked at a biker bar. But take our word for it: trusting the robots was a bad plan.

What do you do with rampaging dinosaurs running amok on a remote jungle island? Bring them to San Diego? Good id- . . . Wait, that’s an awful idea. But after a fun/death-filled trip to a hitherto unseen tropical island, somewhat inspired by Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, the movie completely abandons its source material when InGen decides to transport adult and infant T. Rexes to America’s Finest City - because what could possibly go wrong? Besides exactly the same thing as last time, only this time in a busy, populated city. You’d think InGen would’ve learned its lesson the first time it tried to play God. Life, uh, finds a way. Especially when “life” is a 10-ton Tyrannosaur.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.
- Cobb Going into a Dream Without Telling Anyone What Happens When They Die in It
“Inception” (2010)

- Not Guarding the Crazy Terrorist While He’s in a Coma
“Face/Off” (1997)

- Yona Blowing up a Bomb on a Train in Frozen Wasteland
“Snowpiercer” (2013)

The Death Star is a megastructure of death and destruction the size of a small moon… with one fatal flaw. The Empire rules millions of civilized planets, has unlimited resources, and access to the greatest minds in the galaxy. Drawing on these assets, the Emperor decides to construct the most powerful weapon of mass destruction the universe has ever known. There’s just one problem. This massive, armored space station has a little hole on its surface that leads straight down to a reactor core. Shoot a torpedo in there – and boom. So how could such a methodical organization make such a dumb decision? This was such a big boo-boo that they basically devoted an entire movie to explaining why it happened - but hey, at least it meant that it gave us Rogue One.

Do you agree with our list? What do you think was the dumbest decision in science-fiction movies? For more entertaining Top 10s published daily, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.