Last week, a story about professor Sidney Perkowitz of Emory University made its way around the blogosphere. The reason? Perkowitz, a representative of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, took the stance that Hollywood filmmakers should only be allowed to violate the laws of science once in a movie, after which, they need to adhere to facts. And as admirable a goal as I think that is, it would accomplish nothing.
Let’s presume for a hypothetical moment that Perkowitz could enforce this rule. Who is the beneficiary supposed to be, exactly? Audience members don’t care about the veracity of their science fiction; not the majority of them at least. They don’t care that the bugs in Starship Troopers could not grow to huge sizes in Earth-like gravity because their legs would be unable to support the scaled-up weight of their exoskeletons. They don’t care that a miracle substance called unobtainium is used to to tunnel to the center of the Earth in The Core so that a ragtag team of scientists can detonate a handful of nuclear bombs intended to restart the engine that drives Earth’s protective magnetic shield. Why don’t they care? Because people know that not only is it all a bunch of fanciful malarkey, but that sci-fi movies from Hollywood would be boring were a physics mandate applied.
Just look at last year’s crop of sci-fi to see how dull a trip to the movies would have been were the Perkowitz Law in effect. Even if it allowed the interstellar travel that brought the Prawns to Johannesburg, District 9 would then be lacking all the badass moments involving Wikus in the alien mech suit. Grant James Cameron the mind-melding magic of the Avatar program and he’d still have to remake his entire blockbuster to account for the gravity of Pandora, which should be less than Earth’s. Transformers 2 would be one twenty minute shot of Megan Fox and even then she still has two traits that seem oblivious to the effects of gravity. Give the okay to Terminator Salvation‘s cyborgs and you still have to deal with building sized robots and sentient artificial intelligence. 2012 just would not exist, period. And so on and so on…
The point is, good science does not make a good (or even popular) movie; good filmmaking does. The Core tanking at the US box office had nothing to do with audiences realizing that the whole thing threw science under the bus in the first 10 minutes and everything to do with the fact that there simply wasn’t an audience that showed up for it in the first place. And even though I’m a fan of that goofy, goofy mess, I can admit it just looks like a bad movie (which is why I love it). Flawless science doesn’t change uninspired CGI and cheesy scripting.
If anything, asking Hollywood to break only one major scientific law while bending others hurts the public’s scientific knowledge even more. Folks would become accustomed to the idea that there is truth in their somewhere and before long you’d find people believing that maybe the world isn’t ending in 2012, but that you can drive a stretched limo through the crumbling hell on Earth that is LA and come through unscathed. In fact, if Perkowitz wants to pin down the best way to improve public awareness of general scientific principles, a good place to start would be with cars on film across all genres. How about a consistent portrayal of car crashes, to be specific? Get rid of vehicles that explode into massive fireballs on impact in one film while being able to bounce around other drivers like bumper cars in others. Even Joe Schmoe knows time travel is not legit, but poll ten people off the street and I bet half couldn’t explain that the bus in Speed would, at the very least, need a ramp to clear the freeway gap.
We don’t need more accurate science fiction, we need more accurate fiction. It’s tough to find a bigger pessimst than I as to your average person’s intelligence, but even I’ll admit that people are smart enough to associate a sci-fi with a big, fat “What if?” label whenever they come across it. It’s the films that don’t come with that label that Perkowitz should be concerned about.
Check out last week’s MindFood here
