Via Backreaction, I find that there’s a paper on the Arxiv titled “Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy,” whose authors feel that the best way to counter bad pop-culture science is with equations:
(That’s from a section discussing the bad physics in the ending of the first Spiderman movie. There are places where the math is thicker, but this gives a sense of the subject as well.)
It’s a fairly long paper (28 pages, single column), and analyzes seven silly movie scenes in some detail. I normally hate this sort of thing, as I think it needlessly contributes to the reputation of scientists as humorless dorks– after all, there are many, many reasons to object to The Chronicles of Riddick without needing to bring thermodynamics into the discussion.
They have an interesting take on it, though, approaching the various movie scenes as “Fermi Problems,” and going through order-of-magnitude estimates to demonstrate the implausibility of the situations shown. In the alternate universe where I have infinite free time to develop a ten-week course around the idea of Fermi problems (tentative title: “The Science of Guesswork”), this would make a great final project assignment.