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FACE/OFF

THE PREMISE: Federal agent John Travolta has to go deep undercover to find the location of a chemical weapon that bad guy Nicolas Cage has stashed somewhere in Los Angeles — so government plastic surgeons use laser beams and other high-tech gizmos to pluck off and switch Travolta's and Cage's faces.

THE TRUTH: "An operation like that would be completely impossible," says Dr. Steven M. Hoefflin, a Santa Monica-based plastic surgeon with a long list of celebrity clients (none of whom he'll name). "It would be like picking up the Empire State Building and switching it with the Plaza Hotel. There are all these underground connections that you'd have to make — water pipes and telephone lines and electrical connections. It couldn't be done."

Especially with Travolta and Cage, two people of vastly different skin tones, tissue textures, and bone structures — not to mention characters of different blood types. "We might be able to create some similarities using bone and tissue augmentation and reduction techniques," Hoefflin speculates. "I might be able to give you Travolta's lips or nose or chin. But even then you wouldn't end up looking remotely like him — or even remotely normal." Plus, it would take months for the scars to heal, not days. Still, Face/Off did get one thing right: "Sure, I could remove somebody's face and stick it in a jar. Physically, that would be possible for me to do. But why on earth would anybody want me to?"

CONTACT

THE PREMISE: Jodie Foster plays a radio astronomer whose obsessive search for intelligent extraterrestrial life pays off one day when her earphones pick up what could be an alien signal from the Vega star system. With help from her colleagues at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project (SETI) — including a blind scientist with supersensitive hearing — she decodes the Vegan instructions for building a spaceship.

THE TRUTH: "The movie makes extraordinary efforts to make the science real, but there are a few mistakes," reports real-life SETI astronomer Jill Cornell Tarter, who briefly advised Foster during the filming of Contact. "We don't use earphones. The amount of information we process every second is far too vast even for my blind colleague Kent Cullers' sensitive ears to deal with. So our computers listen."

Contact made some mathematical errors, too. "There's a scene in which Jodie looks up at the sky and says, 'There are hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, and if only one in a million of those had planets, and if only one in a million of those had life, and if one in a million of those had intelligent life — there could be millions of intelligent civilizations out there.' Well, she's taken a number that's 10 to the 11th power and multiplied it by 10 to the minus 18th, and come up with 10 to the 6th, which isn't correct. But nobody except a few of us geeks would notice." (Foster's numbers would leave no room for intelligent life in space.) And what about the Vegan aliens? Did Contact portray them accurately? "I'll let you know after I get their message," Tarter says.