Final Destination 5

Hi. I think some of you may have seen the film "Final Destination 5" or at least know the Final Destination series. If not, you can stop and read this.

Now that you know what I'm talking about, let's talk about Olivia's death. You can see the scene here (keep in mind that this is an horror film).

When Olivia goes to have her eye surgery, her head is tightly secured and her right eyelid pried open with a speculum. A cup of water that Olivia left on top of a water cooler is knocked over when the cooler bubbles, and the cup spills onto the power unit of the laser machine plugged into the wall. The intensity of the ray overheats and the laser machine starts to shake. As Olivia reaches for the emergency stop on the control, she knocks it to the floor, where the activation button is pressed, discharging the laser in her right eye.
The laser burns across her iris and pupil. She removes the speculum from her eye and holds her hand in the way, burning lines across her palm, although the laser still burns through her hand.

We can stop here. It's since the first time I saw this film that I'm wondering if it's possible that a laser for eye surgery can reach such a high power to burn the skin without burning the diode. What are your thoughts?

Jaggions said:

What are your thoughts?

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It's a movie. Anything can happen.

It's not possible ..

Ah, Final Destination 5. I had started my hobby with lasers a little over a year before watching it for the first time, and I easily noticed all the inaccuracies between what the movie showed and what I had learned here not so long before. That caused me to burst into laughter while all the other spectators in the room were horrified.

Really, if you're looking for an answer that is as short as possible, you should ask "what did they do right in that scene". And the answer is: "they said that LASIK surgery is done with lasers".
Everything else is so wrong that you can't avoid but laugh. So, let's rip that scene a new one:

1) The LASIK machine has a display that shows the maximum power of the laser to be 5 milliwatts. Everyone here knows that the only thing you can do with a 5mW laser is to project a dot somewhere, but the movie wants us to believe that a 5 mW laser is too powerful for eye surgery and can burn the cornea, sclera and skin tissues instantly.
2) The laser makes a ZAP sound, like rayguns in sci-fi shows. Obviously, no laser makes that kind of sound because there is no possible mechanism for it. Now, pedants might point out that if a laser is powerful enough, it can turn the air it hits into plasma, make it explode and generate a sound, but let me out-pedant them by pointing out that such a sound would be a BUZZ, not a ZAP.
3) It is the wrong type of laser altogether. We are shown a continuous wave red laser, but real eye surgery uses instead a pulsed excimer laser that emits in the ultraviolet.

And, being a stereoscopy freak, I can add another way in which that scene is wrong. The first-person sequence shows the laser being fired... toward the dead center of the screen. That is completely wrong; the stereoscopically correct way to make that sequence would have been to show the laser being fired toward the center of the right eye field, and not show any glow in the left eye field. Compare it to a similar first-person sequence in Avatar, where a doctor checks Jake Sully's pupils with a flashlight, and we see the glow of the flashlight physically moving from our left eye to our right eye.

djQUAN said:

It's a movie. Anything can happen.

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That kind of reasoning, if genuinely believed, is why bad movies exist. Not only it excuses big lipped alligator moments, it also excuses movies breaking their own internal logic.

Note that I'm not saying that every movie that shows something unrealistic is bad: to the contrary, I enjoy movies full of special effects. But if a movie shows us a world where certain rules apply, and then it breaks them, then it's bad. For example: showing Superman flying is okay, because the ability to fly defines the character. But the moment a Superman movie shows Superman dropping Lois Lane in mid-flight, and Lois Lane still flying (*cough* Superman 4 *cough*) that movie becomes bad.

Not possible. There's another thread about this somewhere