This 1998 blockbuster was so exquisitely awful that it's hard to pick a single instance of bad science in it, since the movie is essentially 99.44 percent steaming garbage.

The plot is that a Texas-size asteroid is spotted 18 days before it hits Earth. NASA sends a team of wisecracking oil-rig workers (including a grimacing Bruce Willis) to plant a bomb that will split it in half so that the two separating chunks will miss Earth, save the day, and allow the boy to get the girl.

But first of all, there is no asteroid that big. Second, if there were, it would be bright enough for Galileo to have seen it. Third, it would take decades for it to get from the asteroid belt to Earth. Fourth, oil-rig workers?

Fifth, the bomb used to split the asteroid would need to explode with the force of a hundred billion one-megaton bombs, millions of times the total yield of all nuclear weapons ever detonated. I, for one, am glad no such bomb exists.

I just wish the movie had bombed as well. In the United States it was the second highest-grossing movie of 1998 (the much better Deep Impact made it to #8).