7 ms·

Scientists Help Movie Writers Make Films ‘Plausible-Ish’

21 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

existencebox 11y ago
Do they really? At the risk of letting my inner hipster movie snob out in force, I've found modern sci fi movies to be bottom of the barrel as far as any sort of plausibility/immersion goes. (As an example, I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations) Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy. I've found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's what the article means by "plausible-ISH", and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the "ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses" (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don't believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be "more correct" one or two levels deeper. A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things. One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head. "You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings"; Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard. Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component (truly "leading the story" as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  I didn't notice any glaring problems in Ex Machina, but it's definitely an exception.
  - existencebox 11y ago
    I'll admit that I gave it the pass the first time I heard about it, due to it seeming like a rehashed mish-mash of I-Robot, Her, Artificial Intelligence, and of course RUR/Metropolis. Given the positive comments in this thread I may give it a watch, thanks. To two birds with one stone and address a sister post, my biggest issue re: the Martian comes when you read (for a contrived comparison) the Apollo 13 transcripts. As much a life or death situation as anything that happened in The Martian, far less of my wanting to throw the "protaganist" out a window for being a nonstop firehose of bad quips and one liners. Extremely excitable is the tip of the iceberg, my distaste came from a broad mosaic of their personalities and responses being exceedingly "off", largely, without even getting into a discussion on the writing/acting itself. (as FiatMoney put it far more eloquently than I did; the demeanor of many of the "Science" individuals is just _wrong_)
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > my biggest issue re: the Martian comes when you read (for a contrived comparison) the Apollo 13 transcripts. As much a life or death situation as anything that happened in The Martian, far less of my wanting to throw the "protaganist" out a window for being a nonstop firehose of bad quips and one liners. The Apollo 13 crisis lasted a week; even then, the transcripts do contain quite a few "bad quips and one-liners". Look at page 14-16 of http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS13_CM.PDF http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS13_CM.PDF for jokes between the crew just 30 minutes into the mission.
      - existencebox 11y ago
        Perhaps I read their interactions differently, but even their "I need the springy jobber" and other more informal statements seemed far more professional and what I'd expect from a career astronaut than "I'm going to do the iron man thing". My original comment was more directed at the actual crisis portions of both the movie and Apollo 13 (around the famous "Houston we have a problem" line) were drastically different. I certainly grant that a movie might not be as exciting if crisis resolution was largely reading checklists out of books and remaining exceedingly composed given the circumstance, but I'd find it a lot easier to buy into than the cacophony of yelling and cursing that took place at multiple instances during the movie. Something additional and more tangible I remembered while writing this, I found myself agog at some of the items they had on mars; the commercial grocery store grape juice bottles were some of my favorites. Edit: I'm normally not one to comment on this, but of all the things I've ever said, I had no idea disliking this movie would attract the silent downvote brigade so aggressively. I find this both interesting and entertaining.
- stephentmcm 11y ago
  I've yet to see The Martian, but have read the book and found it pretty reasonable for the behaviour of all characters, I guess the advantage of a book is that the author can describe the internal thoughts of a character much more clearly than an actor can portray on screen. Further while I'm not rocket science (I prefer rocket surgeon, thanks KSP), my understanding is that the science in The Martian was pretty solid the whole way through.
- sigmar 11y ago
  >I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what you mean. Were they too excitable in the movie to be believable?
- msingle 11y ago
  I'm kind of surprised by you're not liking the martian. Have you read the book? I read the book (but haven't seen the movie yet) and its definitely on of the harder sci-fi books I've ever read. With the exception of the flexibility of space suits and problems with a benzene reaction, the physics, chemistry and biology are pretty good. Maybe this didn't translate to the movie as well (which might have been nigh impossible) or was glossed over in an unsatisfactory way. And as for the astronauts, I've actually heard that astronauts find the attitudes reflected exactly right. All from a guy who didn't know any.
  - batbomb 11y ago
    Except NASA, who basically invented HACCP, would never send raw potatoes up to space.
    - msingle 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure they have before and would again for an experiment.
    - stephentmcm 11y ago
      This is justified in the book as being for thanksgiving dinner, iirc Mark goes as far as explaining how they where treated that still allows them to grow later.
      - mattmanser 11y ago
        That happens in the film too. He's got all the ready meals and then finds the potatoes after checking the thanksgiving box.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      Potatoes in space: https://www.engr.wisc.edu/alumni/perspective/22.2/spuds.html https://www.engr.wisc.edu/alumni/perspective/22.2/spuds.html
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Strange. The examples you say "made you grumpy" are exactly the three movies I think are the beacon of hope for sci-fi, and the trio of hardest sci-fi of the last, I don't know, five decades? Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera). Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were the "power of love transcending dimensions" line by one of the characters, and the... final act. But physics was done more right than probably ever before, Space Odyssey included. (INB4 yes, that planet near black hole was realistic, it's actually a pretty neat edge case of rotating black hole physics.) I actually found myself Googling what I thought was pseudoscience, only to discover it's actually true (and to learn some more about relativity too). And the Martian... come on. There's basically two things the book gets wrong, and both are minor. Dust storm being too strong, and the author handwaving radiation shielding into existence without explaining how it works. The rest is pretty much totally legit. (Ok, the movie didn't show that gravity on Mars is weaker, but that was literally because the director said that doing it is too much of a mess, and the audience won't care anyway.) -- > Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard. Totally agree. Though if the Holy Trio above made you grumpy, I wish to know what do you consider hard. It seems we have pretty different standards. > Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component Also agree. The movies and series in this article are basically a joke in this area (even though I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). They're more like Star Trek in this regard, though I still think Star Trek's technobabble made more sense. And about science being a more integral component - again, check Interstellar. There's a pretty neat story that starts with Nolan approaching Kip Thorne, telling him that he needs a planet with very strong time dilation for the plot. Thorne initially thinks it's impossible, but then he sits down, does the math, and figures out a crazy scenario in which that planet is very much plausible... http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-review.html http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-revi...
- gregmac 11y ago
  I look at it like this: You can make up whatever craziness you want in your universe, but the craziness must remain consistent and follow the 'rules' of your universe. You can violate the real laws of physics, so long as you do so consistently within the rules/laws as you've defined them. You can have 'magic', so long as the magic is used consistently. Heck, you can even break your own previously-established rules, so long as you can explain why in way that is consistent with everything else. If you do it with foreshadowing ("there is some theoretical way to make our faster-than-light engine allow us to travel in time, but no one has ever been able to get it to work") then it might even be accepted. If you do it with no notice because it's merely convenient to the plot ("hey, I just came up with this crazy idea to make our ship travel through time, give me 5 minutes to re-route power and connect a widget and we'll be good to go"), then it's stupid.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  I’m not I’d quite call it hard SF, but give the current show The Expanse a shot. It at least tries to build a somewhat plausible space society. Also has pretty good writing, characters, acting, and camera work. From a plausibility perspective (plausibility of both the society and the characters) it’s far and away better than Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, etc.
westoncb 11y ago
This is actually a decent route for a kind of supplementary education: it would be pretty valuable to expose a broad audience to the way scientists/engineers really think about problems—and the opportunity is generally wasted, preferring to convey that scientists/engineers just have some magical ability that the audience does not. It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that could be communicated, but I guess I'd call it 'intuition'; and the value of trying to convey it in a movie is that if you tell the average person, "I'm now going to give you some examples of how scientists think about things"—they're going to become nervous and less efficient at absorbing the info. I was recently impressed by "Ex Machina" for being 'plausable-ish' and showing realistic, intelligent thought processes, as an example. The t.v. show "House" is also sometimes good about it.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I'd like movies to go more for a kind of "social proof". Part of the reason Star Trek, especially TNG, raised a generation of scientists and engineers is because science and engineering there is normal. Not mundane, but normal. Every protagonist and background character in this world is highly educated; no one is surprised by it, nobody boasts about it - it's just how everyone are. Even that dirty Klinon thug knows more science and engineering than your average university graduate. It's just normal, and I think it reflects on the audience. Besides thinking, there's a huge value in portraying accurate science and technology. Even if it's background, not core of the plot. Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema, whether they like it or not. Especially if one doesn't know about something beforehand, the movie will set baseline expectations about that thing. Think how most people seem to believe that people will explode when exposed to vacuum - thanks to decades of movies that told them exactly that. If people are going to learn from TV, they may as well learn the correct stuff.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    "Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema" I think that's universal of all stories in all cultures. I remember a speaker at Gen-Con in the 90's claimed that the original reason for campfire stories of heroes was to inspire the young men to defend the group in times of danger (overcome the flight with a heroic fight). Cinema is just a very effective way in the line of delivery methods. VR is going to be really interesting to watch.
fiatmoney 11y ago
The science isn't often the most implausible part, it's the actual demeanor of supposed scientists / engineers / astronauts / etc. Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples.
- deciplex 11y ago
  > Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples. Oddly, Prometheus was an excellent example. It's like Ridley Scott documented all the different ways you can make a character totally uninteresting and loathsome, and made sure to include at least one example of each in that movie. What a turd.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
aaron695 11y ago
It's a interesting question, are anti-science movies like Interstellar, which also make science look cool, better for science or worse.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > anti-science > Interstellar ... what? Care to elaborate?
bonyt 11y ago
"Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities." http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt
imh 11y ago
Sometimes this seems to make it worse. I've observed I tend to get most frustrated when the movie is plausible throughout until an implausible climax. I understand that this is where the friction between plot and science will be strongest, but it feels like they're changing the rules where it most matters!
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  They need to stop hiring scientists just to make technobabble plausible - the creative writers need to start treating them seriously instead, and consulting them on the story flow. Like in Interstellar, when Nolan would tell Kip Thorne that he needs something for his plot, Thorne would outline the necessary physical conditions and developments, and then the two would argue over it until they could figure out a path for the story that reaches the creative goal while staying within the constraints of science.

21 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

Do they really? At the risk of letting my inner hipster movie snob out in force, I've found modern sci fi movies to be bottom of the barrel as far as any sort of plausibility/immersion goes. (As an example, I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations) Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy. I've found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's what the article means by "plausible-ISH", and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the "ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses" (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don't believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be "more correct" one or two levels deeper. A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things. One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head. "You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings"; Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard. Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component (truly "leading the story" as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.

humanrebar 11y ago
I didn't notice any glaring problems in Ex Machina, but it's definitely an exception.
- existencebox 11y ago
  I'll admit that I gave it the pass the first time I heard about it, due to it seeming like a rehashed mish-mash of I-Robot, Her, Artificial Intelligence, and of course RUR/Metropolis. Given the positive comments in this thread I may give it a watch, thanks. To two birds with one stone and address a sister post, my biggest issue re: the Martian comes when you read (for a contrived comparison) the Apollo 13 transcripts. As much a life or death situation as anything that happened in The Martian, far less of my wanting to throw the "protaganist" out a window for being a nonstop firehose of bad quips and one liners. Extremely excitable is the tip of the iceberg, my distaste came from a broad mosaic of their personalities and responses being exceedingly "off", largely, without even getting into a discussion on the writing/acting itself. (as FiatMoney put it far more eloquently than I did; the demeanor of many of the "Science" individuals is just _wrong_)
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > my biggest issue re: the Martian comes when you read (for a contrived comparison) the Apollo 13 transcripts. As much a life or death situation as anything that happened in The Martian, far less of my wanting to throw the "protaganist" out a window for being a nonstop firehose of bad quips and one liners. The Apollo 13 crisis lasted a week; even then, the transcripts do contain quite a few "bad quips and one-liners". Look at page 14-16 of http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS13_CM.PDF http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS13_CM.PDF for jokes between the crew just 30 minutes into the mission.
    - existencebox 11y ago
      Perhaps I read their interactions differently, but even their "I need the springy jobber" and other more informal statements seemed far more professional and what I'd expect from a career astronaut than "I'm going to do the iron man thing". My original comment was more directed at the actual crisis portions of both the movie and Apollo 13 (around the famous "Houston we have a problem" line) were drastically different. I certainly grant that a movie might not be as exciting if crisis resolution was largely reading checklists out of books and remaining exceedingly composed given the circumstance, but I'd find it a lot easier to buy into than the cacophony of yelling and cursing that took place at multiple instances during the movie. Something additional and more tangible I remembered while writing this, I found myself agog at some of the items they had on mars; the commercial grocery store grape juice bottles were some of my favorites. Edit: I'm normally not one to comment on this, but of all the things I've ever said, I had no idea disliking this movie would attract the silent downvote brigade so aggressively. I find this both interesting and entertaining.
stephentmcm 11y ago
I've yet to see The Martian, but have read the book and found it pretty reasonable for the behaviour of all characters, I guess the advantage of a book is that the author can describe the internal thoughts of a character much more clearly than an actor can portray on screen. Further while I'm not rocket science (I prefer rocket surgeon, thanks KSP), my understanding is that the science in The Martian was pretty solid the whole way through.
sigmar 11y ago
>I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what you mean. Were they too excitable in the movie to be believable?
msingle 11y ago
I'm kind of surprised by you're not liking the martian. Have you read the book? I read the book (but haven't seen the movie yet) and its definitely on of the harder sci-fi books I've ever read. With the exception of the flexibility of space suits and problems with a benzene reaction, the physics, chemistry and biology are pretty good. Maybe this didn't translate to the movie as well (which might have been nigh impossible) or was glossed over in an unsatisfactory way. And as for the astronauts, I've actually heard that astronauts find the attitudes reflected exactly right. All from a guy who didn't know any.
- batbomb 11y ago
  Except NASA, who basically invented HACCP, would never send raw potatoes up to space.
  - msingle 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure they have before and would again for an experiment.
  - stephentmcm 11y ago
    This is justified in the book as being for thanksgiving dinner, iirc Mark goes as far as explaining how they where treated that still allows them to grow later.
    - mattmanser 11y ago
      That happens in the film too. He's got all the ready meals and then finds the potatoes after checking the thanksgiving box.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Potatoes in space: https://www.engr.wisc.edu/alumni/perspective/22.2/spuds.html https://www.engr.wisc.edu/alumni/perspective/22.2/spuds.html
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Strange. The examples you say "made you grumpy" are exactly the three movies I think are the beacon of hope for sci-fi, and the trio of hardest sci-fi of the last, I don't know, five decades? Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera). Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were the "power of love transcending dimensions" line by one of the characters, and the... final act. But physics was done more right than probably ever before, Space Odyssey included. (INB4 yes, that planet near black hole was realistic, it's actually a pretty neat edge case of rotating black hole physics.) I actually found myself Googling what I thought was pseudoscience, only to discover it's actually true (and to learn some more about relativity too). And the Martian... come on. There's basically two things the book gets wrong, and both are minor. Dust storm being too strong, and the author handwaving radiation shielding into existence without explaining how it works. The rest is pretty much totally legit. (Ok, the movie didn't show that gravity on Mars is weaker, but that was literally because the director said that doing it is too much of a mess, and the audience won't care anyway.) -- > Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard. Totally agree. Though if the Holy Trio above made you grumpy, I wish to know what do you consider hard. It seems we have pretty different standards. > Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component Also agree. The movies and series in this article are basically a joke in this area (even though I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). They're more like Star Trek in this regard, though I still think Star Trek's technobabble made more sense. And about science being a more integral component - again, check Interstellar. There's a pretty neat story that starts with Nolan approaching Kip Thorne, telling him that he needs a planet with very strong time dilation for the plot. Thorne initially thinks it's impossible, but then he sits down, does the math, and figures out a crazy scenario in which that planet is very much plausible... http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-review.html http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-revi...
gregmac 11y ago
I look at it like this: You can make up whatever craziness you want in your universe, but the craziness must remain consistent and follow the 'rules' of your universe. You can violate the real laws of physics, so long as you do so consistently within the rules/laws as you've defined them. You can have 'magic', so long as the magic is used consistently. Heck, you can even break your own previously-established rules, so long as you can explain why in way that is consistent with everything else. If you do it with foreshadowing ("there is some theoretical way to make our faster-than-light engine allow us to travel in time, but no one has ever been able to get it to work") then it might even be accepted. If you do it with no notice because it's merely convenient to the plot ("hey, I just came up with this crazy idea to make our ship travel through time, give me 5 minutes to re-route power and connect a widget and we'll be good to go"), then it's stupid.
jacobolus 11y ago
I’m not I’d quite call it hard SF, but give the current show The Expanse a shot. It at least tries to build a somewhat plausible space society. Also has pretty good writing, characters, acting, and camera work. From a plausibility perspective (plausibility of both the society and the characters) it’s far and away better than Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, etc.

westoncb 11y ago

This is actually a decent route for a kind of supplementary education: it would be pretty valuable to expose a broad audience to the way scientists/engineers really think about problems—and the opportunity is generally wasted, preferring to convey that scientists/engineers just have some magical ability that the audience does not. It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that could be communicated, but I guess I'd call it 'intuition'; and the value of trying to convey it in a movie is that if you tell the average person, "I'm now going to give you some examples of how scientists think about things"—they're going to become nervous and less efficient at absorbing the info. I was recently impressed by "Ex Machina" for being 'plausable-ish' and showing realistic, intelligent thought processes, as an example. The t.v. show "House" is also sometimes good about it.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I'd like movies to go more for a kind of "social proof". Part of the reason Star Trek, especially TNG, raised a generation of scientists and engineers is because science and engineering there is normal. Not mundane, but normal. Every protagonist and background character in this world is highly educated; no one is surprised by it, nobody boasts about it - it's just how everyone are. Even that dirty Klinon thug knows more science and engineering than your average university graduate. It's just normal, and I think it reflects on the audience. Besides thinking, there's a huge value in portraying accurate science and technology. Even if it's background, not core of the plot. Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema, whether they like it or not. Especially if one doesn't know about something beforehand, the movie will set baseline expectations about that thing. Think how most people seem to believe that people will explode when exposed to vacuum - thanks to decades of movies that told them exactly that. If people are going to learn from TV, they may as well learn the correct stuff.
- protomyth 11y ago
  "Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema" I think that's universal of all stories in all cultures. I remember a speaker at Gen-Con in the 90's claimed that the original reason for campfire stories of heroes was to inspire the young men to defend the group in times of danger (overcome the flight with a heroic fight). Cinema is just a very effective way in the line of delivery methods. VR is going to be really interesting to watch.

fiatmoney 11y ago

The science isn't often the most implausible part, it's the actual demeanor of supposed scientists / engineers / astronauts / etc. Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples.

deciplex 11y ago
> Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples. Oddly, Prometheus was an excellent example. It's like Ridley Scott documented all the different ways you can make a character totally uninteresting and loathsome, and made sure to include at least one example of each in that movie. What a turd.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

aaron695 11y ago

It's a interesting question, are anti-science movies like Interstellar, which also make science look cool, better for science or worse.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> anti-science > Interstellar ... what? Care to elaborate?

bonyt 11y ago

"Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities." http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt

imh 11y ago

Sometimes this seems to make it worse. I've observed I tend to get most frustrated when the movie is plausible throughout until an implausible climax. I understand that this is where the friction between plot and science will be strongest, but it feels like they're changing the rules where it most matters!

TeMPOraL 11y ago
They need to stop hiring scientists just to make technobabble plausible - the creative writers need to start treating them seriously instead, and consulting them on the story flow. Like in Interstellar, when Nolan would tell Kip Thorne that he needs something for his plot, Thorne would outline the necessary physical conditions and developments, and then the two would argue over it until they could figure out a path for the story that reaches the creative goal while staying within the constraints of science.