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Favorite Film Scientists?
theodp asks: "From Rotwang in Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Wallace the Engineer in last year's Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Slate notes that scientists have long been a staple of the movies. So who are some of the more memorable scientist characters from your movie-going?"
A: Q.
Not only was he sexier than Bond, he was the inventor of all the cool gadgets we saw in the movies.
Okay, more than one there. But the scientists collectively provide a great illustration of the ethical dilemmas that scientists are faced with in their profession.
The moral of the movie (and the book) could probably be stated as, "We were so busy wondering if we could do it, we never stopped to ask if we should do it." But there were massive institutional problems in a few places as well: (1) the failure of the park designers to listen to certain employees, (2) over-confidence in procedure and technology, (3) a disgruntled employee sabotaging the park because he felt he was unappreciated and could make more money doing so, and (4) the park owner/manager deciding to place the park outside of the U.S. to avoid regulation and to protect intellectual property (IP).
There were also some problems managing risks: (1) not being able to see that "nature will find a way" and allow the all-female dinos to change gender (relatively common in fact in reptiles, amphibians and simple life forms), and (2) failure to see a need for a boat to get off of the island (!).
The movie is actually an example of everything that could possibly go wrong with a well-intentioned science project, with scientists playing the roles of both agonist and antagonist.
If I had to choose just one of the characters, though, my favorite would be Dr. Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill. He probably had the lead roll, and it is easy to identify with him.
Favorite Mad Scientist?
Winner: Dr. Evil
Favorite Scientist?
Winner: Einstein
I'll agree with that, provided you are reffering to his role in Jurassic Park as a mathmatician specializing in chaos theory, and not that Independence Day crap.
Screw both of 'em. The Fly.
The first character that came to my mind was New Jersey - the newest associate of Buckaroo Banzai!RTF Novel.
Page 53 of the hardback (2 pages into Ch. 3, "White Noise", it describes Ellie sitting beside the billion-channel signal analyser and also using headphones to listen to a couple of channels at a time. And knowing it was futile to imagine she could find a signal in a few that the computer monitoring the billion could not, "but it gave her a modest illusion of utility".
Subsequent paragraphs make it clear she's also fooling around with different listening patterns - two narrow-band frequencies against each other in different earphones, two planes of polarization, etc - to hone her own ideas of what a pattern recognition approach might be. And also because one often hears pleasant "patterns" in the noise. (Sagan gets poetic here about stars that sing and glissandos of sound.)
It was a very nice evocation of the drives and thinking patterns of the curious scientist at work - poking around in the data personally, kicking it from every angle.
Chris Knight (Val Kilmer) from "Real Genius".
Too often, smart people are portraied as humorless drones, when a good sense of humor is usually a mark of intelligence.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Plus it has some great one-liners http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/quotes One of my favorite 80's flicks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
both movies are rather contemporary, but I just loved both Val Kilmer as "Chris Knight" in "Real Genius" and Christopher Lloyed as Emmett Brown from "Back to the future".
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Instant win.
Come on, what other scientist has:
1) Been through the Stargate thousands of times
2) Fired a wide variety of weapons
3) Wiped out several hostile species
4) Saved the world countless times
5) Been into space on a regular basis
6) Been cloned several times
7) Worked with Jack O'Neill, Dr. Jackson and Teal'c
8) Blown up a sun
And too many more things to count...
Plus, she's damn sexy.
Goten Xiao