Movie Science (part 1)

Science is cool and interesting and wonderful. It brings us everything from long-winded and mostly inaccurate speeches from presidential hopefuls to the iPhone 4S. We use it to understand the world around us and change it to our benefit. So naturally film-makers tap into this font of knowledge and excitement to improve the quality of their films.

Science has a dark side, however. This is the side where it is actually really boring and time-consuming. It can take years of advanced study to master a single scientific discipline and even then you’ll never know everything there is to know about it. The scientific process, while it sounds fun when you learn about as a ten-year-old and then apply it by turning plants different colors, is actually insanely tedious in the real world. It requires diligence and dedication and tons of patience. As someone who has spent hours waiting for a centrifuge to spin before running the suspension through gel electrophoresis (which, by the way, takes hours) only to have the results come out “inconclusive”, I can attest to this personally. Also, science pumps out shit like this:

 

 

 

But film-makers at major studios have tons of resources at their disposal so naturally they do their best to keep true to the scientific principles they use to fancy up their films, right? Hahaha, I wouldn’t have a “job” then, would I? In all fairness some movies are better than others but really, after all is said and done it’s usually the real science that’s left on the cutting room floor and whatever the director thought looked cool that sells the watered-down soda.

 

The Microscope

Invented sometime around 1590, the microscope was one of the first tools scientists used to understand the world around us. It’s stood the test of time, and modern-day knowledge seekers still use it to make very small things look very big. It has its limits, however; if the small things are too small you have to kill them sometimes before you can make them look big, sometimes you think you’re looking at part of your small thing but what you’re really looking at is a tiny scratch in one of the lenses, more complicated microscopes take training to use properly, and so on and so forth. Try telling these things to the modern-day film-maker, though.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this scene: the scientist character has just obtained a sample of the monster/superhero/alien’s cells and as he or she puts it under a microscope that looks like it was purchased at the gift shop of a natural history museum he/she watches in horror/amazement as a group of very nicely spread out cells performs a tiny cellular version of what is going on in the big people’s world. Sometimes there are “regular” (whatever the fuck that means) cells mixed in with the alien cells. Naturally the alien cells are easily differentiated; they’re the ones with spikes or something equally evil or strange-looking sticking out of them, maybe they’re a different color.

As someone who has actually used real microscopes to do actual real science let me tell you this is probably one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen. Very rarely does cell behavior at the micro level mimic phenomenon at the macro level. If it did a psychologist’s job would be very easy; all he or she would have to do would be obtain a sample of their patient’s cells and look at them under a microscope. “Ah, I see; Chad’s cells, which I can tell are his because they wear thick-rimmed glasses just like him, are being little jerks; eating all the food, pushing the other cells out of the way, not calling his friends on their birthdays, obviously his problem is that he’s a little jerk!” Think that sounds silly? Well it is. Furthermore, when you actually look at cells under a microscope, they usually look a bit more like this:

 

Space

It’s an extremely small subset of today’s humans who will ever get to actually go into space but an extremely large subset that think it would be super fucking cool to do so. It’s exciting and dramatic and romantic and you get to, literally, look down on EVERYONE.

It’s not without it’s perils, however, as the vacuum of space is not somewhere humans were really intended to survive. That’s usually inconvenient and boring though so if we’re making movies we’ll usually just put it by the wayside, for DRAMA.

One commonly occurring scene in particular bothers the shit out of me. In it one to three of the characters find themselves unable to escape a situation other than by exiting some sort of spacecraft. Naturally there are no space suits nearby so they must expose their frail human body to the vacuum of space with little to no protection until they can be snatched up by another waiting spacecraft. While it’s true that you could probably survive in such an environment for about 30-90 seconds before you choked to death on nothingness these scenes always conveniently ignore that transition period that happens when you go from inside a spaceship to outside of it. For you see your body is used to hanging around at about 760 Torr of pressure. You can survive at around 150 Torr, but not comfortably. However, since space is pretty much a vacuum it’s essentially at 0 Torr. A sudden drop of around 100 Torr can be fatal. You do the math. But, instead of being dead or at the very least blind, deaf and unable to breath outside of a hyperbaric chamber, the characters are usually shown spending a couple of weeks in a hospital bed then maybe limping around on crutches for some reason.

I’ve also never seen a movie go into detail about the multifarious health effects associated with putting a human body in a zero-gravity environment for extended periods of time. Sure we see the psychological effects all the time, because it’s fun to watch an astronaut go crazy, but I’ve never seen a movie space traveler’s face get all puffy and gross because the fluid in his body is being redistributed in ways evolution never intended. Other fun stuff that happens to your body in space include loss of vision and taste, motion sickness, muscle atrophy, bone density loss and a decreased production of red blood cells. Fun.

Join me next time when we’ll discuss faster-than-light travel and evolution/genetics and how movies abuse them… a lot.