Random Super Common Movie Deaths That Are Scientifically Impossible (12 items)

(#8) Your Body Exploding In The Vacuum Of Space

If science fiction movies have taught us anything it is that space is a scary place. Finding oneself in space outside of the safety of a spaceship without a suit surely leads to an almost instant death as explosive decompression causes the human body to literally expand until it blows up. In reality, the human body wouldn't explode in outer space. A person would almost certainly swell up, possibly to twice their normal size, as bodily fluids expand and begin to bubble.

But the skin is flexible enough to be able to take this extra strain, making a person bursting open almost impossible. In reality, lack of oxygen would render you unconscious within 15 seconds, and it would be the most likely cause of death.
(#3) Getting Sliced By Sharp Wire

Most people will be familiar with the old movie trick of stringing up some wire across a road and tying it between two trees. The intended victim will then speed along in their car and either be decapitated or have another body part sliced off by the high tension of the wire. To be fair, industrial strength wires can cause horrible injuries and even death if they snap and hit someone, but any wire thin enough to be used effectively as a razor would not be strong enough to survive the impact.

Instead, the wire would just snap when the person hit it.
(#4) Being Quickly Strangled To Death

Hollywood has long portrayed manual strangulation – someone choking another person to death with their hands – as a quick and easy method to kill a person. In real life, throttling a person is much more difficult than movies make it out to be. It is definitely not quick and can take up to five minutes for a person to die.

Meanwhile, a person being choked is likely to struggle violently as they panic and begin to lose consciousness, and they can almost fully recover in just a few seconds if they are able to break free.
(#9) Dying After A Powerful Palm Heel Strike To The Nose

Heroes in action films have the uncanny ability of swiftly (and cleanly) killing their enemies in hand-to-hand combat. One of these killer moves is the palm heel strike to the nose, a move where the hero forcefully thrusts their hand into their enemy's face. Movie science says the nose bone is shoved so hard that it busts into the enemy's brain, effectively killing them. In Con Air, this palm heel is the whole reason Cameron Poe (Nic Cage) is imprisoned.
This type of death is impossible for an obvious reason: our noses are nearly all cartilage, so there is no pointy bone waiting to pierce your brain upon impact. There is a tiny portion of bone at the top of your nose, but it still can't kill you.
Even if a person were to get hit so hard that the tiny part of bone became dislodged, there is no way the bone could get to your brain – that's the whole point of having a skull. Yes, a person could die from blunt force trauma or other indirect reasons after getting a nasty palm heel to the nose, but it won't be in the form of a bone-induced lobotomy.
(#1) Having All Your Flesh Eaten By Piranhas

Piranhas might be the most feared fish outside of sharks in all of the Earth’s oceans and rivers. The widespread belief that they can strip anything in their path to the bone appears in movies all the time. Just like most other fish, though, piranhas will flee if a bigger creature comes near them, and this includes humans. They tend to only attack things that are smaller than them or are already dying, with the carnivorous fish being far less aggressive than the film industry has made them out to be.
Though certain highly specific factors can coalesce to create a dangerous situation involving piranhas, if left to their own devices and in their normal breeding patterns, they won't be stripping any living humans to the bone anytime soon.
(#7) Shattering When Liquid Nitrogen Freezes Your Body Into Ice

In the movies, liquid nitrogen is portrayed as some sort of magical substance that is capable of flash freezing anything it comes into contact with. While it can be used to shatter objects in real life, such as flowers or other small items, it is wildly impractical to kill someone with it as shown in films. Liquid nitrogen can reduce the temperature of skin very quickly but takes a very long time to significantly reduce the internal temperature of a human.
It would also take a huge amount of it to be dangerous, as it would just evaporate upon contact with skin in small doses.