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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?"
Dr. Eleanor Arroway from Contact.
Actual user of the scientific method and all-around skeptic.
Doctor Who all the way. "Reverse the polarity" is one of the iconic phrases of a generation of SF fans.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Mr. Spock, science officer of the USS Enterprise.
His objectivity, intellect, and curiosity made him the quintessential scientist.
(Okay, he's mostly a TV character, but he appeared in his share of movies.)
Dr. Gaius Baltar from the new BSG has rapidly become a favorite of mine. He's such a weasel and so much fun (and exhausting) to watch!
This is one of my favorite engineer exchanges in movies, from "No Way Out," 1987, with Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, and Sean Young. A computer is crunching away at a bad photograph which when enhanced will incorrectly incriminate Costner in the death of Sean Young's character. He estimates that he has only a few hours to find the true killer before the photo is legible. The following exchange takes place. (Compare and contrast this with absolutely every other movie and TV show in which a photograph can be zoomed indefinitely by simply clicking on the interesting part, or can be immediately enhanced by the geek of the day with only a few key strokes (never a mouse) upon directions from a superior such as, "Can you make it clearer?")
- What do you want me to do?
- Slow up the resolution on that picture.
I need more time, Sam. I need more time to get this straightened out.
That's what I need.
I'm not satisfied with the way this is coming up. The eigenvalue is off.
Looks all right to me.
We're pulling away from our reference information. Program a Fourier transform.
- That seems like a waste of time.
- Just do what I want, OK?
Best Mad scientist ever, and the funniest, too!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
first place for me would be:
Dr. Daniel P. Schreber
(played by Keifer Sutherland in Dark City)
Honorable mentions would be:
Dr. Evil & Dr. Stranglove
Far and away Dr. Bunsen.
Gyro Gearloose (Ok, he's an engineer, so what?)
The Brain
Lt. Col. Samantha Carter (they will do another Stargate movie, right?)
Dr. Frank-N-Furter
And purely for looks, Dr. Christmas Jones
The professor from Gilligan's Island. When I was a kid, that's what a scientist was like.
He knew nearly everything except how to get them off the island. He was a social misfit, still everyone respected him because of his high intelligence.
She was just listening to the noise, must have been very soothing. If you remember, but then I doubt many do, mainframe consoles used to come with a speaker that was hooked up over the data bus. It was there to listen to the computer - not that you really could - though people wrote programs that did nothing other than cause the gentle hiss to become melodic for a few moments.
Jeff Goldblum is my favorite movie psychic, not scientist. Although I would like to hire his Independence Day character to be in charge of our Mac installers at work.
As far as movie scientists are concerned, I always liked that group of scientists in Brainstorm (which I haven't seen in a long time). I've worked in real labs of several different sorts, and those guys still look like the real deal. Unlike most Hollywood "science" movies, which force their scientist characters into Frankenstein-inspired cliches, there were a few common mistakes that Brainstorm avoided with its scientist characters:
- No one scientist who works in isolation. This was a team of at least 3 scientists, like you'd find in real life. The two team leads who were the primary researchers shared credit equally as far as the film was concerned. The project was their baby.
- No "mad" scientist. Although one of them was played by Christopher Walken. Louise Fletcher's character I think was better written. She was the one who smoked if I'm remembering correctly. Movie scientists are usually too smart to smoke. They've done research or something and found that it's bad for you.
- Intense personal relationships. Walken's character was having marital problems. That's very strange for a movie scientist, who usually remains single to avoid confusing audiences who do not view scientists are normal human beings. (If he has any family members at all, their purpose in the script is to be props- they will be in close proximity to a volcano or bomb or something, so as to establish that the amoral movie scientist has "something to care about".) Not only does this guy use his machine to rejuvenate his marriage and make things better between him and his wife, people in the lab immediately discover the new technology's potential for porn. Good call on that one!
- Problems with upper management. They had a boss who was trying to militarize their whole project, and IIRC they had to cooperate to keep their funding. Most "movie scientists" either require no visible source of funding, or can just rely on their own personal wealth to buy all the Jacob's ladders and other mad-looking items they need for their lab. (Or they have the scientist running an entire company, like Eldon Tyrell. As a CEO scientist, Tyrell naturally has plenty of time to spend with local city policemen as they give Voight-Kampff tests to his employees.) As far as militarization of scientific work is concerned, most movie scientists are amoral and don't care. In the movies, scientists are completely amoral unless they are saving the world that day- and they're probably only doing it because their wife or kid is too close to a volcano or bomb.
Having said all that, I have to admit that in general the characters in Brainstorm are not very well developed because the movie is trying too hard to impress you with its technology. In 1983 it looked pretty impressive- these people had a system where you could dial in over an acoustic modem and have a tape robot play terabits of personal experience directly into your head! As far as text went, their terminal software looked like the setup I had in 1983. But even for 1983 they made reasonable guesses. I always remember that scene where they finally demo the technology and have some sort of hub with a dozen ribbon cables coming out of it connected to everyone's heads.
I have always liked that Christopher Walken used his oddness to play a good guy who is odd because he's a genius, and he actually gets it right. The scene etched on my memory is where Walken is talking about what he's learned about the government black mirror program and says "They've taken my work ... and made it into something bad!" That could have been a Plan 9 groaner for sure, but Walken delivers it with the crestfallen betrayed earnestness that we know is the end result when you spend twenty years in a lab.
The technology is painfully dated, but they tried hard and it's educational to see how badly they missed some of the marks when you compare reality with what they projected. Kinda makes you wonder where our future will really lead.
Brainstorm also had to fight for its life after Natalie Wood died just to get finished and released (the studio wanted the no-completion insurance money baaaaad) and its director never worked again (which in turn killed John Varley's Millennium as it was originally conceived, directly resulting in the craptacular flick it eventually became with Cheryl Ladd).
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I don't know how common it is to use audio cues for data presentation, but there's an interesting example of it here. (Cassini/Huygens probe's descent to Titan.)
Well, Apollo 13 depicts engineers from around 1970 as the rocket scientists they really were.
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I've always had a soft spot for the mad/obsessed scientist, and Jeffery Combs does a fantastic job as Herbert West in the Reanimiator films. Aside from being devoted enough to his work to kill (and reanimate) obstacles, he just can't pass up a "what if" experiment when it presents itself. From the very beginning, his curiosity is what killed the cat, reanimated it, and killed it again.
Dr. Rodney McKay
I know it's not a film, but that doesn't make him any less of an incredible role model!
"How's it coming, Rodney?"
"Slower than I expected, but faster than humanly possible."
All those scientists were real scientists!
That movie was about as close as you can get. They all had flaws, they all had to work together to solve the problem, they all were only as strong as their weakest link, and they were stupified for the entire movie because what they were studying was completely alien to them.
Go back and look at this movie. It's a true classic.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Professor Eddie Jessup, portrayed by William Hurt in Ken Russell's "Altered States".
For those of you who haven't seen it, Jessup is a researcher at a Boston university who obtains some extremely powerful hallucinogens from southern Mexico and does massive doses while inside a sensory deprivation tank, when seven shades of hell breaks loose, with a strong whiff of Jeckyl and an australopithecine Hyde. Plus, the guy gets some pretty decent nooky throughout the film, including one of his super-hot students, so bonus points for that.
I'm also a bit partial to Doctor/Botanist Stephen Maturin, played by Paul Bettany in "Master and Commander", who almost beat Darwin to the punch by some 20 or 30 years.
Finally, psychologist Kris Kelvin in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 epic "Solaris", is definitely up there with the greats.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty