The Biology of B-Movie Monsters (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters (2003)

fathom.lib.uchicago.edu

96 pointscainxinth45 comments

LaB was my PhD advisor! A thoughtful, creative, and curious scientist and a teacher extraordinaire.

For a slightly longer form take from Mike on B-movie monsters see:

LaBarbera, M. 2013. It’s Alive! The Science of B-Movie Monsters. Univ of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo178413...

For more about Mike and his impact on the biological sciences at the Univ of Chicago see: https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/life-aquatic

Zombie physiology also seems a stretch—-how do organisms with so many open and often bleeding dirt-covered wounds maintain hemodynamic stability in the face of inevitable septic shock and/or blood loss? A movie where a virus just makes infected people seem normal and very friendly but want to furtively bite other people to spread disease and then have delayed onset terminal sickness, like a subtle version of rabies, would be terrifying and more plausible.

In "World War Z" (the book), the scientific "questions" regarding how the zombies work are brought up but not answered. For instance, in the book, the zombies freeze solid in winter and when spring comes thaw and just start going again. The fact that ice crystals normally rupture cell membranes is brought up as a question of how this is possible; but no attempt is made to answer the question, because that's not the point of the book.

Wood frogs can survive freezing solid. Their liver produces glucose to flood all cells, prevent cell freezing, and protect against dehydration. Ice forms around cells and organs but not inside them, preventing lethal damage.

https://www.nps.gov/gaar/learn/nature/wood-frog-page-2.htm

And if the book was about how such a "virus" might work, the author could have brought that up. But since the book is actually exploring how different cultures or people groups might react to the same event, going down that road would be a trap, and only invite more intense scrutiny from pedants. Explicitly "lampshading", as a sibling commenter put it, is the better way to achieve the author's goals.

In other words, the problem is "lampshaded": The author indicates to the audience that they are well-aware something doesn't make sense, in a way that encourages the reader to ignore it going forward.

In Demon, the third in John Varley's Gaia trilogy of sci fi books, the (alien-manufactured) "zombies" were animated by colonies of worms that fed on the soft tissues of the corpse, and simply replaced the actions of the lifeless muscles. They thus had very human outlines, and if anything, far more horrifying looks than half-rotted corpses.

They also didn't last very long; they were meant as disposable remote-controlled troops.

The "original" (in the non-Vodoo sense) zombies shown in George Romero's "living dead" movies made no claims that the undead were scientifically explainable -- it was later movies like 28 Days Later that tried to rationalize them as infected, living people, to their detriment, I think.

In 28 Days Later the infected starve to death, I can't remember them being overly supernatural.

It is The Walking Dead in which the zombies are basically immortal but useless. Unless the plot requires otherwise. After Season 1 it is a terribly written show. Don't get me started.

28 Days Later is scarier because the infected, living humans can chase you down, climb and open doors, and the infection spreads much faster. I always wondered what The Walking Dead would have been like if the survivors couldn't clear out a prison full of zombies with hand to hand weapons. 28 Years Later is coming out this year, and they going to show what happens to humanity stuck in the UK that's been overrun by the Rage virus and presumably quarantined all this time by the rest of the world.

To me that makes it more boring though. The interesting part about the Romero movies is that the survivors underestimate both the zombies and their fellow survivors. They think because they can deal with individual zombies that they are safe. But they forget that zombies in mass are dangerous and that even more than that, their fellow survivors might be not be friendly.

There is a passing mention of a radioactive satellite falling to earth in the movie, so there is an attempt at providing some explanation.

The first section about "The Incredible Shrinking Man" reminded me of "Life At Low Reynolds Number", with the concept of "scaling".

>It helps to imagine under what conditions a man would be swimming at, say, the same Reynolds number as his own sperm. Well, you put him in a swimming pool that is full of molasses, and then you forbid him to move any part of his body faster than 1 cm/min. Now imagine yourself in that condition: you're under the swimming pool in molasses, and now you can only move like the hands of a clock. If under these ground rules you are able to move a few meters in a couple of weeks, you may qualify as a low Reynolds number swimmer.[0]

[0]https://cooperlab.wustl.edu/PracticalAdvice/Purcell%201977.p...

Always (usually) fun to read an expert talk about their field as it crops up in unusual places, at least when it's done without an ego. I've avoided the YouTube clickbait "real bank robber reviews movies" videos, but maybe I shouldn't.

Meta: Unfortunately, even the earliest snapshot of this page on the Wayback Machine doesn't contain working images: https://web.archive.org/web/20040624122432/https://fathom.li...

If you're looking for some good quality "expert reviews their field as represented in movies" videos without too much clickbait, Vanity Fair has a long playlist of them that I enjoyed: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ2lDrDpOLrusAYQFq2yVHf...

I've always loved this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qSiEKntQA

Alex Honnold Breaks Down Iconic Rock Climbing Scenes

I always thought that the Hulk running fast and landing too gently makes him appear too light:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzceykTiwjs

You can see similar issues in the recent American Godzilla movies. In the first one, Godzilla seems huge and heavy. In the later ones, they keep making it faster and more agile and the result is that it seems light and small (and extremely fake) no matter how many buildings fall over or ships get sunk.

That could be because Japanese audiences complained that in Godzilla (2014), their favorite kaiju had gotten fat.

I often think this when there's meant to be a big heavy thing moving around. I think it's one of my problems with Pacific Rim 2 vs the first film. In the first film, the robots were slow and heavy, in the second they were nimble and didn't have any of the weight behind them

The new director started somewhere how he did not like how big and bulky the original robots were. Which was the entire point of the movie! They are beefy tanks. It felt as real as you could imagine building sized robots to be.

The camera does shake when he lands to give the impression of a hard landing.

He probably should have also had a crater or something show up on the road when landing. Maybe that was a limitation of the CGI of the time though. If so maybe the camera shaking was a way to deal with that CGI limitation in order to make the Hulk seem like he had weight.

Or superheroes picking up a car, when really they would just be ripping the bumper off it like soft cheese.

I worked as a stress analyst in aerospace for a while. Lots of good insights here about buckling of thin walled structures, with respect to arthropods and how to attack giant arthropods.

Another scientific bit that's almost always ignored in the growing/shrinking trope is that the pitch of one's voice would change. The incredible shrinking man would presumably have an inaudibly high pitched voice. His own cilia are shrinking too so it'd be interesting to work out if he could hear himself.

Variants like the Hulk also seem to violate the conservation of mass but it's amusing to imagine using that property to make an infinite power source. Put Bruce Banner/Hulk on one side of a teeter toter and a mass between that of Banner and the Hulk on the other, then get Banner/Hulk to alternate forms. Profit!

I highly recommend the books by Mark Glassy, The Biology of Science Fiction Cinema and Biology Run Amok!: The Life Science Lessons of Science Fiction Cinema.

Just the title reminds me of this wonderful talk

Godzilla: History, Biology and Behavior of Hyper-Evolved Theropod Kaiju

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXgX2WErXQo

For Jurassic park, I always wondered about how quick these adult dinosaurs must have grown. The large ones must have been, I don’t know, atleast 10 years? But then the park must have been much older than that. Is there some average or maximum kilograms per year that an animal can conceivably grow?

Now do space opera!

The Expanse is probably the most realistic of fast-paced battles in the stars space opera, and I've seen analyses that show that the Epstein drive is at the edge of what physics would possibly allow. But those UN, MCRN, and Belter ships would need something you don't see at least in the series (or described in the books): heat sinks. They'd have to have radiators or they'd melt. Even if the drive was insanely efficient (like >90%) it would still generate hundreds of megawatts of heat at those power outputs. I suppose you could cool with propellant, but that would greatly reduce your specific impulse. To jet around the solar system like that would require very high specific impulse, meaning tiny amounts of propellant emitted at relativistic velocities.

Speaking of propellant velocity: those Expanse fusion rockets would not look like blowtorches. They'd look a bit more like the "laser beams" depicted here -- rocket plumes that look like straight lines because they're made of particles accelerated to like 3-5% 'c': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8vh2ER3ao4

Edit: ... and one more big inaccuracy: a torch rocket is also a death ray that would be horrifically effective even at very long range. The scenes where "they're trying to burn us up with their drive plume" would have to take place at much longer range or they'd just be dead. If you were near a ship all you'd have to do is flip around to hose your enemy down with X-rays and superheated plasma. You'd also never fire up one of those things anywhere remotely near a space station like Tycho unless you wanted to at least give everyone on board cancer. You'd have to use conventional rockets to get well clear before turning on the fusion drive.

No space opera I've seen gets this right. Any sufficiently powerful space drive (fusion/antimatter torch, let alone warp drives) is a weapon of mass destruction. Does Star Trek ever even examine what happens if you point the Enterprise at a planet and say "warp 9, engage!"? In The Expanse if the belters wanted to stick to Earth and Mars they could do simpler things than throwing stealth rocks if you really think about it. Those drives would be insanely deadly in many different ways.

It's one of the reasons I think war in space is gonna be rare. If it happens it's basically mutually assured destruction (MAD) given the power involved. Even a chemical rocket can generate velocities that make an impact have a yield comparable to a small nuclear device.

For All Mankind is almost space opera and is probably the most realistic.