Real Genius/Headscratchers

• The ending of the film has been subjected to Fridge Logic, with the unanswered question of what exactly happens next. The military can still build more lasers now that their prototype was proven successful, right? Except that the whole scheme was exposed to public scrutiny, with a congressman directly witnessing it, ensuring that there will be subpoenas and indictments aplenty going around. And if nothing else, Hathaway's ruined.
  • Not to mention that, as far as the military is concerned, the only 100% successful laser test was done by Chris and Mitch in the lab. The aerial test laser, in addition to hitting the wrong target, also burst into flames. Even without the added public scrutiny, there is no way the military would risk using a weapon that potentially unstable on a plane or spacecraft. (Of course, the laser's self-destruction was engineered by Chris and Mitch, but the military doesn't know that.)
    • Caveat: the simple act of examining the wreckage will reveal to them the mechanical cause of the failure (dirt on the lens), which is a known failure mode for high-energy lasers. So unless they solidly clutch the Idiot Ball and refuse to do so much as a basic accident investigation on the high-profile failure of a multi-million-dollar classified defense research project, they will have physical evidence that the failure was not caused by the dynamite laser being inherently unstable in principle but instead caused by either a mechanical defect or deliberate sabotage.
• At no point does any of the protagonists bother to exposit why it's so wrong to build a laser capable of vaporizing ground targets from space. They simply state flatly that it is, and act on that basis. But Fridge Logic suggests that unless the assassination laser was fired willy-nilly at innocent people (at which point the problem would not be the existence of the laser, but the murderous insanity of whoever's firing it), it would actually pose much less risk to innocent bystanders and less general destruction to simply vaporize a hostile dictator from space than, oh, declare war on his entire nation. And there is no plausible deniability involved when you're talking about giant glowing laser beams from space. Only one nation in the world at that time could be credibly suspected of owning laser satellites, and a scenario that posits a conspiracy of agents acting without sanction from National Command Authority is an even bigger plot hole, because National Command Authority is going to be the first person to ask "Why the hell did one of our own 'weather satellites' just vaporize someone with a giant laser beam? Who is responsible for this?" as soon as said satellite is actually seen firing.
  • Although there is the fact that the man in charge of building it made his students work on it, without their knowledge, with only the shaky promise of a job or graduate study as potential payment.
    • Wrong! The opening scenes exposit in detail why the whole concept is bad, bad, bad. All you can do with it is kill unsuspecting targets; it would be useless in open warfare, against enemies who are either unknown or in hiding. "It's the perfect peacetime weapon." All it's good for is deniable assassinations. And ones without space capabilities at that.
      • Again, there is nothing deniable about a giant glowing laser beam from space. The demo film at the beginning of the movie shows that the weapon is intended to be fired from the Space Shuttle. Hey, you know who tracks Shuttle launches in real-time? Pretty much every other major government in the world. The US might as well Fed-Ex their target a nuclear bomb in a shipping crate with 'PROPERTY OF THE US GOVERNMENT' painted on it in two-foot Day-Glo lettering, and have about an equal amount of plausible deniability^[1] in so doing.
      • Also, the claim of 'the weapon is only good vs. unsuspecting targets' is risible. That beam punched a six-inch hole through several feet of reinforced concrete -- and quite likely a heat-absorbing layer as well, given that that was the backstop in a high-energy laser lab. That's enough penetrating power to rip straight through anything short of a nuclear-hardened underground bunker, much less the top armor on any military vehicle in use today. Forget 'unsuspecting targets', this thing is a battlefield fire support weapon. You could use it to snipe tanks. You could use it to snipe warships.
      • In it's prototype form, perhaps. But Science Marches On, and this laser bears a remarkable resemblance to the powerguns from Hammer's Slammers, which occupy weaponry niches from heavy artillery to small arms and everywhere in between.
      • Furthermore, it would be by far the most effective ABM system yet invented, and mightn't mitigating the megadeaths of a possible nuclear exchange during the Cold War perhaps be a good thing?
      • "Unsuspecting" is not the same as "innocent". Besides, you're taking the movie as a given that it would only be used as a tool of assassination. The opening video shows a single zap-and-done, but the actual test shows it as able to drag a fairly destructive line... it would be an amazing weapon for taking out enemy fortifications or battle lines that were keeping forces from advancing or keeping them pinned down, or taking out strategic targets like missile silos, runways, and storage facilities. It has plenty of applications on the actual battlefield, ones that could probably save numerous American soldiers' lives.
        • DARPA currently has a chemical-pumped laser in field test, that's notably bulkier and less powerful than the one in this movie. Its intended for use as a battlefield weapon, not a covert assassination tool, in the air-defense artillery role. Admittedly this movie was made decades ago, still, its a major case of the Idiot Ball that the military-industrial complex was handed the idea of a 5+ megawatt beam weapon with a tight enough focus to still be an effective weapon over hundreds of miles of range and had their only reaction 'hey, let's use this as an assassination tool' instead of 'hey, let's use this to melt the entire Soviet Air Force from space!'
    • Also, the opening credits spell out the point of the film pretty clearly: the song "you took advantage of me" playing over schematics of Little Boy.
    • You mean kind of like they take advantage of the college giving them a free ride on their education and research and getting them a job post-graduation? This makes about as much sense as someone joining the armed forces just to get the "free" money for college, and then throwing a fit when their commanding officer actually had the audacity to deploy them as if they were an actual soldier. But then, people do that, so maybe it's just being realistic about how shortsighted and entitled some people can be.
    • That's not a valid comparison. With the military and the GI Bill, yes, you know that you might be deployed to combat--you expect it because that's what you signed up for. However, Chris, Mitch, and co. don't know that they're working on a military death ray. The protagonists are pacifistic science students who are coerced/manipulated into making a working assassination ray. As far as they knew, it was going to be purely a scientific endeavour with unlimited applications. (Except the most obvious one, granted...) Remember the story Chris told about Laslo having a Heroic BSOD in The Seventies after finding out his research project would be hurting people? Same type of thing with our protagonists and their laser.
      • Laslo's case is even worse than theirs because Laslo knew that he had been working on defense projects. Its kind of hard to design fighter planes and bombs without knowing that you're building fighter planes and bombs. Sure, he had an emotional breakdown once it finally sunk in that his work wasn't just an interesting series of design problems but was actually used in a real war to fry real people to death, but that comes across more as 'ivory-tower iconoclast is belatedly slapped in the face by the real world after deliberately ignoring it for way too long', not as 'innocent person was taken advantage of by evil manipulators'.
    • They've been invited to work on a laser with the express goal of making it more powerful and therefore more destructive. At that point their blinding themselves to the reasons anyone would want such a thing isn't anyone's fault but their own. "I was too dumb to know that my genius could be weaponized even though I was blatantly building a weapon" isn't exactly a heroic excuse.
    • That's just the characters' hubris at work. Hubris is a subtle recurring theme in the film. Chris and Mitch make the exact same mistake that Chris said happened to Laslo: they got so caught up in their work that it blinded them to what the final outcome was. However, when they are alerted to their shortsightedness, their morals instantly come into focus, and they react as they see fit. I expect that Laslo got involved purely because he doesn't want Chris and Mitch to suffer the same Heroic BSOD that he himself suffered after he finished his project.
      • Errr, that's precisely the point. The only reason the characters can claim to be surprised by the outcome of what they were doing is because they were blinded by their own hubris -- which means they have no legitimate grievance on these grounds. Any reasonable person would have known the consequences of what they chose to do before they chose to do it, that they were cocky jackasses does not automatically mean we should feel sorry for them not seeing it coming. Sure, Hathaway was an asshole and scamming students for free labor while simultaneously defrauding the government by misappropriation of funds, but that doesn't make the invention inherently immoral. An equitable redress of grievance for what had been done to them would have been the ending of Hathaway's career (notice that no one disagrees with that part of the movie), and maybe getting paid for the fair value of their contribution, but would not involve deliberately ruining a major US defense project,
• Assuming that there are blueprints and detailed notes and knowing that the concepts behind it are sound,wouldn't the DoD just be able to build another laser? They know it works... and they still maintain the rationale for building it...so why wouldn't they just build another one?
  • They don't know it works. They know it missed its target and burst into flame. They don't know that this was intentional, and probably assume it's just a piece of junk.
    • No, they know it had a failure. The next step would be to put together another one, have someone go over it to try and find the problem, and then do another test to see if the problem could be reproduced or was just some sort of fluke or human error. Having one unexplained failure and scrapping the project forever is pure Hollywoodism.
      • Given that the test failure produced substantial property damage off-base, you would think that an accident investigation crew tearing this thing's remains down to the frame to try and find the problem would be mandatory. If only to try and avoid liability concerns. And of course the instant they do that they find the traces of grease smeared on the lens, which at minimum suggests 'it blew up due to faulty maintenance' and not 'it blew up due to inherent design flaw'. So run the test again.
  • Again, the point that people seem to be missing is the added public scrutiny. The Congressman, the college dean, and a few passersby saw a laser beam hit Hathaway's house. Eventually, a Congressional oversight committee and an interested public are going to start asking questions. I expect that the laser project would be buried underneath red tape for YEARS to come.
    • Congressman and others go to Congress. The Congresspeople that actually approved the project in the first place say "It's classified" and send them on their way, to gripe to the college newspaper and whatever publications will listen to them about "a giant space laser". Red tape cut.
      • The movie strongly implies that the project was not operating with legitimate oversight -- i.e., that there weren't any 'Congresspeople that actually approved the project in the first place. At which point informing Congress about the laser means that Congress will be very pissed off that somebody was not keeping them in the loop when they were supposed to be.
    • Or, the congressman goes public with the information for political reasons, leading to public outcries and, yes, public scrutiny. Read up on how much the SDI was criticized and you might get a better understanding about why John Q. Public in the '80s would be interested in solid proof^[2] that the government was testing death rays in a time of peace.
      • Regarding 'political reasons', this is the 80s so its Reagan in the White House and Republicans in Congress pushing 'Star Wars' defense research. If the Congressman is a Democrat he has every reason to make the hugest public stink about this that he possibly can, as it would be only to the benefit of his party's chances in the next general election. And since this is supposed to be southern California, he probably is.
    • Truthfully, without Word of God to confirm it one way or another^[3], or with the present lack of a Sequel, the final outcome remains strictly in the realm of Wild Mass Guessing. I like to think that, at the very end, when it's all said and done, that the project was a flop. Definitely not thrown out altogether, but put aside for a while (maybe boxed up and stashed away in Hangar 51, haha).

• What age is Mitch when Sherry Nugil vamps on him? Her dialogue states that she waited three years for him to be legal, and I thought that age of consent in California is 18. Since he comes to "Pacific Tech" at 15, that means that one of several things must be the case:
  • The film covers three years rather than single year it implies. This makes no sense, as Chris is already a senior when Mitch arrives and Hathaway is clearly under pressure to complete the laser that same year.
  • The age of consent is actually sixteen for purposes of the film, and Sherry's been stalking Mitch since he was thirteen.
    • The age of consent is sixteen in most of the developed world, and in most of the states of the US besides. California is the outlier in that it makes 'em wait until age eighteen. And just because Mitch was 15 at the start of the movie does not necessarily mean he is still 15 by this point in the movie, because unless his birthday was during the summer he's going to pass it before the end of the academic year.
  • Mitch is in some kind of weird Timey-Wimey Ball.
  • Sherry is blatantly lying.
  • Sherry is attempting statutory rape, and Jordan does actually commit it (or is implied to), but the movie simply ignores this.
    • Sherry says she's been waiting for Mitch to be "old enough", presumably to be old enough to make his own decision about whether he wanted to have sex or not, as opposed to old enough by the law. Considering that Mitch proceeds to turn her down, and chooses to instead go have sex with Jordan, she was clearly right about him being old enough to make his own decisions. Eighties movies in general were surprisingly un-shy about portraying teenagers as being perfectly willing and capable of deciding to have sex whether it was legal or not, often without world-destroying consequences.
    • Sherry is only attempting statutory rape if the age of consent in their state is over age sixteen, which it is in many states. Sure, this is a fictional Expy of Cal Tech and California's age of consent is age eighteen, but since its not actually Cal Tech they have wiggle room to say 'and this is not actually California, either'. So, we don't know, but given that Sherry's dialogue actually uses the words "I was waiting until you were old enough", Occam's Razor suggests 'Mitch just hit the age of consent'.

1. ↑ Which is 'absolutely none', for those who haven't gotten the joke yet.
2. ↑ And yes, I'm sure that Chris, Mitch, and co. would have ensured that there was solid proof
3. ↑ Someone should look up Neal Israel and/or Pat Proft (or even Martha Coolidge) to ask them