Convection Schmonvection / Live-Action Films

• In After Earth, Kitai is able to stand outside in an ash cloud without a breathing apparatus. In Real Life, volcanic ash particles turn to cement when they are inhaled, causing rapid suffocation. Furthermore, Kitai takes refuge in a cave with a ledge overlooking an active lava flow and is no worse for wear, and lights a campfire to make it cozier. Later on, after nearly freezing to death in the wilderness, he runs and jumps up the side of an active volcano, coming within feet of large cracks that glow with the heat of the lava.
• Subverted in The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), which has a planet whose entire landscape gets recreated daily by a cloud of super-hot air and accompanying lava roaming over it, caused by being so close to the local star. Riddick and a few others make for escape but nearly get burned to a crisp by the sunlight. Later a character walks into the cloud and gets burned to pieces (literally). Riddick only survives in a hangar which is obviously made to survive the phenomenon, including cooling.
• The Core averts this. One crewman has to step outside safe area of the ship, never touches lava, and still burns to death. He is wearing a protective suit — which is the only reason he can even open the door without immediately bursting into flame while simultaneously imploding from the intense heat and pressure. Previously they had to use liquid nitrogen, the ship's coolant, to exit the ship without bursting into flames. The crew is notably sweating through the rest of the movie, even while in the ship.
• In Danger: Diabolik, most famous for being the subject of the final episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the eponymous character dons a protective suit near the end to keep him safe as he melts down a large bar of gold. He claims that in such a suit he could swim through the sun (though he doesn't say so, he presumably means he could survive the ordeal as well). While this itself is fairly stupid, one has to take notice that there is a noticeable gap between the bottom of the visor and his helmet, as if he didn't shut it properly. Although this does not appear to present a problem when he is later sprayed with molten gold and survives.
• Dante's Peak has a scene where a truck drives over lava and the tires only melt a little. In another scene lava starts pouring into a wooden house, that miraculously hadn't caught fire already, which surprised instead of incinerated all of the characters there. Also, when they run outside, the lava has already swept through the surrounding small pine trees, most of which were still standing. Other than that, though, it was a fairly well-researched movie, and goes into several other deadly effects of volcanic eruption beyond the lava.
• Disaster Movie The Day After Tomorrow, among other examples of terrible, terrible science featured a scene where a main character runs down a hallway where the temperature is dropping so fast that moisture in the air turns to ice on the walls in less than a second. Despite the fact that he's only wearing normal clothes and a coat, our hero seems to be in no danger as long as he doesn't let the rapidly forming ice catch him — the air a few feet in front of the death zone is only somewhat chilly (and moving slower than a running human). He also manages to hold back the cold entirely by entering a room with a fireplace and shutting the door, but that's a different issue.
• A similar event in the Sylvester Stallone movie Demolition Man in which Phoenix holds a blowtorch mere inches away from a floor which is covered in diesel. Never mind that the fumes coming from it would have surely caught fire instantly, as long as the naked flame doesn't touch the liquid itself it's fine.
• In Dragonball Evolution, Goku forms a series of stepping stones across a pit of lava, with corpses. The other characters walk around the edge of the area to meet back up with him. While Goku himself is extremely superhuman, and so perhaps a justified case, the corpses are less so.
• Dragonslayer: Galen uses a dragon-scale shield to protect himself from the dragon's flames, despite them going past it and around him, never mind the heat this should generate as well.
• Glass Onion: Helen blows up the Glass Onion complex with Klear, creating a fiery, extensive explosion that sets the entire complex ablaze, which would fry anyone still inside. Yet the Disruptors, Helen, Peg and Whiskey all conveniently survive without any visible burns or injuries.
• Godzilla:
  • The ending to Godzilla 1985 has the monster being trapped in a volcano. Not surprisingly, he's not affected at all by either the lava itself or any of the intense heat. He is Godzilla.
  • Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth had Godzilla and Larva Battra open a fissure on the ocean floor during their fight and plunge into the Earth's mantle for a good part of the film. Godzilla emerges from a volcano unscathed and angry, Battra is also fine but how he got out isn't shown.
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: In a scene that was not in the book, Thorin and the Company attempt to kill Smaug by flooding him with liquid gold from a Dwarven furnace (it doesn't work). There is a chase sequence where Thorin lays down on a metal wheelbarrow to surf the river of molten gold that erupts from the furnace, with no ill-effects whatsoever. Never mind that he should have been fried almost instantly — laying metal down over a source of heat is how skillets and frying pans work. Plus, there are several times when the heroes take cover in some way from Smaug's fire breath, and are completely OK being mere feet (or even inches) away from a massive inferno. They must have Improved Evasion.^note At least they got the wheelbarrow floating on molten gold part right. Iron is both less dense than gold, and has a higher melting point, so an iron wheelbarrow would float on molten gold just fine. Although it would rapidly heat up to over 1900F and glow bright yellow.
• House of Wax (2005) has the main characters escaping from the house of wax as it melts and burns, not bothered by the heat at all.
• Downplayed in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
  • Willie is lowered so close to lava that she should be bursting into flames. However, the poor sap who gets lowered before her does burst into flames. It's further downplayed in the novelization, which goes into full detail of how excruciating the experience is for poor Willie, saying that her eyelashes singe and her dress starts smoking, and she eventually passes out from the high temperature.
  • Indy hoists the metal cage Willie is in back up and opens it up to let her out. With the temperature it was exposed to, the cage shouldn't just be too hot to handle; it would probably have softened and become unusable. Especially ridiculous when you consider that the Thuggee perform successful sacrifices by full submersion of the cage in the lava, yet it always emerges completely undamaged.
• In Iron Man 2, Whiplash manages to get Iron Man tangled in whips hot enough to melt through his armor. Even after having several entire sections of the armor torn away, several more rendered molten inches away from his skin, and then wrapping himself in said whips to get close and end the fight, Tony doesn't have any burns on his body at all. It's slightly justified because Tony was wearing a fire-resistant racing suit underneath his armor.
• In The Island at the Top of the World, the heroes flee through a narrow stone passage ahead of a lava flow, with Sir Anthony being only few steps in front of it. They escape by climbing on to a rock ledge a few feet above the lava, where realistically they should all have been killed by the radiant heat.
• At one point in Jack the Giant Slayer Elmont is rolled in raw dough and placed in an oven to be cooked as an hors d'oeuvre. When he frees himself a few minutes later, he's not even sweating, despite the fact that the dough he was inside visibly cooked while he was freeing himself.
• James Bond:
  • The climactic battle in Dr. No takes place in a room being flooded with coolant from a nuclear reactor. Dr. No survives long enough in the superheated coolant to desperately claw for a way out even when submerged above his head, and Bond is unharmed despite being mere inches away from the coolant.
  • Diamonds Are Forever has two assassins putting Bond inside a coffin about to be cremated. It starts, but a crook cancels the thing and opens the coffin nonchalantly... despite the fact that it had been inside a lit crematory and thus would be as scalding as a cake just out of the oven.
  • Quantum of Solace has a climactic fight in a hotel that's burning down. None of the combatants have any trouble breathing, talking, seeing, or fighting. Bond even runs through flames to rescue a woman having a PTSD episode, and then the two of them run through a burning, collapsing wall. No one gets burned.
• The explorers are carried up the tube of a volcano by lava on an asbestos dish in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and a dinosaur skull in Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) — which in real life would get them cooked alive.
• Taken to patently absurd degrees in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. At one point, Owen's body is mere inches away from lava and is somehow completely fine. It's even worse with the baryonyx that attacks Claire and Franklin, who takes a splash of lava to the face, and only flinches.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, two barefoot hobbits were able to walk on the rock of an erupting volcano, only a few feet from the flowing lava on either side. However, the soles on Hobbit feet are about as leathery as shoes (and in theory the rock they were walking on hadn't had time to heat up yet—rock's a pretty bad conductor). When Gollum and the One Ring fall into the Crack of Doom, neither show any signs of burning even when Gollum gets completely submerged.
• As prophesized throughout The Northman, Amleth and Fjölnir battle in the "Gates of Hel", an active volcano (probably meant to be Hekla). At times during the fight, they're both seen stepping barefoot mere inches from active lava flows, which doesn't seem to cause any damage or slow them down at all. Given that magic and the supernatural are very much present in the film, though, it's quite likely that the place's description is at least semi-literal, and the gods aren't going to let anything as trivial as the laws of physics get in the way of a fated Duel to the Death.
• Pacific Rim: On Striker Eureka's blueprints there's mention of the "Sting-Blades" channeling thermal energy, but it's unknown if it's this or outright case of Kill It with Fire. This is averted in the Final Battle, where Gipsy Danger shoves a Kaiju's head into a volcanic vent and roasts its face in an attempt to kill it.
• In Robin Hood (2018), Robin and Gisborne outrun a cascade of molten iron from an overturned crucible, despite the fact the heat should have barbecued them where they stood.
• The Sharknado films have been well-known for giving the middle finger to the laws of physics. A rather amusing example is in Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, when one of the sharknados becomes a Nukenado. The heroes go to fight it and, naturally, aren't cooked from the inside.
• Subverted realistically in the Silent Hill movie — a character dies from heat exposure while hanging above an open flame, and is later shown as a burned corpse, even though she is never actually lowered into the flame itself.
• Averted in Sky High (2005). While the main group is escaping through a ventilation duct, they ask Warren if he can use his fire powers to light the way, to which he responds “only if you want to be barbecued”.
• In the finale of Species, when the tar-filled pit catches fire, the temperature in the cavern should have been unbearable. However, the characters don't respond to this fact.
• In Spider-Man 2, Doctor Octopus builds what is effectively a miniature sun. Characters standing a few feet away show no signs of feeling the heat. Later he sinks it, and there's not even a whiff of steam. There is mention of a containment field, however, which might be keeping the heat in. It's designed to be a power source, so you certainly wouldn't want to be wasting any more energy as heat than you have to.
• In Spider-Man: Far From Home, despite Molten Man growing large enough to fill up the entirety of Prague Square, no one is visibly burned, not even Mysterio when he flies straight into it. Because it's not actually there - "Molten Man" is simply an illusion designed to camouflage drone attacks so Mysterio can make himself look like a hero.
• In the opening scene of Star Trek Into Darkness, Spock survives for several minutes in the crater of an erupting volcano. Possibly justified by the high-tech environment suit he's wearing, though the fact that his equipment survives unscathed is a bit harder to swallow. Unlike other films, this one shows the volcanic ash severely damaging the shuttle to the point that Sulu and Uhura end up ditching the craft. Scotty also warns Kirk about what would happen if the Enterprise were directly above the volcano at the moment of eruption.
• Star Wars:
  • In order for a plasma blade to cut through metal with no resistance, it would have to be a few million degrees, which would be enough to burn someone to ash within seconds of activating a lightsaber. Though supplemental materials mention that a lightsaber's plasma is held in place by a force field that prevents anyone or anything from being burned by the blade unless direct contact is made (and if a lightsaber blade does emanate heat, that means it was improperly constructed).
  • In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn tries to melt through a blast door with his lightsaber; even if we assume the heat from the lightsaber itself is somehow contained (see above), his hands are still mere inches away from the molten door. Still, he doesn't even get singed. Force-based protection from heat seems as reasonable an explanation as any.
  • Downplayed in Revenge of the Sith. The final battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin takes place on a molten planet. We see that the station they are fighting on requires special shielding, which is then disabled, causing the station to disintegrate. At the end of the fight, Anakin bursts into flames on the shore of a lava river without direct contact. On the other hand, there are multiple instances of Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting above or near unshielded lava with no obvious ill effects, other than Obi-Wan's outfit being a bit singed, and by the end of the fight it is stained with sweat and soot. The novelisation states that they used the Force to shield themselves. Presumably, Anakin couldn't do this as effectively after losing his limbs. Lucas has also stated that the symbolic setting of fire and lava in the final battle trumped realism.
• The infamous Syfy Channel Original Movie Raptor Island features a scene where the female lead runs across a tree over a river of lava. It's also a good thing air doesn't conduct heat — at least in that movie, apparently, since that's the meaning of "convection". (Also there's heat-radiation.)
• Averted in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. During the final chase scene, Sarah Connor declares that it's "too hot" to approach the open pit of molten metal. When the T-800 is lowered into the steel in the end, his boot and pants catch fire a full foot above the metal.
• Volcano:
  • After blocking a lava flow with concrete barriers, the fire fighters lean over the top of them, laughing.
  • In the same scene, the protagonists have to rescue an unconscious fireman stuck at the far end of a fire truck's ladder. Apparently convection from a precarious position is enough to make metal melt and bend, and clothes ignite, but if you make it to solid ground you're safe even if you're closer to the lava now than you were while up on the ladder. To be fair, being above the lava would put both ladder and fireman directly in the rising column of heat, while being next to the lava wouldn't.
  • The scene in the subway is an utter howler; a man is able to move around in a train car so hot it's actually melting all around him, making it so hot all the "survivors" he's rescuing would have been incinerated. Then came the part where the brave man heroically jumps into lava, stupidly remaining conscious and throwing another grown adult clear of it, and then stupidly melting. And it was stupid, did we mention that?
  • Also, the scene with the barriers ends with aerial drops of water onto the pool of lava to solidify it. The resulting clouds of superheated steam which engulfed everyone nearby should have scalded them all to death, but they safely (if stupidly) emerged unhurt.
• When Time Ran Out... is about a volcanic eruption that imperils vacationers in a Hawaiian resort. The characters often come implausibly close to the lava, including a daring lava-pit rescue by Burgess Meredith (as a retired high-wire artist).
• Wrath of the Titans features Cronos, a mountain-sized man made of molten rock that apparently does not give off any heat. Notably, in the climax Perseus flies Pegasus down his throat and gets slightly singed for his trouble.

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