In which I take the foolish and reprehensible step of holding a slightly different opinion from that of David Mitchell.
David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author, though he’s brilliant too (and there are apparently many others as well, many of whom I’m sure are also jolly good)) is brilliant. He’s been getting some play in the skeptical community lately because of some rather fun jabs that comedy duo Mitchell and Webb take at pseudoscience in their sketch shows, like the Homeopathic E.R. sequence. And he wrote an article this week, about this physics professor in the US who declared recently that Hollywood films should stick closer to science fact.
The first thing I’m prompted to wonder is why this is suddenly newsworthy now, when I’m sure there have been any number of scientists grumbling on very similar lines for years. And David’s main point has also been made a number of times before: the primary purpose of TV and film is to be entertaining, and it’s entirely correct that this should sometimes take priority over reflecting such petty details as the laws of physics with perfect accuracy.
Reality is unrealistic, after all. You don’t want everything in fiction to perfectly resemble the real world you already know and are bored with – that’s why you’re watching telly in the first place. I think I more or less agree with David’s assessment that:
Being realistic is a storytelling tool, like lighting, music and sexy actresses.
This doesn’t downplay its importance too much. If you’re telling a story, then storytelling tools are vital. If you don’t bother worrying about the lighting while filming, it’s likely to end up looking terrible; likewise, if realism is completely disregarded, your script will probably be a total mess. Realism is important, but to be used wisely as a tool of story-telling, wherever appropriate, not adhered to dogmatically.
Where I started to cringe a little was this paragraph:
How typical of a scientist to try to reduce film-making to a formula. He’s noticed that enjoyable science fiction sometimes needs to include the impossible, but streams of implausible events don’t make a compelling narrative. He’s right but he should have left it at that. The happy medium is found by using judgment not maths.
It’s the first sentence, really. I hang out with far too many science geeks, and read far too many scientists’ blogs and Twitter feeds, not to be acutely aware that reducing anything to a formula is not typically representative of what scientists always do. It’s usual poor tabloid reporting that produces that kind of nonsense. To some actual scientists, such formulae are anathema.
But despite that nagging quibble, he’s making basically a good point. The guy making these recommendations – Professor Sidney Perkowitz of the Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia – has reportedly suggested a limit of “one big scientific blunder in a given film”. Which is where it starts to get a bit silly.
David speculates that this is comparable to the “one coincidence to which good screenplays are supposed to be restricted”, but that doesn’t seem like a great analogy. Major coincidences happen sometimes in the real world, but rarely in big clumps, so multiple coincidences in your film will make it start to look unrealistic.
But scientifically impossible things don’t happen at all, so whether there’s one breach of the laws of nature in your movie or a dozen makes no difference as to its implausibility. Any such simple hard-and-fast rule is bound to be misleading and unhelpful.
One film I recently really enjoyed was called Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. I’m about fifteen years older than its target audience, but it was warm and funny and energetic and had nifty pacing and great comic timing and for the most part it stopped short of being annoying in its zaniness. Two thumbs up. But it was full of completely impossible things going on that only make sense in a cartoon world – unsurprisingly, being an animated kids’ film – and if you were scientifically nit-picking your way through, you’d have no time left for anything else.
And I would dispute that there exists any precise definable line between stories where you can do stupid cartoon stuff, like drop anvils on your characters and have tweeting birds appear circling around their dazed heads, and sci-fi, where everything must make perfect sense. Just as much as I dispute that allowing “one big scientific blunder” per movie does anything useful to address scientific plausibility in cinema. What’s likely to be acceptable depends far more on the context and the internal logic of an individual film.
It’s also worth noting that sci-fi writer John Scalzi was way more put out by the bad science in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie than was astronomer Phil Plait. These are both guys who know a thing or two about a thing or two, but it’s clearly possible to forgive a lot that you know is technically unrealistic, in the right context.
And while it’s lamentable that it’s taken me this long to reach one of the most interesting points about all this, there’s one thing I’ve heard from scientists on this subject time and again: When big-budget sci-fi movies do get actual science advisors on board to try and make sure things stay somewhere within tentacle’s reach of reality, they almost never have to totally sacrifice huge swathes of cool stuff that they wanted to do. Very often, having someone who really knows their stuff just makes the science even more awesome.
The conversation will go something like:
“Okay, someone send the resident geek in here. And get me some more coffee. Ah, smarty-brain, there you are, how’s it going? Listen, what’s your nerdy take on this bit in scene twelve where James Bond goes solar-wind-surfing? That’s a thing, right, solar wind? So I figure we get him wind-surfing but, like, on the Sun. Pretty cool, right? Not really sure how we get him up there, though. Does the Space Shuttle go to the Sun? Could we get one of those sky elevator things I think I heard about that one time? China has those, right?”
“Yeah, look, I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about this whole scene, none of it really makes any sense, and if you go ahead with it as it’s currently written then your audience are going to tear you a scientifically impossibly large new one for turning their favourite franchise into a joke.”
“Damn. Tina, cancel my breakfast with the Prime Minster of China, tell him he can keep his crazy moon escalators. Okay then, astro-boy, you’d better come up with some new idea that’ll give me an excuse to have Bond to take his shirt off and justify a special effects budget bigger than the GDP of several small countries.”
“Well actually, if you’d ever paid any attention in school, or indeed to any other human being in your entire life, you might be aware of this other thing you could do, which would still look awesome on screen and let you showcase the CGI expertise of your hordes of computer-literate underlings, with the added bonus that it’s not total bullshit.”
“You mean, giving a shit about scientific accuracy might not reduce the entertainment factor by crippling my ability to blindly throw in whatever cool stuff I can think of, and may even put me in a better position to make exciting and visually inspiring references to genuine scientific phenomena?”
“Yep. You want to do things that way then?”
“Make it so.”
Wow, that rather got away from me. Wasn’t expecting that to turn into quite such a flight of fancy. Probably a bit wordy and less funny than I think it is. Still, not in the mood to edit now.
A good example of the kind of thing you may have just skipped over is the occasional recognition in some sci-fi films that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, and so cool-looking explosions wouldn’t actually make any noise when observed from a distance. David likes hearing stuff explode, and is willing to forego some realism on that score, which is fine – there’s always got to be some suspension of disbelief for the sake of entertainment, and we all have our different limits – but as Phil Plait points out, a spaceship blowing up in perfect silence can, if done right, be eerie as hell. Knowing how the real world works can really add to a talented director’s repertoire.
Yikes. That was wordy. Have I covered everything? I feel I should sum up. Or at least redraft before I post this. Nah. Thoughts, anyone?
as you know firefly is the only sci-fi i’ve really seen lots, and i can’t remember Abrams Star Trek that well, but firefly on the other hand, i can… sort of.
I remember that they didn’t do sound with space, as you said it doesn’t happen, but to make it work, they used music, just nice and simple, which makes it not only awesome but adds to the overall feel of western in space, or something.
but then of course, at the same time, you want explosions, with sound, and AWESOME factor, so you go off onto a planet and have an awesome chase scene.
That said i think Serenity went more with sound affects than music, but not sure,
I had a whole point I completely forgot to bring up, about how much the sciencey skeptical geekdom loves Firefly and Doctor Who, regardless of some crazy moments of unscienceyness in both. But yes, Firefly does know how to get it right to really cool effect sometimes, and glossing over stuff like terraforming and artificial gravity is basically fine.
I will run with ‘implausibilty’ in science in films to a point. I mean, who is going to even try and hang on to the slender glimmer of scientific fact in films like 2010 or even the Star Trek reboot (or Firefly or Dr Who, for that matter).
What really shits me is films like Danny Boyle’s Sunshine which supposedly had a ‘science advisor’ and has a kind of po-faced pretension to be like 2001, A Space Odyssey, a film which has some remarkably good science (OK, yes, there are some daft speculative things, but they are obvious flights of fancy). I picked Sunshine apart here if you’re interested. I think it is particularly irksome because it sets itself up to be oh so worthy and attempts to wear a cloak of plausibility. If it was more plainly a case of willing suspension of disbelief I might have run with it.
Another film on the same shelf is The Happening. In this particularly egregious piece of rubbish, ‘science’ is actually presented on screen in a ‘factual’ way (in this case the McGuffin is Bee Colony Collapse Disorder) – only it’s done in that wide-eyed ‘scientists are loonies’ way that not only perpetuates an unhelpful and innaccurate stereotype, but also allows all kinds of daft pseudoscience to sneak under the wire.
I would argue that this kind of film does irreparable damage because it reinforces an incorrect and dangerous image of science and scientists as being incompetent, Machiavellian and meddling. There are already plenty of people who believe that already – we don’t need the pop media reiterating it in technicolour.
I suppose what irritates me above all with these two films is that the directors both claim some kind of scientific acumen, and then seem happy to abandon any pretense to it as soon as they roll the camera. Films like Star Trek inhabit a consensual fantasy world where we accept that things work a bit differently than here. But Sunshine and The Happening are supposed to be set in this world, and in my opinion, they break the rules at their peril.
When I have more time to sit and ponder the unfathomable mysteries of the universe, I’ll try and figure out exactly why The Happening annoyed the crap out of me infinitely more than Sunshine. It might take a while to list everything, so I won’t get into it now.
The world which these films inhabit is an important issue which I completely forgot to mention, though. Star Trek is obviously set in the Star Trek universe, and that’s a world where you expect a few things that don’t make much sense if you think about them too hard, like the Holodeck and the uncannily humanoid English-speaking aliens. So they seem to get away with it, just like cartoons get away with a lot of cartoon-rules stuff and it’s fine. There’s presumed to be some sort of internal logic and overall sensible ordering of things there, which is more than can be said of The Happening.
I think a great deal of it is about a contract between the audience and the filmmaker – you will completely buy the world of Dr Who for example, even though it is vastly implausible, because it’s understood that it will be vastly implausible.
So, if a filmmaker sets up a where the rules are more realistic, then i think it is the right of the audience to be a lot more critical of the breaking of them.
I once had lunch with a couple of friends, one a director of plays and the other an uber-geek. The director asked the geek’s advice for an up-coming play. It seems the play needed to have some computer hardware (routers, modems and such) visible on stage. The director asked the geek if he would be willing to help out with the specifics. The geek’s (thoroughly correct) response? “Just put some flashing lights on stage. 99.9% of your audience won’t know the difference.”
My point? Simply this: how come most people can’t tell the difference between random flashing lights and a router (an item most people have in their own homes), but so many not only know that there shouldn’t be sound in a vacuum, but even go so far as to get pissed off when a movie depicts sound in a vacuum?
@Terry: Well, for a start audiences have have several decades to understand the concept of a vacuum not transmitting sound, but modems and routers are relatively recent. For example, you couldn’t make a realistic film about the Moon where there were forests and creatures with bat-like wings, even though once upon a time people might have bought that.
But aside from that, technical gadgets have a fair bit of leeway, especially if you’re dealing with things in the not-near future (although they can date fast – look at Blade Runner – the flying cars were cool when it was released, but they look a bit stupid now).
One of my pet peeves (and something I’m asked to do often) is beeps and bloops when computers do things – everybody knows that most of the time cursors don’t ‘beep’ when they blink, but you see that all the time. This is particularly egregious because these kind of operations don’t make noises specifically because they’d annoy the crap out of you if they did it continually.
And let’s not mention daft things like Jeff Goldblum being able to upload a virus into a completely alien computer in Independence Day. I can’t imagine how anyone went with that one – personally, I almost choked on my popcorn.