Scientists Help Movie Writers Make Films ‘Plausible-Ish’
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that could be communicated, but I guess I'd call it 'intuition'; and the value of trying to convey it in a movie is that if you tell the average person, "I'm now going to give you some examples of how scientists think about things"—they're going to become nervous and less efficient at absorbing the info.
I was recently impressed by "Ex Machina" for being 'plausable-ish' and showing realistic, intelligent thought processes, as an example. The t.v. show "House" is also sometimes good about it.
Besides thinking, there's a huge value in portraying accurate science and technology. Even if it's background, not core of the plot. Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema, whether they like it or not. Especially if one doesn't know about something beforehand, the movie will set baseline expectations about that thing. Think how most people seem to believe that people will explode when exposed to vacuum - thanks to decades of movies that told them exactly that. If people are going to learn from TV, they may as well learn the correct stuff.
I think that's universal of all stories in all cultures. I remember a speaker at Gen-Con in the 90's claimed that the original reason for campfire stories of heroes was to inspire the young men to defend the group in times of danger (overcome the flight with a heroic fight). Cinema is just a very effective way in the line of delivery methods. VR is going to be really interesting to watch.
I have seen an AR-15 (which is not really an assault rifle, but the media is not very accurate) and handled a gun (my mom's) and shot one when I was 7 (I sucked) and hunted (we apparently ended up tracking Sun-Tzu the deer). I'm very worried by our "I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express" level of knowledge.
As a side note, I really like some of the comic books written by Jonathan Hickman, for example his S.H.I.E.L.D. or FF runs. He seems to be a fan of science.
1) High level of baseline literacy we were talking about. Contrast to our world, when many people shy from learning new things, and those who do learn are often labeled as nerds and warned about dangers of having too high self-esteem. I really long for the world where this sort of anti-intellectualism is not something to be proud of, and where the social pressure is encouraging self-development, rather than discouraging it.
2) Expectation of competency. It's visible on all levels - from civilian vs. Starfleet interactions, through teamwork of starship crews, to the inner workings of big bureaucracies like the United Federation of Planets. Everyone is assumed competent until proven otherwise. Characters in Star Trek know they're working with others who are as smart as they are, and so they trust each other and trust the system. Contrast with the real world, where we often assume our coworkers are incompetent, and the predominant narrative in society is that bureaucracies are stupid and evil.
I only now realize how much my expectations of humans are different thank to Star Trek, and that a big part of my life is trying to form an area around myself, where 1) and 2) would hold.
There's also point 3), but that may be a particular quirk of my personality - I prefer stories where not individuals, but organizations are heroes. That's another reason why I love Star Trek, and that's also why S.H.I.E.L.D. was always my favourite part of the Marvel Multiverse. A magical mutated flying superhero is boring. A Helicarrier - now that's interesting. :).
As for 2), that's an interesting point. Perhaps it speaks to a level of maturity and mutual trust that we have not achieved yet. Maybe it manifests naturally as a result of progress with 1). It'd be interesting to read some lengthier discourse on this.. I feel it relates to government, market forces, social perception, culture and more..
Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy.
I've found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's what the article means by "plausible-ISH", and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the "ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses" (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don't believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be "more correct" one or two levels deeper.
A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things. One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head. "You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings"; Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard. Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component (truly "leading the story" as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.
To two birds with one stone and address a sister post, my biggest issue re: the Martian comes when you read (for a contrived comparison) the Apollo 13 transcripts. As much a life or death situation as anything that happened in The Martian, far less of my wanting to throw the "protaganist" out a window for being a nonstop firehose of bad quips and one liners. Extremely excitable is the tip of the iceberg, my distaste came from a broad mosaic of their personalities and responses being exceedingly "off", largely, without even getting into a discussion on the writing/acting itself.
(as FiatMoney put it far more eloquently than I did; the demeanor of many of the "Science" individuals is just _wrong_)
The Apollo 13 crisis lasted a week; even then, the transcripts do contain quite a few "bad quips and one-liners". Look at page 14-16 of http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS13_CM.PDF for jokes between the crew just 30 minutes into the mission.
My original comment was more directed at the actual crisis portions of both the movie and Apollo 13 (around the famous "Houston we have a problem" line) were drastically different. I certainly grant that a movie might not be as exciting if crisis resolution was largely reading checklists out of books and remaining exceedingly composed given the circumstance, but I'd find it a lot easier to buy into than the cacophony of yelling and cursing that took place at multiple instances during the movie.
Something additional and more tangible I remembered while writing this, I found myself agog at some of the items they had on mars; the commercial grocery store grape juice bottles were some of my favorites.
Edit: I'm normally not one to comment on this, but of all the things I've ever said, I had no idea disliking this movie would attract the silent downvote brigade so aggressively. I find this both interesting and entertaining.
Don't forget that he was on his own with a big delay in communication. So from a science perspective, he's talking to himself so why would he be formal checklist guy, and from a movie perspective they have switched the inner monologue of the character to be an external one into a 'video diary' to make the story watchable. It's a story telling device.
While there are movies deserving of ire the Martian isn't one of them and definitely not for the yelling and screaming.
Writing this I see now that the movie itself may not feel as "hard sci-fi" as it does if you know the book - e.g. the agricultural arc was very much rushed in the movie. In the book, the protagonists takes things more slowly, and much more thoughtfully.
(And I have no frikkin' clue what's with the downvotes; upvoting to compensate.)
To answer the question from your other post, my "holy trinity" is Primer, Moon, Pandorum. (the first two on a pedestal above the third, but the third manages to fit in being an "action" movie without going too far down that road such that I can't but love it.)
If we're talking books, that's an entirely different discussion, and seems to be the one most people want to have when bringing up The Martian. I've certainly felt the same about some of my favorites. (I recall the whisper of a Foundation movie that made me want to run and hide)
RE shortening, I remember watching Ender's Game and leaving cinema angry, because the movie had compressed the book so much that I felt it won't make any sense for a person who hadn't read the novel. I now imagine that the Martian may have seemed similarly poor to you because of that. If you happen to read the book and find the text being crap, please get back to me, I'd really like to hear your perspective.
We, or rather - some of us - are talking not books, but book+movie combo. The Martian was quite a thing among space geeks even before the movie was announced, and doubly so after the story broke - so, like me, they probably implicitly assume others read the original too. I guess it's a lesson for me for the future, to bring up explicitly whether one had or had not read the book :).
I agree it's ridiculously implausible, but I'm fine with that in sci-fi as long as it's only done once per story. In fact, many of my favorite stories follow that pattern: Take a normal world and add one radical (or even impossible) piece of technology or magic. Then explore the implications. Vernor Vinge's bobble books (The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime) are an excellent example of this.
The thing that annoys me is when authors don't see an implication of their invention. Or worse, they make their characters use the invention in implausibly limited ways. JJ Abrams is often guilty of both of these.
(Spoilers follow.)
The most glaring oversight was the lack of an emergency shutdown for Ava. The story should have ended with Nathan pulling out a remote, pressing a button, and Ava collapsing. The prospect of a robot going berserk was known to him. Heck, it'd already happened before. One scene shows footage of a prototype smashing itself to bits on the wall. The movie expects us to believe that after that incident, Nathan thought, "No need to add failsafes. Just let these AIs destroy my carefully-crafted robot bodies on this glass partition." I don't buy it.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what you mean. Were they too excitable in the movie to be believable?
And as for the astronauts, I've actually heard that astronauts find the attitudes reflected exactly right. All from a guy who didn't know any.
https://www.engr.wisc.edu/alumni/perspective/22.2/spuds.html
Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera).
Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were the "power of love transcending dimensions" line by one of the characters, and the... final act. But physics was done more right than probably ever before, Space Odyssey included. (INB4 yes, that planet near black hole was realistic, it's actually a pretty neat edge case of rotating black hole physics.) I actually found myself Googling what I thought was pseudoscience, only to discover it's actually true (and to learn some more about relativity too).
And the Martian... come on. There's basically two things the book gets wrong, and both are minor. Dust storm being too strong, and the author handwaving radiation shielding into existence without explaining how it works. The rest is pretty much totally legit. (Ok, the movie didn't show that gravity on Mars is weaker, but that was literally because the director said that doing it is too much of a mess, and the audience won't care anyway.)
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> Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard.
Totally agree. Though if the Holy Trio above made you grumpy, I wish to know what do you consider hard. It seems we have pretty different standards.
> Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component
Also agree. The movies and series in this article are basically a joke in this area (even though I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). They're more like Star Trek in this regard, though I still think Star Trek's technobabble made more sense.
And about science being a more integral component - again, check Interstellar. There's a pretty neat story that starts with Nolan approaching Kip Thorne, telling him that he needs a planet with very strong time dilation for the plot. Thorne initially thinks it's impossible, but then he sits down, does the math, and figures out a crazy scenario in which that planet is very much plausible...
http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-revi...
Same feeling for "The Martian". The Martian base and the spaceships look like youth hostels, the astronauts an unruly bunch, but more than everything, there is no feeling whatsoever that we're looking at people dealing with something alien. It's the usual ingenuous american guy playfully overcoming difficulties that end up looking more or less trivial, like traversing hundreds of kms of Martian desert, growing potatoes (under artificial light!), surviving a Martian night while unconscious with no protection from the cold... Just have a look at the Martian landscape as depicted in the movie:
http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/martian-gall...
(hint: like a holiday destination in a hazy day) and at how it looks for real:
You can violate the real laws of physics, so long as you do so consistently within the rules/laws as you've defined them. You can have 'magic', so long as the magic is used consistently.
Heck, you can even break your own previously-established rules, so long as you can explain why in way that is consistent with everything else. If you do it with foreshadowing ("there is some theoretical way to make our faster-than-light engine allow us to travel in time, but no one has ever been able to get it to work") then it might even be accepted. If you do it with no notice because it's merely convenient to the plot ("hey, I just came up with this crazy idea to make our ship travel through time, give me 5 minutes to re-route power and connect a widget and we'll be good to go"), then it's stupid.
From a plausibility perspective (plausibility of both the society and the characters) it’s far and away better than Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, etc.
Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples.
Oddly, Prometheus was an excellent example. It's like Ridley Scott documented all the different ways you can make a character totally uninteresting and loathsome, and made sure to include at least one example of each in that movie. What a turd.
> anti-science
> Interstellar