Hollywood has been fascinated with diving since its inception, but as with anything that Hollywood gets a hold of the sport is never quite pictured right. Maybe it’s the need to constantly add things in to the mix that just don’t fit or maybe it’s Hollywood’s quick draw scheme that gets it in trouble, but their research into something almost never seems to fit with the reality of what they’re presenting. You would think with all the assistants and the experts they have on hand and the money they spend trying to get things right that they would pay greater attention to the finer details of something.
But that might not be as entertaining.
5. Sharks will attack a diver on sight.
It’s widely thought that sharks are simply nature’s perfect killing machine and will take a chomp out of anything they think looks like food. That would of course include a diver that’s fully clad in a wetsuit and flippers, right? But in all honesty sharks aren’t bound to simply attack unless there’s cause, and for most divers the appearance of shark is a fun sighting.
4. Divers are fast swimmers.
The faster you go the more oxygen you’re using and the more O2 you’re using the quicker you’ll reach the point of exhaustion. The reason this is so dangerous is that you could very easily risk decompression illness and even miss out on your surroundings and the whole point of the dive. Plus if you’re deep sea diving the likelihood of overexerting yourself is very high since you’re going to be wearing a heavy pack laden with your air supply.
3. Divers mix their gases.
The problem with diving with what is called nitrox is that while it does allow you to dive deeper due to being richer in oxygen, there is a very real risk of oxygen toxicity since at those depths you’re going to be breathing oxygen at a high partial pressure. What this means is that mixing gases is not a good idea even if it lets you go deeper. It’s still bound to cause some harm.
2. You can dive anywhere.
That’s just not true unfortunately. The pressure of the ocean as one goes deeper and deeper and the fact that it gets unbearably cold the further you get from the surface is very real. And since only a fraction of the ocean floor is actually able to be reached by diving it’s more likely that the sunken ships, planes, and treasure that most divers are going after in films is unreachable and lost for good, at least so far as diving goes.
1. Underwater explosions aren’t a big deal.
While shrapnel wouldn’t be as much of a problem the pressure caused by an underwater explosion would be immense. It would actually increase to such a degree that no one, not even the movie heroes you see being engulfed by those billowing, underwater explosions, would be able to swim to the surface so easily. Try to think of it this way, if an explosion goes off in open air it dissipates quickly since there’s nothing around to help it build as it spreads out. In the water, that pressure continues to grow and has plenty of material to work with.
So really, almost none of the diving scenes in films get it right.
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