Biology and science fiction

When it comes to science fiction, I try not to let shoddy science get in the way of enjoying a good story. Sometimes, though, the suspenders of disbelief are stretched past all credibility. But even if they don't quite snap, why have a good story with bad science if you can have a good story with good (or at least good-ish) science?

Biologist PZ Myer has a lament about physics snobbery, especially as it relates to science fiction. I feel his pain -- biology is much more complicated than physics. Rocket science? Bah! Getting a rocket to fly is easy compared to growing a kidney. So why do physicists and engineers treat biology as the soft option?

Biology professor Michael LaBarbera has a look at the biology of some classic sci-fi B-movies, and explains why the best weapon against giant ants would be a strong throwing arm with a house-brick, and why the giant octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea was so lethargic and passive. He also explains that Stephen Spielberg did a remarkable job of getting the biology of E.T. and Jurassic Park believable.

Truly alien aliens would probably make for truly boring stories, but I don't think it is asking too much of writers that they treat biology with at least as much care and respect as they do physics. (By Wodan's one good eye, that's little enough!) I'm not asking for total scientific realism -- where would SF be without faster than light travel, time travel, aliens that look like humans, and other fantasy elements? But it would be nice to see a little bit of plausibility in SF biology from time to time.

Colour of Magic the movie

It looks like it is official: Terry Pratchett's first two novels The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are being filmed as a two-in-one movie. Following the success of Hogfather, SKY Network has apparently doubled the budget, which is a good thing because Hogfather occasionally suffered for its low budget, and The Mob's Vadim Jean is again directing.

Both novels are extremely lightweight, so it shouldn't be hard to turn the two of them into a single screenplay. Obviously a lot of scenes and characters are going to have to be dropped, but I can live with that. I do hope they manage to keep Hrun's speaking sword.

Details at this time are very thin on the ground, although rumour has it that Sir David Jason is going to play Rincewind. Sir David is a fine actor, and can play many roles wonderfully, but having him play Rincewind would be the second-most egregious example of miscasting ever. So let's hope the rumours are mistaken.

The most egregious example of miscasting ever, surely, is the suggestion that The 40 Year Old Virgin star Steve Carell should play Twoflower.

Although... [grits teeth] ... Japanese tourists were very much a 1980s thing, but clueless, obnoxious American tourists are an eternal truth. Maybe that makes a kind of sense?

Nah. The important thing about Twoflower is his child-like innocence. Who else should play Twoflower but Masi Oka?

(Click for larger image.)

As for Rincewind, I give my vote for Pirates of the Caribbean actor Mackenzie Crook. The man was born to play cowardly, moth-eaten, skinny anti-hero Rinso the Wizzard.

(Click for larger image.)

Paul Kidby writes in his blog that he will have a cameo in the film. (That story hasn't been archived yet, but when it is, it will probably end up in the archive for June.)

SFX Best Ten SF movies - part 2

Continued from Part One:


#5 The Matrix might not have invented bullet-time, but it certainly popularized it, and rightly so. Unlike the sequels, The Matrix hadn't yet devolved into a computer game, nor was it drowning in Zen psycho-babble and Dickian mysteries, although the early warning signs of wankery were there. But it was visually impressive, had an exciting plot, and didn't let the Zen philosophy get in the way of a rollicking good story. My rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars.

#4 Planet of the Apes. I speak not of the recent remake, which was abominable and entirely without merit: the ridiculous interspecies marriages, the pointless and nonsensical "shock ending", the absurd battle scene where knuckle-walking gorillas out-raced horses. But the original was an entirely different thing. The shock ending of the original was, at the time, actually shocking and not just stupid. Viewed as a mere action SF movie, Planet of the Apes was quite good by the standards of the late sixties, and I believe it has held-up well even by today's standards. But it actually had something serious to say about humanity, self-destruction, and what it means to have the shoe on the other foot. Even after losing points for getting the psychology of the great apes so badly wrong (it should have been the chimpanzees who were the killers, and the gorillas the tree-hugging peace-nics) I give the movie a better-than-average rating: 3 out of 5 stars.

#3 Blade Runner is a movie that polarises both SF fans and critics into those who love it and those who hate it. If all you've seen is the Director's Cut, I can understand you hating it: Ridley Scott managed to take a movie already easy to dislike, and make it more pretentious, unengaging and confusing. I often say that unless you've seen the original, you won't be able to make head or tail of the Director's Cut. But the original is a spaceship of a different engine: although it is slow-paced and quite dark, it also has a harsh, dystopian beauty, and explores a number of literary themes. Being based on a Philip K Dick story, naturally it questions what it means to be human, but in this case it does it well, unlike (for example) the awful Screamers. The sound track, by Vangelis, is hauntingly beautiful, and the rooftop death-scene of the Replicant Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer), dying in the rain, is both haunting and wonderful. My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

#2 Star Wars is one of the most loved and most viewed movies of all time, not just science fiction, but across all genres. It is a wonderful, innocent, rollicking good adventure -- more space opera than science fiction, but it did more than anything else before it to make science fiction acceptable to the mainstream. Yes, Star Trek may have paved the way, but Star Wars build an interstate superhighway. George Lucas virtually created modern special effects, and if some of the effects don't look quite so seamless in 2007 as they seemed in 1977 when we saw them for the first time, who cares? Star Wars was, when you get right down to it, merely Flash Gordon with state-of-the-art special effects and a marginally better script. The movie barely had an original line in it: Lucas copied, sometimes scene-for-scene and even word-for-word, from Japanese samurai movies, Flash Gordon serials, The Dam Busters, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, and even Nazi propaganda films. But it was done with such panache and style, and it contained so many memorable characters, that the movie goes beyond its origins as a homage to the Saturday afternoon serials. My rating: 4 1/2 out of 5.

#1 If Star Wars invented the "used future" SF movie, Serenity made it real: You Will Believe A Spaceship Can Fly. Far from space opera, Serenity combined characters you can believe in and care for with a fantastic story. It contains Joss Whedon's trademarked clever use of language, humour, tragedy and action. I don't always agree with Orson Scott Card, but on this, I agree one hundred percent: Serenity is a great movie. It explores questions of sin and belief, paternalistic government, and the freedom to make choices, whether good or bad -- and without the over-powering shadow of Uncle God that too often gives inane answers to these questions. My rating: 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Fantastic Four 2

Mrs Impala and I just saw Fantastic Four Two. Sorry to damn it with faint praise, but the best I can say for it is that it is not bad. Consider it an hour or so of moderately fun sci-fi comic book entertainment, and nothing more. The SFX for the the Silver Surfer were a huge win, but otherwise nothing really stood out as, um, outstanding.

However, I do wish to make a complaint. There are something like 6,300,000,000 people in the world who are not Americans (by which I mean people from the USA, my apologies to all you other Americans, like the Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, etc.). Quite a few of us watch movies, and many of us are sick and tired of seeing American movie makers, even in comic book movies, treating the rest of the world as America's backyard.

Case in point: the UK government might have a "special relationship" with the USA, they might be allies, but even the British would feel rather miffed if the American military flew into the centre of London and started a military operation without mentioning it to the authorities. At least put a token British officer in the helicopter with the troops!

And again, what's with the American military base in Siberia? The same Siberia which is part of Russia, which has little friendship for the USA, especially after Bush Co essentially slapped Putin in the face after he put out the hand of friendship. Now, I personally think Putin is a murderous thug living up to his past as a KGB agent, but for good or bad he is President of a proud nation with great natural resources and a lot of nuclear weapons.

I'm not concerned that the Russians will take offence of a silly movie and start a war over it, or anything like that, but it is an example of cultural imperialism and the American arrogance and utter contempt for anything that isn't U-S-A. The movie makers could have been a secret military base in Alaska, or even in the Arctic. But Russia? That's like having a movie about a rock band where the lead guitarist plays the guitar by hitting the strings with drum sticks, and expecting the viewers not to notice. It isn't hard to get these things right, or at least "right enough". But the truly frightening thing is that, more likely than not, 90% of American audiences will not only have not noticed the problem, but wouldn't understand it if it was pointed out to them. When your country is the whole world, why shouldn't you have military bases anywhere you like?

A Tale of Two Peters

Some weeks ago, Mrs. Impala and I went to see the latest Spiderman movie. Afterwards, I asked her if she wanted to go home and watch the (then) latest episode of Heroes, and she replied "No, I don't think I could deal with watching Peter Parker playing somebody who isn't Peter Parker immediately after watching Peter Parker being played by somebody who isn't Peter Parker."

Peter Parker playing somebody who isn't Peter Parker.

Peter Parker being played by somebody who isn't Peter Parker.

I don't think Tobey Maguire is a terrible Peter Parker, but he just isn't quite right. Milo Ventimiglia, on the other hand, was born to play Peter Parker. Let's hope that if there is a Spidey 4, Maguire is indisposed and the producers have the sense to turn to Ventimiglia.

SFX Best Ten SF movies

Earlier, I blogged about SFX magazine's poll for the best ten science fiction movies. In reverse order, here are my thoughts about each movie:

#10 Back To The Future deserves to be in any list of classic SF movies. It is a wonderful example of good old-fashioned entertainment: action, adventure, comedy, great music and sympathetic characters. It brightened the lives of millions of fans and gave people a simple introduction to the paradoxes of time travel. The time-travelling DeLorean has become iconic, so much so that when the Doctor needed to explain to his latest companion, Martha Jones, the dangers of time paradox, he simply reminded her of Back To The Future. My rating: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars.

#9 The Terminator gave people a dystopian future with no hope but endurance, and a more sophisticated time travel paradox than that from Back To The Future. It also launched the careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron into the stratosphere. The Terminator too has become iconic. My rating: 4 1/2 out of 5.

#8 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of those movies that, in my opinion, people love for what it represents rather than what it is. What 2001 represents is "grown-up science fiction" as literature, not mere entertainment. What 2001 is, on the other hand, is mostly dull, pretentious and infused with a religious mysticism that says nothing and goes nowhere. It is significant that the only memorable, sympathetic character in the movie is the murderous computer HAL. As a movie, it has some good moments: the use of classical music is stunning, and there are some iconic scenes, like the spinning antelope bone becoming a space station. 2001 tries hard to be faithful to a realistic view of space travel, but it succeeds far too well to make for a good movie. But for all of 2001's pretensions to hard science, it then turns into some of the softest, most nonsensical mysticism ever put into a movie. The mysticism of the movie doesn't even say anything: Stanley Kubrick, in particular, has virtually invited audiences to interpret the end any way they like. The problem with human film-makers trying to portray incomprehensible events is that they have to cheat: it isn't that the end of 2001 has meaning beyond human understanding -- if it were, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke couldn't have written it, being only human themselves. The only way for human writers to portray something beyond human understanding is to make up nonsense and wrap it in pseudo-significance. So any attempt to make sense of (e.g.) the fetus in space is simply projecting his or her own hopes and beliefs into the movie. A fetus in space is mystic? So would be a chicken egg, and just as silly. 2001 is a study of contrasts: ape-man and space-man, the cold harshness of space and the richness of the classical score, the ultra-realism of the hard science and the ultra-dippy weenieness of the mysticism. The end result is some magnificent minutes but also some tedious hours. My rating: it might be a classic, but it isn't a good classic. 2 out of 5.

#7 Forbidden Planet is a bit of a mystery to me. I have seen the movie, perhaps twenty years ago or more, but I don't remember enough about it to give it a rating. I'm awfully suspicious though: virtually every review of Forbidden Planet mentions that it is based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. I guess that makes it "literature", and science fiction which has been treated as literature is, generally speaking, overly serious and not terribly good.

#6 Alien is more horror than science fiction. We might go to the stars, it says, but the Nameless Horror in the dark will have got there first. Scary and intense, with one of the most memorable and unique monsters in all of fiction. 4 out of 5.


Continued in Part Two, coming right up.

Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter

Oh my, this has got to go on my Must Watch list.

Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter.

There is a review (with screen shots and even a short movie clip of Jesus kicking some unrighteous atheist butt) here.

Do you think they trying to tell us something?

A bootleg DVD of V For Vendetta has been found with a very unfortunate blurb on the case. According to the bootleg copy:

V for Vendetta is a poorly paced and spectacularly disjointed rehash of Orwellian themes.

(Note: I couldn't agree less with the reviewer, but then, what can one say about somebody who gave Superman Returns 5 out of 5 stars? Apart from "Did you eat lead paint as a child?" perhaps.)

Best movie ever, yarrr.

PZ Myers, who first thought he would be curmudgeonly and hate it, has declared Pirates of the Caribbean II the Best. Movie. Evar.

The plot careered around like a drunken sailor, and made very little sense. [...]

Still...Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was terrific fun. It's got pirates, a squid-man, a giant squid, a crew of undead human-sea creature hybrids, random sword fights, a giant squid crushing ships, the cutest little animated barnacles, a giant squid eating people, very poor dental hygiene, and it just never stops. I'd been warned that it was over-long, but seriously, I got to the end and thought, "It's done? Already?"

[...] The character of Elizabeth is showing signs of dissatisfaction with that piece of damp cardboard, Will Turner. I think you can all see where this is going: I predict that in the final movie, Elizabeth will finally meet Davy, she'll fall in love at first sight, she'll win his heart, and they'll sail off into the sunset, where they'll spawn many squidlets together. Yeah, it's predictable, but this is the kind of movie that just has to have a happy ending.

I loved that movie. The last few seconds of the movie, back at the voodoo priestess' hut (you know the scene, the one with the apple), had me bouncing in my seat going "Squee squee squee!!!" like a 13-year-old fangirl.

But in a manly, pirately way, you understand. Yarrr.

Box-office payola

Freakonomics discusses the economics of box-office sales figures, whether or not they get inflated, and why they usually sink like a concrete raft after a couple of weeks: in a nutshell, it's all about getting the movie on as many screens on the opening weekend as possible.

One of Freakonomic's readers, Scott Cunningham, makes an insightful comment, but then fails to draw the obvious conclusion and in fact draws the wrong conclusion:

But, it does make sense that studios would offer incentives for distributors. Movie demand is driven by information feedbacks because movies are differentiated products and willingness to pay depends on experience. [...]

But you can’t trick the public for long. De Vany shows how well the information conduits work. So I can’t imagine a rational distributor would pay theaters millions in lost revenue just to open the movie on many screens when the survival of a movie experiences a steep decline after the first week anyway.

He's got it completely backwards. It is precisely because you can't trick the public for long and ticket sales usually decline rapidly after the first week that the monster opening weekend is so vital. They need to generate as much hype and interest and ticket sales as quickly as possible, before word-of-mouth starts spreading the word that the flick is a turkey. Of course future dollars should be discounted compared to current dollars ("a bird in the hand") but that alone doesn't explain why the studios are so desperate for the movie to go off like a rocket. Having the movie showing on lots of screens is a good way to pump sales quickly.

The end result is that, even when the movie isn't a turkey, Hollywood is addicted to that instant blockbuster opening. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that, if given a choice between a movie that makes $10 million profit in the first month and then never makes another cent, or one that takes three months to break-even but brings in a steady $20 million profit every year for ten years, most studio executives would go for the first option. And it wouldn't even be a hard decision for them to make.

Best-worst horror movies

Cracked tells us about the eleven must-see horror movies which are so bad they're good. Like Return of the Living Dead:

It has the coolest zombies ever. Forget 28 Days Later, this was the original fast-zombie movie. Not only that, they talk. In fact, to my knowledge, this is the only zombie movie that actually features the zombies saying "Braaaaaains!" which may make it worth seeing in itself. Also, there's a scene in which, after the zombies have killed and eaten a group of paramedics, a zombie grabs the CB radio in the ambulance and insists that the dispatcher "Send...more...paramedics!"

Tough questions for the Entertainment Industry

The EFF is asking the entertainment industry some questions they don't want to answer, including:

• The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That's over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where's all that money going?


• Major entertainment companies have repeatedly brought lawsuits to block new technologies, including the VCR, Digital Audio Tape recorders, the first MP3 player, the ReplayTV PVR, and now P2P software. Why is your industry so hostile to new technologies?


• Unlike the major record labels, many popular indie labels offer mp3 downloads through sites like eMusic. Why won't you let fans purchase mp3s as well?


• The major movie studios have been enjoying some of their most profitable years in history over the past five years. Can you cite to any specific studies that prove noncommercial file sharing among fans, as opposed to commercial DVD piracy, has hurt the studios' bottom line in any significant way?


• Is it legal for me to skip the commercials when I play back time-shifted TV recordings on my TiVo or other PVR? How is this different than getting up and going to the bathroom?


• Why are there region-code restrictions on DVDs? How does this prevent copyright infringement? Is it illegal for me to buy or and use a region-free DVD player, or to modify a DVD player to be region-free?

The strange and horrible history of Superman

With the latest Superman movie just out in the cinemas now, it is a good time to link to the strange and horrible history of the movie, and how (as of 2004) the studio had spent fifty million dollars on it without even agreeing on a director or writer. It is a tale of utter disrespect and contempt for the Superman character and the fans:

[Jon] Peters then told [Kevin] Smith to have Brainiac fight polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude, demanding that the film be wall-to-wall action. Smith thought it was a stupid idea, so Peters said, "Then have Brainiac fight Superman’s bodyguards!" Smith responded, "Why the hell would Superman need bodyguards?" Peters wouldn’t let up, so Smith caved in and had Brainiac fight the polar bears. Then Peters demanded that Brainiac give Luthor a hostile space dog as a gift, arguing that the movie needed a cuddly Chewbacca character that could be turned into a toy. Then, after watching Chasing Amy, Peters liked the gay black character in the film so much that he ordered Smith to make Brainiac’s robot servant L-Ron gay, asserting that the film needed a gay R2-D2 with attitude. Then Peters demanded that Superman fight a huge spider at the end of the film, which Smith refused to do—he used a "Thanagarian Snare Beast" instead. (However, Peters did manage to recycle his spider idea and use it in Wild Wild West.)

It is no wonder that Hollywood finds it next to impossible to bring out quality movies. The few exceptions tend to come from independent or semi-independent producers. Judging by the history of Superman, it seems that the worse a director, the more his movies bomb, the better the major studios love him.

And casting choices... Oy vey!

WB made Justin Timberlake a firm offer to cast him as Superman...which he turned down cold, saying "whatever it is you’re smoking, I don’t want any part of it"

I have it on good authority that the new Superman movie isn't bad -- but, with the exception of the incredible performance of the lead actor, isn't especially good either. As I'm not a fan of Superman, I doubt I'll be forking out my hard-earned to see this flick at the cinemas.

Still, we can all give a sigh of relief that at least there were no polar bears.

From the land where Up is Down

War is Peace and Slavery is Freedom.

Tim Lambert at Deltoid writes about the mud being laid on with a trowel to the doco-movie "An Inconvenient Truth".

How is An Inconvenient Truth doing at the box office? Pretty well. The gross takings have increased every weekend and have almost reached $10,000,000. It's already the number 7 on the all time box office list for documentaries.

But that's not how it's being spun by the wingnuts:

UPI reports that Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, hasn't done so well after a promising start:

Former U.S. vice-President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" has seen its ticket sales plummet after a promising start.
[...]
The film dropped from its record $70,333 per play to $12,334 during its third week and its numbers have continued to fall as the film opens in smaller cities and suburbs across the country.

This is a text-book example of lying with statistics. As the movie is shown in smaller cities and suburbs, the average take per session falls -- but the total take increases. Strangely enough, UPI and Variety report that increased take as plummetting downwards. How curious. The right-wing media would lie about something? Say it ain't so!

Deltoid shows an impressive graph, showing clear growth, here. As the graph shows, the film is not only still making money, but the amount of money they make each week is continuing to grow.

Of course the wingnuts don't want you to know that, so what to do, what to do? There has never been a statistic that can't be distorted, so they focus on the per-session average, ignoring the fact that there are a lot more sessions. Of course, that means pretending that Up actually means Down, but hey, so long as the wingnuts continue to drink that Kool-Aid, it's all good.

Update:
Good Math, Bad Math has a good analysis of the dodgy statistics being used by UPI.

[...]when it was first released, it was being shown in a small number of showings in a small number of theaters. When it was premiered in 4 theaters, they sold out standing room only - so the gross per showing was very high. Now, four weeks later, it's showing in over 500 theaters, and the individual showings aren't selling out anymore. But more people are seeing it - every weekend, the number of people seeing it has increased!

The Powerline article (and the UPI article which it cites) are playing games with numbers to skew the results. They want to say that Al Gore's movie is tanking in the theaters, so they pick a bizzare statistic to support that, even though it's highly misleading. In fact, it's one of the best performing documentaries ever. It's currently the number seven grossing documentary of all time, and it's about $600,000 off from becoming number 5.

(Emphasis in original.)