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The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
Ant writes "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters is a published paper about the reality of movie-monster anatomy in 2003. In the paper, Michael C. LaBarbera explores the implications of extremely large and extremely small fantasy creatures, whose mass, volume and surface-area scale at different rates as they are shrunk/enlarged (e.g., ants can carry many times their body-weight, but if they were the size of tigers, they'd be crushed under their own carapaces). Other issues covered include the respiratory difficulties of Mothra, the biomechanics of Jurassic Park dinosaurs, and the reason E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial is so effing cute.."
Sadly, LaBarbera completely avoids the issue of whether Godzilla steaks taste like chicken. Enquiring minds want to know.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Some people clearly just have too much time on their hands! Writing a serious paper about movie monsters is like thinking some silly reference to the Simpsons or Futurama is really funny.
:-)
Wow, look at that Karma go down the drain -- it's like after I finished cooking pasta tonight, only it took a second or two for the water to disappear after that!
Note to self: next time right after last call, just think instead of posting!
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
ET was designed to be cute!?
I shall never trust the film industry again.
Rich.
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I don't think anyone expected Hollywood to actually WANT to have accurate physics in their movies, all that counts is "how cool" they look. It's not a bad thing, mind you. Who'd want to see a King Kong that would die 'cause his bones snapped from the shear weight of his body? Pretty cool read though... shocking to see an article that isn't split into 14 pages to cash in on advertisers.
When my dad and I first watched Cocoon http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088933/, few words were exchanged for most of the movie. toward the end, when the old people were on the boat fleeing the US Coast Guard, my dad stood up and shouted, "There is no way in hell that a little pleasure yacht like that could outrun a Coast Guard cutter!"
So he was totally satisfied that intergalactics and geriatrics would hit it off, he believed without question that aliens visited earth in the first place, and did not quiestion that the first notion the US government would have had was to chase down a pleasure boat, but once that boat had exceeded its real-world limitations, he was totally disillusioned.
So my dad is a boat man. This guy is a body size ratio man. Neither seem to posess the skill of suspension of disbelief, a prerequisite for watching a movie. I further the "waste of time" motion.
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I sense a pattern. His other papers were "Why Bumble Bees Can't Possibly Fly" and "Proof That Dinosaurs Could Not Walk". And my favorite "Whales Are In Fact Fish". His research on the last one was somewhat dubious since it amounted to looking a Baroque illustrations showing whales had scales.
I remember reading an article in Boy's Life years ago along the same lines. IIRC, in it the author tried to make a Godzilla sized Lobster, but physics was its undoing. I never could really look at those "giant monsters" type movies the same way again.
i think it would be absolutely impossible to explore the subject matter he does without talking about Alien (and i suppose its followup, Aliens as well, with its exposition of social insect behavior)
Alien is almost an excellent primer on parasitology, taking some of the more bizarre lifecycle aspects of certain parasites and insects, and exploding it into a scifi universe where humans are the host (with some great neato "what if" aspects of contemplative exobiology like acid for blood, organometallics for an exoskeleton that can resist the vacuum of space, the mouth-within-a-mouth, etc.)
wikipedia has a good exploration of the subject
the point is, Alien satisfies both mass audiences with requisite scares, but it also satisfies the scientifically-minded audience, because it begins with a good grounding in biology and expands upon it in a scholarly manner. Alien is entertaining on both a shallow bug out manner, and is also fodder for intellectual rumination as well. so many movies are just one or the other (usually the former), and it is very rare to find a movie that can do both very successfully like Alien
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Sometimes you see RC airplanes hovering (propeller upward), which tells us something about the scaling of engine power versus mass. And this RC helicopter does crazy things you would never see a large version do. Very cool.
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I think its perfectly natural to forgive inaccuracies like that if you aren't familiar with the material. For instance, my mother is horrible with computers, she knows that they can't do half the things they do in the movies, but it doesn't really bother her. Now have her sit down and watch tv show House (She's a doctor) and she will fret the whole way through. What am I getting at? It's easy to look past the 1 or 2 facts you know about a subject and enjoy the fiction, but if you are an expert it's natural for your mind to dissect it.
So while I watch House and think "I doubt that that many people could get soo many rare diseases" she thinks "Those test results aren't indicitive of that, why don't they screen for this? That disease can't progress that quickly. That disease doesn't present symptoms like that at all! Doctors don't go to patients houses like that. " etc etc It's hard to shut that voice out.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
- the Coast Guard had the slowest maritime vessels on the water back then... an outboard with a 50HP engine could outrun an 82-, 95-, or 110-ft cutter (and most others in inventory)...
The point of the article isn't to make fun of B-movies. The point is to teach science in an entertaining way.
Sorry to nitpick, here, but this is not a "published paper" as described in the parent post which implies some sort of scholarly work. As others have pointed out, this ground has been well-plowed before and there are no citations. This is an "educational resource" provided by the U of Chicago - reuse of the ideas are free, and you only need author's permission to reproduce charts, etc, and you can't, of course, freely incorporate the exact text into something you are going to sell.
It's a pretty good site, actually, IMHO. Archive is worth a couple of hours of browsing.
From the home page:
"The University of Chicago, through a consortium of 14 leading educational and cultural institutions called Fathom, provided high-quality, free educational resources on the Internet from January 2000 through March 2003.
This Library archive offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by University of Chicago faculty, researchers, and departments. Feel free to browse this archive of online learning resources, which include lectures, articles, interviews, and exhibits.
Faculty interested in finding other venues to disseminate materials for educational outreach should contact Stephen Gabel, Associate Provost, University of Chicago (sgabel@uchicago.edu, 702-0790)."
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
Very interesting article and I've learned a lot. Here's one more:
could an invisible man be a reality? Maybe, who knows, but one thing is certain: to be invisible, photons should pass straight through you, so you are in fact invisible. Your eyes won't be able to register anything and you'll be effectively completely blind.
So I guess that's the other side of the coin, noone can see you, but you can't see anything at all.
On the point whether we should "suspend our disbelief" when going to see movies: depends on the movie. For a fantasy movie with magicians, elfs, and trolls, suspending your disbelief is only natural.
But a "sci-fi" is called a "sci-fi" since it's based on a scientific probability. Of course most people do not specialize in biology and chemistry and all this and for them it's all the same.
But you can see for yourself how amazingly irritating it is for a Slashdotter to watch a movie with preposterous ideas about computer technology and Internet (err infinite detail raster photos and magic "password hacking" boxes anyone?).
However we gotta give it to Hollywood. I know it's modern to bash movies nowadays, but just compare the level of sophistication of modern sci-fi movies with what people were fed in the 50-s. It's definitely better, and definitely has more science put into it.
It's the only thing we can expect with an increasingly better informed and discriminating public as people are nowadays.
The article seems decently written to me and enough content to go along with it. It is an exercise into this person's field of study and did illustrate several principles to me. I say this subject would be a start to figuring out how aliens might be constructed but that's another academic exercise.
A great article. But the article is: Copyright 2003 The University of Chicago.
:P
Slashdot doesn't seem to be getting its news so fresh anymore.
Now that was great article - very nicely put together.
there is no issue with my network
if that is an example of your standards of scientific realism before watching a scifi movie, you might as well never watch star trek, star wars, firefly, stargate, predator, terminator, and well, basically 99.99999% of anything in the genre
basically, your standards for realism don't just suck, they exclude anything remotely entertaining
please, go watch a dvd of a university chemistry lecture, that's about the only thing you could watch and not find anything to complain about in terms of loss of scientific realism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
consists, surprisingly, of two parts. The part about inertia is famous. The other part is about scaling laws, why bones must become thicker if you scale up an animal and so on.
By Larry Niven. Same idea, but with superheroes.
The text of the story was on http://www.larryniven.org/ , but I can't find it now.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I have grown to be able to enjoy action movies just because they have good cinematography and can get a bit exciting, but once in a while the voice kicks in and it takes me 5-10 min to get back into the movie. But I seem to be one of the few to have enjoyed the movie The Island, and I liked the new King Kong movie, so maybe I'm getting better, though I do admit that I'm geeky enough to have thought, "but mammals didn't develop until the dinosaurs were gone!" so I do have flare-ups.
FTFP:"As I said, diamond is just a form of carbon, and like the more prosaic forms will burn quite nicely."
His area of expertise may be invertebrate biology, but not apparently, basic chemistry. Flamethrowers won't ignite diamonds. Diamonds may be combustable under certain conditions, but are not flammable, and won't "burn quite nicely" - certainly not as a result of flame-throwing ant-killing military rampages of the sort in Them!
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
If you google around, there have been several discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere of so-called meta-materials which can essentially deflect light around an object. No light bouncing off you = no way for a human eyeball to detect you. It's interesting, and apparently theoretically possible and compatible with physics as we know it.
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I think it may be universal I don't know of many shows that include going to the bathroom scenes. I don't remember Lassie ever leaving a pile on the ground but I don't think it implied that Lassie didn't have to crap from time to time, it just didn't need to show it.
I would like to see some scifi movie/show deal with the effects of faster than light travel sometime. I don't think anyone ever has any side effects from traveling across the galaxy in about 30 seconds.
Algerath
I mean, think about it for a moment. What surface area do you really care about? The monster's hide, or the amount of boobage exposed? Does anybody really watch those movies for the monsters, or for the showers?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
He's partly right about the ants in "Them." I live in New Mexico, and while these ants are indeed impressive-looking, they aren't really all that dangerous. Even children learn pretty quickly, that the way you defend yourselves against these things is to break their legs. The real social problem related to these insects is that juvenile delinquents are always torturing Them. Something about it is just too irresistable.
But then there's that persistent rumor about them having diamonds in their joints. It's not true, and it just creates a poaching problem. You wanna come to NM and get fined for giant-ant poaching? Ok, come on over and get your ass fined. You'd be shocked out how much it costs, and it's a significant source of our local governments' revenue.
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Argh, you're talking about Alien, and the article mentions E.T., which brings up a painful memory.
I went to the midnight opening of E.T., knowing almost nothing about the movie. All I knew was that Spielberg -- you know, the guy who made JAWS -- was involved, and I had recently seen Alien.
I had certain expectations, as you can imagine. They were not met.
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this paper is essentially saying "Ghosts etc. can't exist because they violate the laws of physics."
Well, um, being that it was written by a bunch of physicists and all, for a bunch of physicists (since it's on arXive), isn't this to be expected?
Now, I'm sure if the professors from the Womens Studies department write a followup paper, that'll be some really good reading.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We don't know. But that doesn't mean the film asserts that it's somehow "magic." You can't assume that something is unrealistic simply because you don't have a clear view of it. Unexplained != unrealistic. I would concede it's one of the most glaring questions raised by the movie, though.
I have heard it postulated that the Alien did eat some parts of the ship itself, before it started killing people. I'll have to watch the movie again, though, to see what inspires these suggestions.
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I read practically the same article in a Readers Digest in the late seventies.
Anyone have access to a Readers Guide to Periodical Literature?
Blshea
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Yeah, the aliens of the Aliens movies are kind of neat, but they seem to defy conservation of mass: they sometimes grow enormously quickly without obvious food sources. Also, for a parasite that wants to use a human host to spawn, they are killing their hosts too quickly.
The Aliens movie also have serious problems with space travel: the colony is apparently 2 lightweeks from Earth, but it is far too warm and too light for that.
Bruckheimer's rendition of Pearl Harbor is a historical and patriotic travesty. You don't have to be a WWII history buff to hate that movie...any red blooded American should be find it their civic duty to despise Bruckheimer for presenting it as even remotely historical.
It was like he had a big encylcopedia of movie cliches and was determined to use them all. Mix that in with gross negligence of what actually happened (for example, 2 drunk pilots and half a dozen yokels with shotguns and Tommy's shooting down on their own more Japanese planes than we actually downed as a whole that day), ridiculously over-the-top acting out for Doolittle, drawing silly halos around Roosevelt, and standing in modern-day Aegis cruisers in place of battleship row (hello? CGI!), a painfully stupid love triangle in a desperate attempt to make up for the lack of plot, and a sensationalists (and shallow) rewrite of the Doolittle raid and you've got me finishing up 3 painful hours wanting to drive down to California and beat the snot out of that sorry excuse for a producer.
In case you can't tell, suspension of disbelief was not enough for me in that case. I was practically waiting for Godzilla to pop out of the water and sink the Japanese carriers.
I hope the author gives some credit to Isaac because it sounds exactly like a chapter in "The Solar System and Back", which was published in 1970.
Isaac, as the commenter says, did lots of good stuff, not just on aliens, but also on weird chemistries and strange physics. For a look at a how-to on coming up with aliens that make biological sense, They came from outer space: Real Aliens, published in 1997. The whole business of imagining aliens is a great topic. Until we've found a few thousand other civilizations and get hemmed in by reality, there's not much in the way of limits, either.
An example http://www.unrealaircraft.com/gravity/xfy1.php
Suspension of disbelief only works if you willingly decide to shut off your rational mind and buy into what you're seeing. I'd argue that not only does one's level of expertise in the field being portrayed play a role, but also one's degree of rationality in general. Someone who engages in a great deal of magical thinking may be more likely to suspend his/her rational faculties than someone who, by profession or personality, operates on a more logical basis. To wit, one who has a great deal of scientific training will be less likely overall to buy into the notion of cloned dinosaurs or fifty-foot-tall space aliens than someone who doesn't - even if the scientist doesn't know much about the specific field being portrayed, he/she knows that general logic precludes the existence of such things.
Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, so I could be dead wrong. It'd make a great topic for a psych paper, though.
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"I do not know why everything in this script must inevitably explode."
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I can't believe you got modded up to +4...you just make insignificant counterpoints to parent's supposition, seemingly b/c his statement involved saying that ALIEN was a satisfying film on both action/suspense and science fiction grounds...does it offend you that such a movie exists? do you have a phd or something?
Our first clue your post was BS
Yeah, a fun movie, many good things about it, but not at all scientific.
Emphasis added to your exaggeration. Your actual point has little truth, so you wildly exaggerate in order do be pursuasive...aka flamebait. The simple fact is, ALIEN had loads of science in it.
On to your specific BS nitpicks:
1. How does the Alien grow from the tadpole that bursts out of the crewman's chest to the full-sized adult, without eating anyone or thing?
You know, a species as adaptable as the Alien species probably would be able to eat just about anything. If it's blood can eat through metal, isn't it reasonable to assume it could digest it as well?
2. no ore is that valuable or rare
Praytell, exactly what CONTEXT are you talking about 'valuable or rare'? I'm sure you already see where I'm going with this...this is the future...MANY plausible answers exist. I don't recall if the movie states specifically, but the 'ore' in question is either one we know of today in 2006 or it is not. If it IS, then shortages on earth and/or purity/quality issues, and/or environmental concerns about mining all could explain why such ore would be mined offworld. If it's NOT something we know of now, or have access to on earth, then reason for its value are self evident.
You might be a very learned scientist or capable engineer, but regrettably, you belong to the slashdot counterpoint cabal. You make irrelevant counterpoints based on spurrious logic and sometimes unfourtunately get upmodded for it. Posts like yours are flaimbait in disguise.
ps, to address another point you and others make, such as: 'Hey, it was alot smaller when it popped out of that guy's chest 10 minutes ago, how did it get so big so fast without eating??? this movie sucks!' and 'you never see people take a dump in sci-fi...that's bullshit'....
try to think like a filmaker. You only have 120 minutes or so to tell a story (42-45 if it's an hourlong TV show), why waste time showing every minute detail? It's how visual story telling works. You can't possibly show every relevant action in the story, so you count on the viewer filling in some missing details with their own IMAGINATION.
plus, why is sci-fi somehow held to a different standard with regards to showing people deficate??? How many well-received hollywood films in the last 50+ years ACTUALLY BOTHER to show the protagonist taking a crap? Now take those and subtract the times when being on the john is part of the story (Leathal WeaponII, Pulp Fiction, Dumb and Dumber, etc...) and the list is virtually nill. Why do you expect ALIEN and STAR TREK to have bathroom scenes every 30 minutes but not, say, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE or 24???
Thank you Dave Raggett