When Scientists Go To The Movies

If you manage to coax them out of the lab, do remember that scientists may not see movies the same way you do.

Alice TSSS 1

AsianScientist (Oct. 17, 2014) – It was a dark and stormy evening. I sat in a darkened room while flashing images before my eyes and the sound of gunshots and explosions tortured my senses. The people in the room with me didn’t seem to feel my agony though—indeed, they seemed to be deriving a great deal of pleasure from what was happening. I sat in my chair as silently as possible so as to not draw more attention to myself. And then the film ended and someone turned on the lights.

“Thank goodness that’s over!” I exclaimed to my friends as we all reached for various snacks. “Oh come on, the movie wasn’t that bad,” they replied. I had just endured the ordeal of watching the 1997 Hollywood action blockbuster Face/Off.

For those unfamiliar with the film, FBI agent John Travolta and terrorist Nicolas Cage exchange faces through the use of an experimental face transplant procedure and infiltrate each other’s lives with many gun battle-filled results.

“You can’t just pick and choose who can give and receive transplants—anybody who knows a little bit about transplant rejection knows that!” I exclaimed while starting my diatribe. “And don’t even get me started on differences on facial anatomy.”

As I ticked off a litany of errors in this movie to my friends’ increasingly glazed expressions, I started thinking about scientific inaccuracies in Hollywood movies—was it just me who was bothered by this?

A very rigorous survey of colleagues during lunch (n=20) confirmed that I was absolutely not the only one! While we all agreed that we could suspend disbelief for a few hours—no one really cared whether or not the science behind the suit in Iron Man is feasible or that closets in hospitals exist only for hot young doctors to hook up with each other—at some point or another, we had all watched ‘science’ in a movie that made us squirm or reduced us to laughter. Our biggest peeves could be divided into three primary categories:

  1. When something is possible but is presented in an incorrect manner
  2. The face transplants in Face/Off fall into this category but for a famous example please see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter comments about the 2013 movie Gravity.

  3. When basic lab work is completely wrong
  4. For this, one particular example kept popping up—the pipetting in Avatar. Just in case there are some who don’t remember James Cameron’s 2009 CGI-extravaganza, while main character Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is giving his video diary about his adventures on the planet Pandora, scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is in the background, sitting at a microscope and pipetting something into a petri dish.

    People admitted to cringing in agony as the pipette is held upside-down and waved in the air. Not that it matters because she didn’t push the plunger in order to draw up any solution. “They spent how many of millions of dollars making that movie to present the 3D as realistically as possible, and they couldn’t even ask a scientist how to use the equipment?!” was a common exclamation. On the other hand, we were all really impressed that Eppendorf still seem to be producing pipettes in over 1,000 years’ time.

  5. When everything is completely wrong
  6. Perhaps the best example given to me by a colleague was of the 2009 Canadian horror film Splice, in which a couple of genetic engineers create animal hybrids, and eventually a human/amphibian mix to terrifying consequences.

    “Believe it or not, I could ignore the fact that this movie was telling me it was possible to combine DNA from different species and make a living organism that could have the physical characteristics of both like tails and wings,” recalled my friend, “But I just couldn’t believe that these guys worked at a company called ‘Nucleic Exchange Research & Development’—and it is referred to by the acronym N.E.R.D.”

Despite all of this, we did have a lot of praise for when Hollywood gets it right, or for even attempting to portray science in a cool and/or positive light at all. I think we can all agree that the reality of day-to-day science isn’t the most glamorous movie subject in the world. Who really wants to watch people spend time changing culture medium or doing analysis for hours?

And when worst comes to worst, we have to remember that it isn’t always just scientists being portrayed this way. After a couple of IT guys hacked into the account of the department head (who had been away for so long that he’d forgotten his password), people asked them if it was a difficult task. They admitted it wasn’t—“But we still put on our sunglasses and installed five different monitors to play that green Matrix code anyway!”

This article is from a monthly column called The Sometimes Serious Scientist. Click here to see the other articles in this series.

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Insomnia Cured Here/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Alice Ly is a postdoctoral researcher in Germany. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, and has a BSc in Pathology (First Class Hons) and BA (Art History). She enjoys microscopy, cakes, photos of puppies, and removing warm items from the incubator.

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