Headscratchers / A Good Day to Die Hard

• An armed American drone over Moscow airspace? Seriously?
  • Considering our current President wants to have armed American drones flying over our own airspace, why would flying one over Moscow be all that unbelievable?
    • There is a world of difference between having drones flying over your own airspace and having drones fly over the airspace of another sovereign country entirely.
    • And that hasn't stopped Obama from blowing up people in plenty of those other sovereign countries, has it?
    • There's also a world of difference between having drones flying over the airspace of a foreign country that you're in acknowledged conflict with and flying over the airspace of one you don't.
    • America isn't at war with Yemen, didn't stop Obama from murdering Abdulrahman al-Awlaki with a drone missile strike in Yemen. So there's clearly not as much difference as you think.
    • Uh, yeah there is. Yemen's air defence system isn't quite on par with Russia's, so the risk of the drone being spotted is significantly higher. An American-made drone being discovered and taken down at the same time as an attempt is made by an unknown party to break free a political prisoner and murder countless civilians? That wouldn't look too good. The difference isn't about morality, it's about the risk of being caught and the potential repercussions of that happening. That clear enough for you, Sparky?
    • It has been revealed more recently that the NSA has been spying on allied countries. While this is mostly in the form of wiretapping, it isn't out of the question in what is otherwise a simple action flick, for a drone to appear over Russian skies. Keep in mind, the US did send an armed drone over the Philippines back in 2012 and took out a village in the process in order to sniff out some terrorists.
    • Yemen and the Philippines are not nuclear powers. Russia is. Invading their airspace with military aircraft without their permission is a technical act of war, and while Yemen and the Philippines are vastly unlikely to declare war on the United States regardless of provocation, the freaking world ends if Russia chooses to do that. Rationally speaking, it should never have been risked at all even if the risk was only slight, because if the risk doesn't pan out, its the Apocalypse.
• Did John and Jack drive all the way from Moscow to Chernobyl? Across the border? I really hope I'm missing something here...
  • Writers Can't Do Geography maybe? And if that's not a trope, it should be.
    • That's covered under Artistic License – Geography. "Artistic license" is a better term because it allows for the fact that sometimes writers are aware that things don't work that way but write them that way anyway for the sake of a story. Not everyone considers accuracy to be the primary factor in determining if something is good.
• So in Good Day to Die Hard, the bad guys have a seemingly magical chemical that can somehow eliminate radiation in an area to the point of being able to breathe and walk around without gas masks or protective suits. If that sort of chemical existed, whoever invented it should get the Nobel prize because that would eliminate all the nuclear waste and contamination problems in the world ever.
  • There IS a gas called Brown's Gas that is capable of accelerating the rate at which radiation decays, reducing the amount of time before the area is safe to be outside of a hazmat suit, but it does not work NEARLY the same way as was shown in the movie. scientists estimate that it will be 20,000 years before the area around Chernobyl becomes habitable again, and if Brown's Gas were used then it would reduce that time... to a few hundred or a few thousand years. I'm not sure by exactly how much it would accelerate the decay. And even if it DID work the way it was shown in the movie, they would need to spray ALL of Chernobyl and the entire surrounding area with that spray, not just the small area we were shown, an operation that would take weeks or months without a crop duster and a huge crew of people.
    • Also, the claims that Brown's Gas can even do this are somewhat disputed, after looking a few things up on Google, I found that it's Wikipedia page lists this under "Fringe Science." There were several sites that said the gas CAN be used this way, but none of them looked like trustworthy sites.
  • Even if we are generous with our Willing Suspension of Disbelief and just accept that such a wonder-chemical exists in the Die Hard universe - why then wasn't that chemical already used years ago by the official authorities to decontaminate Chernobyl?
  • It is quite possible that this "Super Chemical" has numerous side effects in large amounts, like instability, or only blocks radiation for a small amount of time, such as a possible lead based decontaminant, or was too expensive to manufacture en masse, using only a little to make sure they made a profit from their sale, I like to think its the fact that it was a "fix" as so much a "band-aid" too make it safe to get what they needed then go.

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