Zzxt! Shockingly plodding plotting

It’s an action movie in which one of the characters looks at a clothesline and says, “pardon my C-cup,� but I was impressed by the logic holding the plot together in “Stealth.� And I don’t think that was because I was distracted by the C-cups.

In the movie, which opened Friday, the Navy wants to teach its new unmanned fighter plane how to fight, so it sends it out with its best pilot so the plane’s artificial intelligence will learn from him. Thing is, the Navy’s ace pilot is, believe it or not, a bit of a rule-breaker. So the plane learns to break all the rules and, lacking the judgment of a human action hero -- who only kills random extras we don’t care about -- starts to wreak havoc. Lessons are learned. Things are blown up. The person sitting to my left caught me text messaging.

Still I’m impressed by the neat little O. Henry-like fable. And then it happens. The thing I hate most. The reason the plane goes berserk is that it is struck by lightning. And as anyone struck by lightning knows, it causes the plane to be super-smart and autonomous, not all burned up and dead.

I have a particular aversion to magic caused by lightning. I vastly prefer the culturally insensitive method of having mystical stuff happen because the main character interacts with a different culture that is so primitive that it’s in touch with the supernatural: the fortune cookies that cause mom and daughter to switch bodies in “Freaky Friday,� the gypsy inside the carnival wish machine that turns a 12-year-old into Tom Hanks in “Big�; the Thai ping-pong balls that make Spalding Gray momentarily interesting in “Swimming to Cambodia.�

But when a screenwriter gets to the page where the plot stops making sense, the most popular solution is electricity. Lightning makes the Frankenstein monster come alive, allows aliens to travel down to Earth in “War of the Worlds� and makes a photo of Kelly LeBrock spring to life in “Weird Science.�

Electricity allows the Thing to transform back to his Michael Chiklis self in “Fantastic Four.� Dropping a blow-dryer in a bathtub lets Mel Gibson hear women’s thoughts in “What Women Want.� Trying to control electricity can cause almost anything, including a recall election.

To find out why this is, I considered doing research on Zeus and anthropology, but instead called Brian Greene, the Columbia University physics professor who wrote “The Fabric of the Cosmos.� He appeared in the film “Frequency� with Dennis Quaid. So I didn’t feel too bad about wasting his time.

From a beach on the Mediterranean with his family, Greene said: “Electricity and magnetism provided the first example of unification in the world. Maxwell, in the late 1800s, showed that electricity and magnetism are part of the same unified structure of physics called the electromagnetic force.� I do not know how Quaid put up with this.

When I pressed on the lightning-as-magic-in-movies conundrum, I was shocked to find out that Greene, despite all his supposed Rhodes scholaring and superstring theorizing, had never contemplated this before.

“It seems natural to me that people do still rely upon it,� he said about writers using lightning to move their stories along. “When there’s a lightning storm, it’s like I turn into a little kid. People think the more we understand, the less wonder there is in the world. I don’t think that’s true. It is pretty interesting to note how much we’ve learned about the world ... about space and time and matter that people have yet to take in.�

Greene, I realized, is right, mostly because he’s so much smarter than me. We might be a very religious culture, but our daily faith is still in science. If God were to interfere, it would be ridiculous, suited for a comedy such as “Bruce Almighty� or “Oh God!� or “Heaven Can Wait,� not a serious computer-controlled-fighter-jet film.

Science makes things legit. Because we don’t really understand anything after Newton, science can be used to explain crystals and reiki and astrology and magnetic therapy and every other New Age theory L.A. is into.

Writers, of course, are the most ignorant about science, which is why they had to become writers. So they think radiation makes superheroes and electricity makes our brains extra juicy. Why they can’t come up with a scenario in which Rob Schneider encounters gravity and stops making comedies is beyond me. “Deuce Bigalow: Gigolo Who Has a Good Long Look in the Mirror and Doesn’t Like What He Sees� is a film I would go to Sundance to see.