There's but one explanation. This film took place during the events of The Day the Earth stood still.
Note: I haven't seen either of the films
Either? Oh, they remade it. Haven't seen the new version. But if I remember the former correctly, you'll get no solice out of "The Earth Standing Still", because it's a purely psychological "standing still" of the Earth (or, rather, of its populations, holding their breath as it were).
OTOH, there's an SF-ish short story I remember where some guy gets the power of 'miracles', or some way to wish for things and them to happen, no matter what. At some point in his experimentation, or perhaps demonstration of his powers to a friend or colleague (I forget) he decides to make "the Sun stop in its tracks", in the sky... Of course, because the apparent movement of the sun is due to the rotation of the Earth, his will gets translated into "stop the Earth rotating[1]".
The Earth stops rotating[2], but everything
on the Earth still has the inertia relevant to the prior state, and everything (presumable less so as you near the poles) is now flung sideways, w.r.t. the now 'stationary' Earth. Our miracle-endowed guy, whilst violently thrown sideways (or violently finds the Earth no longer turning with him) rushes out a mental command along the lines of "whatever else happens, let me be safe!", and so is protected from the worst of the effects, but witnesses the gross destruction he has caused as people and things and buildings and seas and oceans and perhaps the air itself rushes across the face of the Earth, spin-wise, with very little surviving. I
think it became one of the moralistic "be careful what you wish for" tales, at that point, because he works out why all this happened and makes one last combined 'wish' that: a) Everything be set back as it should, and b) That he no longer have (or remember having?) the powers.
(I cannot hope to remember the author. It's as likely to be Brian Aldiss as Clifford D. Simak or the rest. Shall we say pre-'70s, and in my mind it could even read like a 1950s SF style, or perhaps earlier, but not as far back as Wells. Tries to put a contemporaneous veneer of "hard SF" onto a basic fantasy plot, though, like they did back then...)
[1] Or, I suppose make it rotate at whatever rate would be 1 revolution per year, but events don't continue long enough to reveal whether the author appreciated this depth.
[2] Or at least grossly alters the rate of it, as per footnote 1.
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Topic: Nitpicks that Ruined Movies (Read 137812 times)