From a science fiction writer, who should know.
So, yeah: In a film with impossibly large spiders, talking trees, rings freighted with corrupting evil, Uruks birthed from mud (not to mention legions of ghost warriors and battle elephants larger than tanks), are we really going to complain about insufficiently dense lava? Because if you’re going to demand that be accurate in a physical sense, I want to know why you’re giving the rest of that stuff a pass. If you’re going to complain that the snowman flies, you should also be able to explain why it’s okay to have it eat hot soup.
Read on for the Flying Snowman theory.
Cheap Talk 
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January 2, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Rohan
While not disagreeing with what is said in the post I do think that good science fiction (perhaps like a good model) consists of outlining the unexpected implications of some small set of deviations from the known set of physical rules, while staying true and consistent to everything else and the deviations.
Anthony Lane of the New Yorker probably says it better in this review of Spider Man 3. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/05/07/070507crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=all
“The fact is that if the fantastical is to flourish it must lay down the conditions of its magic and abide by them; otherwise, we feel cheated. (Tolkien knew this better than anyone.)”