If anyone has ever looked at Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter, they see that the celebrated astrophysicist is an amateur film critic, one with a lot of self-admitted “snarky” takes on films. Neil is often the first to point out how a film isn’t 100% scientifically accurate, and recently, his comments about Frozen 2’s Elsa having “horse-sized eyeballs” got him in hot water. “I am just being honest,” a good-natured Neil tells HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY ahead of the Mar. 9 premiere of his series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds. “My movie tweets — if you look at them, they are not even opinion. I mean, occasionally, there is a leaky opinion that shows up, but mostly, I am offering observations that you might have missed, things I noticed, and I noticed that other people didn’t notice.”
“I just share them, and I don’t want special treatment for that, but I don’t want to be ridiculed for having done it any more than would you ridicule someone [else],” he tells HollywoodLife. “Say there is a period piece that, let’s say, takes place in 1958 l but there is a 1960 Chevy Bel Air parked on it. ‘What those fins were not inside? What, how?’ And you would say, ‘Hey, I got a friend that knows that!’ You’d be proud of that friend! I am no different.”
“I am just doing that in the field of science,” he adds. “Yet people somehow want to reject it. I just want the same respect. Maybe you have a friend who is a costume designer and you are watching a Jane Austin period piece where there are people coming off the carriage and someone is wearing a derby instead of a top hat. [Your friend is] like, ‘No, that wasn’t in style that year!’ I would be like, ‘Hey, how did you know that?’ You’d be tickled by this knowledge, so I just don’t get respect! [laughs].” Neil, who insists that his comments are in good fun, and his tweets are “mostly just information to add to your movie-going experience!”
Neil recently invoked the wrath of Frozen fans by tweeting how Elsa’s cartoonish proportions were kind of whack. “Not that anybody asked, but if Elsa from “Frozen” has a Human-sized Head then she has Horse-sized Eyeballs — occupying 4x the normal volume within her cranium. I’m just sayin’,” he tweeted on Feb. 23. This wasn’t the first time he dragged Frozen 2. Before the movie was out, he pointed out that the sequel’s poster had a screwed-up snowflake. “Dear @Disney, You got it right the first time. Water crystals have hexagonal “six-fold” symmetry. You still have a few months to fix your #Frozen2 Movie Poster, unless the sequel takes place in another universe, where water crystalizes to different laws of physics.” However, he did defend Frozen for getting some things right.
Not that anybody asked, but if Elsa from "Frozen" has a Human-sized Head then she has Horse-sized Eyeballs — occupying 4x the normal volume within her cranium. I'm just sayin'. pic.twitter.com/UujtGa3z5h
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) February 24, 2020
Even though @DisneyStudios’s "Frozen" features talking snowmen and enchanted rolly-polly rocks, the Aurorae were authentically represented in the Nordic nighttime skies. pic.twitter.com/E79UmAcyUV
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) February 24, 2020
Along with Frozen, Neil has criticized Titanic (“You try once. ‘Oh, this is not gonna work. I will just freeze to death in the water.’ No, excuse me. No!”), Game of Thrones, Armageddon, The Martian, Superman and more, per Newsweek. When asked his take on how the silky-voiced astrophysicist wouldn’t land a role in Frozen 3, Dr. Tyson laughed and said, “There aren’t many people of color in the Nordic lands where Frozen is held, so I don’t expect an offering.”