Hollywood Density - Television Tropes & Idioms

"54. Do you not realize how much gold actually weighs?"
—The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

Writers frequently misapply, distort, or outright forget about the concept of density and its implications. This results in such oddities as most metals, including gold, being treated as weighing the same as an equivalent volume of iron or steel, with the possible exceptions of aluminum (famous for weighing less) and lead (famous for weighing more). The only thing typically treated as denser than lead is matter from a neutron star, by orders of magnitude — there's apparently nothing in between.

By the same token, anyone can lift as much of a "light" object, such as feathers, Styrofoam, or in the worst cases even stacked flat paper, as can be made practical to carry.

What's worse, even if the writers get it right, sometimes the actors won't due to not compensating for the difference between the weight of the prop and the weight of the object it's supposed to represent through acting.

Generally, the only exception to "People carrying around big gold ingots with ease" comes when the density of gold relative to other substances is itself a major plot point. Especially since gold is actually of 70 % higher density than lead.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

Skipper from The Daughter Of Twenty Faces must be one heck of a strong guy, since he manages to transport not one but two large cases of gold. The fact that he does it underwater only adds to the difficulty, since he has to wear a clumsy diving suit.
The info in the Pokedex in Pokemon frequently applies this to living things, giving weights that are often ridiculously heavy or light: Wailord is 14.5 m long, yet only weights about 400 kg.
- Apparently some Pokemon are less dense than hydrogen.
  - Ghosts are made of unobtainium!
Future Police Urashiman episode 22. Ryu, in an invasion of Necrime's fortress, fills his shirt with gold bars, which he has no trouble picking up. He's weighed down, but he can still walk and he can pick the bars up with one hand.
One Piece is not known for its realistic physics, but during the Skypeia Arc a group of average, non-powered townspeople collectively carried a chunk of gold the size of an apartment complex (and thus many,many times their collective size) with little difficulty, and were even able to run while carrying said gold. Of course, utterly ridiculous feats of strength are very common in the series.

Film

It's not just actors who get it wrong. The recent remake of The Italian Job featured at one point several Mini Coopers allegedly loaded with gold bullion — but they didn't sit any lower on their shocks, nor did the additional thousands of pounds of load make them any less nimble or speedy when they roared through the sewers under Los Angeles. Especially odd given that they had earlier detected which of three trucks had the bullion by which of them was lower on their shocks.
- This troper doesn't really know enough about cars to contradict the above with authority, but there is definitely a scene in which the Minis' suspension is improved dramatically and most of the car's insides are stripped out to help them handle the weight. That's what the friend of Handsome Rob's is doing, the one who lets Edward Norton into the train car at the end.
- This happened in the original one too. Somebody once calculate that in order to steal gold worth the stated amount each mini would have to carry two and a half times its own weight in gold. And yet they're still fast and nippy enough to evade the police cars. Not to mention that when the gold shifted in the bus on the cliff they should have gone straight over.
Aversion: In, Die Hard With A Vengeance, Zeus carries around a single gold bar, and has some trouble with it.
- Played straight in the same movie: the trucks loaded with looted gold bullion would not have been able to drive uphill. The producers admitted to making this mistake.
- Also played straight when one thief tosses a gold bar to another thief. The way it hits him when he catches it, it should've ruptured a few organs.
In Goldfinger, James Bond releases himself from a handcuff by using two gold bars as makeshift hammers. He later throws a bar through a respectable distance, hitting Oddjob with it, but not doing any damage since the henchman is Made Of Iron.
- However, the film has a Action Film Quiet Drama Scene where Bond explains to Goldfinger how robbing Fort Knox, even if he killed all the troops stationed there, is impossible. Namely, gold is so heavy that the 15 billion dollars worth at the fort weighs 10,500 tons. That means Goldfinger would need sixty men to load it onto 200 trucks over a period of twelve days while the US military would find out what happened at the fort and move to stop the robbery within 2 hours.
  - And Bond knows Goldfinger knows that, which is how he figures out that Goldfinger's plot is not to steal the gold, but to set off a nuclear bomb and irradiate it, therefore making it useless for almost 60 years and greatly increasing the value of his own gold.
- This may well be a bit of Biting The Hand Humor at the expense of the original novel, in which Goldfinger's plan was to clear out the vault.
The Mummy has a book made of solid gold. And the sequel has a bracelet of the same material. Which is carried by a child most of the picture. Both would be near impossible to carry easily.
- Oddly enough, earlier in the film, when lugging around the bracelet in a box he comments it weighs a lot.
Averted in Sherlock Holmes in New York. Holmes quickly realises that emptying the large underground vault of gold via the tunnel that has apparently been dug to it would be impossible in the time available, and that the whole vault is actually a fake built on top of the real one, with the access elevator rigged to stop at the new level, rather than the bottom of the shaft. The gold is meanwhile being removed at a more practical rate.
Averted in Three Kings where one of the characters picks up a suitcase full of gold, and it promptly rips apart. They eventually are able to move the gold by transporting them in duffel bags with only a few bars in them. Unfortunately the actors still handle them like they didn't weight more than ordinary bricks, while they held the bars in their hands.
The 1950s sci-fi film "Atomic Submarine" features the title boat dodging ice falling off the bottom of the Arctic icecap.
- And lest one think that no one these days would do something so silly, I give you an episode of seaQuest DSV where, to trap the giant prehistoric crocodile (snerk), our heroes torpedo an Antarctic ice shelf...burying the animal under a submarine ice landslide. Yes, it was a stupid as it sounds.
- GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra also went this route, featuring an underwater ice-fall in the finale.
  - But it justified it with a bunch of metal tunnels in the ice pack weighing it down, might not create the scene as shown but it's more explanation than expected from GI Joe.
At the start of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Indiana Jones effortlessly hefts an apparently solid gold idol with one hand and drops a bag full of sand that was supposed to approximate the idol's weight onto the plinth, despite the bag being smaller than the idol. He even takes some sand out of the bag first, believing it to be too heavy. Of course, since the trap went off anyway, it seems Indy screwed up the estimation.
In In Old Caliente a payroll wagon loaded with gold coins kept getting held up by bandits on horseback, so the teamsters decided to melt down the gold into a heap of slag too large to move on horseback. When they were forced to retreat after being waylaid again, they lit the wagon on fire, rendering the gold immoveable before the authorities could arrive.
Averted in Armour of God II. It's not a Hollywood movie, of course.
In The Dark Knight, the bank robbers toss duffel bags stuffed full of stacked money into the bus like they were bags of balloons.
A blatant example shows up in a Viking movie from the '60s called The Long Ships. In it, the Mac Guffin is a solid gold bell large enough to be mistaken for the roof of a small chapel. It is easily towed behind the Vikings' boat. No raft, no pontoons, just a solid gold bell floating effortlessly behind an oar-driven ship.
The movie Night At The Museum has one of the characters (a ten year old boy) effortlessly carry and run with a solid gold tablet. He should not have been able to even pick it up.
Iron Man Despite recovering from recent open-heart surgery, Tony Stark carries a lead-acid car battery like it's an empty cardboard box while in the terrorist camp.
In Heat, the back robbers have to run from the police while carrying big duffel bags that are absolutely packed with paper currency. A full duffle would be able to hold enough stacked and bundled bills to weigh between 150 and 200 pounds.
In The Hidden Fortress, a point is made about how heavy gold is, and the characters are staggering under the weight. But based on the volumes of their packs, they should be carrying between two and three tons of the stuff each.
In The Lordofthe Rings Gollum falls into a river of lava and sinks in it as if it's water. It may be molten, but it's still rock.
- The director has said that they know that shot is all wrong in terms of science, but decided to just let the RuleOfCool reign.
In Independence Day, the aliens' hemispherical mothership is described as being over 550 kilometers in diameter and "In terms of mass, it's a quarter the size of the moon." This would give it an average density about 20 times that of solid lead. The shots of its interior near the end of the movie show that it's mostly hollow, so that means the material it's built out of would have to be at least the density of white dwarf matter, if not the density of neutron star matter.
- Neutron Star matter seems to be misrepresented as well. A teaspoon of neutron star would outweigh an entire freight train.
Subverted in Secondhand Lions: Walter correctly figures out that Garth couldn't've taken out the guards with all that gold weighing him down, leading him to admit "Huck helped a little" and a cut to young Garth struggling to do anything.

Literature

In an Encyclopedia Brown story, the density of gold was used to prove that the supposed gold ingots were really just bricks spray-painted gold, as there is no way a kid could lift a brick-sized bar of gold with one hand.
Averted in Terry Pratchett's The Truth: Lord Vetinari is accused of trying to abscond with a large amount of money supposedly stolen from the city's treasury. Commander Vimes and William de Worde both realise the story can't be true after they calculate how much that amount of money would actually weigh.
- And played straight in Pyramids!, when Teppic notices that the golden mask he's wearing is actually made of lead. He observes that "the mask had felt heavy as lead, because it was made of lead" (paraphrased). As noted earlier on this page, gold is heavier than lead.

Live Action TV

On 30 Rock, Kenneth has an idea for a game show in which contestants guess which suitcase being carried by models is filled with gold. The show was discontinued for being too easy, as one had only to look for the model who had trouble holding up the suitcase.
At the other end of the scale, one episode of CSI has the team investigating a casino heist, supposedly of ten million dollars in cash. Grissom realizes the money would weigh around two hundred pounds — far too much for one man (seen in security footage) to practically carry. (It isn't stated, but it would also be unfeasibly bulky.)
- The 200 pounds (actually closer to 220) presumes it's all in $100 banknotes. A more normal mix of currency would about double this. A million US dollars in mixed currency fills a large suitcase, and one would probably have to pay over-weight charges to fly with it. $250,000 (in $100 bills) fits carefully into an Evil Mastermind-syle aluminum attache case.
Averted in an episode of MacGyver where Mac has to shovel a large collection of diamonds down an improvised chute and into a car trunk.
In Merlin, a character uses alchemy to create a big lump of solid gold, which the characters lift and carry as easily as if it was polystyrene.

Real Life

Real Life: at some old gold mines in Canada, one gag played on new miners (and visitors) was to tell them that if they could lift a brick of gold off the table with one hand gripping it from the top, they could have it. The joke worked because of the density (something about the size of an ordinary brick weighs about 30 kg), shape of the brick, and smoothness of the metal, making it impossible to get a grip strong enough to lift it.
Another case of Reality Is Unrealistic - this troper saw a documentary on the production of polystyrene (it's actually quite interesting because if you just straight-up polymerise styrene - as he did in high school chemistry - then you get a viscous liquid, and it requires more processing to turn into the white puffy material used for packing) where a worker picked up a huge block of polystyrene - probably the length of a truck and large enough to have to carry on the shoulder. He was incredulous - how the heck is he able to carry that? It's huge!
Often, actors who handle fake human limbs without realizing that actual body parts are much heavier than you'd think they are. We tend to forget that because legs and arms seem to move around so easily. Of course, so do cars. Since it's something most people wouldn't really know about, it can be excused as a case of Reality Is Unrealistic.
- Most male actors are in ridiculously good shape. If this troper (not exactly small, but still far under 100 kg, and a sports-averse couch potato at that) could and regularly did lift and carry his ex-girlfriend using one arm, and once won a drunken bet involving lifting a man exactly twice his weight and carrying him 10 steps without injury to anyone involved... Then anyone in Hollywood whose muscles aren't implants or prosthetics should easily wield single human limbs, without effort!
  - With little effort and without effort are not identical.
  - Not to mention that the weight people can carry and take steps with is a lot more than what they can carry and do other tasks with. As well, many objects won't be cooperative enough to hold on to you and help you remain balanced.
- For reference: The weight of human body parts can be roughly calculated by the "rule of nines." The head is 9%, the torso is 18%, the abdomen is 18%, each arm is 9%, each leg is 18% (with 1% left over). So, if you weigh 80 kg, each of your arms is about 7 kg, and each of your legs is about 15 kg, give or take.
- On an episode of American Justice, discussing the case of a woman who had killed and dismembered and beheaded a man, the video of her statement has her comment on picking up the head and being surprised at how much it weighed. A detective who'd worked the case commented that's one of the reasons they were confident the confession was valid: unless you'd actually picked up a detached head, it's not the sort of thing someone would think about.

Video Games

Many games featuring weight limits for what a character can carry measure everything in the same unit. This can become a problem when the unit was designed with some common adventuring item (such as an arrow or dagger) weighing "1 unit," in which case items that should be much lighter (jewels, scrolls…) end up weighing the exact same amount as "base" items. A common workaround is to give such items a weight of zero, which can lead to massive hoarding if any of them are common and useful.
- In lieu of such possible hoarding, certain games may opt for body slots for items of negligible weight, meaning only a certain number of these items may be worn at a time.
Most fantasy CRPGs (such as Neverwinter Nights, Baldurs Gate and Morrowind) track encumbrance on items, but money is weightless, so it's permissable to walk around with five million gold coins without a sweat. On the other hand, the RPGs some of them are based on usually averts this: in D&D 3.5, 50 coins weigh a pound. Whether you take this into account depends on your DM.
- Albion averts this - money has a definite weight.
- And old dungeon crawler computer game called "Castle of the Winds" completely subverts this trope: not only does the money have weight but also mass, which means the more you try to lug around the slower you move and react when the ancient red dragon comes around the corner. Fortunately, there's a bank in the village you can deposit all your cash in for a letter of credit. Debit cards in the medieval world. Who'da thunk it? However, it's still noteworthy that copper, silver, gold and platinum pieces weigh exactly the same, while being conviniently worth ten times the value of their predecessor.
  - Letters of Credit were invented in the late middle ages.
- GURPS takes some time to discuss this. The writers point out that adventurers without superhuman strength wouldn't be able to carry off piles of gold. Gold coins are pretty heavy but in a fantasy setting gold, especially in the form of jewelry, would have had a better value/weight ratio than we think of today.
- Averted by Return to Krondor, where coinage had a definite weight. However, it wasn't very noticeable for the first few chapters of the game, where it would auto-exchange coins for high-value gems whenever you visited a shop. Towards the middle of the game, there's a chapter that involves traveling from Krondor to a small village, with no shops to stop in along the way to exchange coins. You will inevitably be leaving behind quite a large amount of treasure on monster corpses before the chapter is up.
  - Betrayal at Krondor, the predecessor to Return, used weightless money. Then again, inventories were so small that requiring an inventory slot for money would've been outright painful.
Tibia averts this, treating Gold as a stackable (up to 100 per slot) object. 100 of them equal a platinum coin and 100 of those equals a Crystal coin, which results in that an ounce of crystal is worth 10 000 ounces of gold.
In Morrowind, everything has a rather realistic weight to it, however, your character can still lift an insane amount without being slowed down. Humorously this means often times it's more practical to steal/loot cheaper stuff (like clothes) than gold, because it's value:weight ratio is higher and thus you can walk away with more of it.
- Everything but money, actually. As opposed to its predecessor, Daggerfall, where money weighed a good bit and players were encouraged to take advantage of Letters of Credit and bank accounts.
Many games with a storage system will often overlook that the amount of items and weight of some of them will either not fit in the specified container used, or would end up being so weighty and bulky the character couldn't move around as effectively as they are shown to. Of note, Metal Gear Solid 3 comes to mind with its backpack inventory system, fitting an RPG, two rifles, and an assortment of pistol sized weapons, along with medical supplies, rations, and any critter you caught, while not weighing Big Boss down. They only become weighty when equipped on his person.
- Also is Resident Evil 4, with the Attache case. Nevermind an RPG weighs a lot, or that a fully loaded case would probably be too heavy to lift. And how does the Merchant hide that in his COAT?
Ever Quest assigned weight to coins, as well as having money come in different denominations (copper, silver, gold and platinum). Along with the way fall damage was calculated, it meant it was entirely possible to commit unintentional suicide by grabbing a couple thousand platinum from the bank - and abruptly taking 20k damage from the "drop" when you stepped off the threshold of the bank's front door.

Western Animation

The episode of Bat Man The Animated Series that debuted Scarface has a scene where his men are stealing a load of platinum. They unload the ingots one at a time and it's shown that of the three, only Rhino, who's twice the size of Batman, can lift an ingot with no problem. Batman is captured in the ensuing fight when Rhino tips what should be several tons of the stuff over. Batman is only knocked out for a few hours with no noticeable injuries.
Parodied by Futurama, where starship fuel is so dense that "a single pound of it weighs ten thousand pounds."
- In one case, Fry refers to a ball of this fuel, which has previously been shown to be liftable by a human, as "weighing as much as a thousand suns." This Troper wonders why it hasn't turned into a black hole yet.
- A lampshade gets hung on this when Fry and Leela are going to have a fiddle contest with the Robot Devil where the prizes are Bender's soul and a solid gold fiddle. When Fry (of all people) asks "Wouldn't a solid gold fiddle weigh hundreds of pounds and sound crummy?" Beelzebot admits that it's mostly for show, then (being a robot) takes it and plays a complicated piece on it.
  - A complicated piece using TWO bows, this troper would like to add, one held in his right hand, the other in his tail. And yes, both of those bows are ALSO made of gold.
  - Then Bender grabs some wings and begins to fly out of Robot Hell carrying Fry and Leela. When Leela tells him he needs to fly faster he says he could if she would drop the solid gold fiddle.
Inverted in an episode of Inspector Gadget, Penny realizes that a stack of gold bricks is fake because she can lift them too easily.
One of Pinky And The Brain's first capers was to break into Fort Knox and steal all the nation's gold. Unfortunately, the two couldn't pick up even one brick.
In The Batman, the Joker once stole Bane's muscle inflation device, and used it to become super-strong and grow at least 15 feet tall. All is well and good, until he steals a golden globe BIGGER THAN HE IS with no effort. Aside from the normal Shapeshifter Baggage associated with size-changing, he should NOT have been able to do that.
- How do you know how strong Super Strength is "supposed" to make you? There are super-strong characters in The Batman who can lift much, much larger weights, so obviously muscle size alone is not a limiting factor.