Over the last week or so, I’ve seen a lot of films. They are, as far as I can remember and as near to being in chronological order as I care to make them, Sliding Doors, most of Event Horizon, The Core, Bad Boys II, The Italian Job (the 2003 remake), and The Italian Job (the 1969 original), The Sin Eater, and last but by a narrow margin not least, The Matrix Revolutions.
I enjoyed all of them, but for different reasons. Sliding Doors was good in a chick-flick kind of a way, though I thought the ending was a bit of a cop-out. I should probably mention I’m a stickler for endings. A bad ending can ruin a film for me, particularly if that film is Angel Heart. The trouble with Sliding Doors is that earlier that day I had seen the Episode of Frasier based loosely around that film, which had a very good ending — It would have to, or else the rest of the series would just become increasingly confusing until everybody lost interest.
My distaste for poor endings put The Matrix Revolutions at a disadvantage, of course. The Matrix had a fairly ambiguous ending, and The Matrix Reloaded had a cliffhanger. Revolutions, and if you haven’t seen it I suggest you skip forward until you see the word “annoying”, had something of a deus ex machina ending, although I suppose deus ex machina is kind of the point of The Martix, so I have to let it off.
But all of this is just an annoying prelude to what I actually want to say, much like this analogy, which adds nothing to the column except some wordcount and only really serves to get in the way of the following sentence. My point is that in flims like Event Horizon and The Core, writers seem to have got the idea that you can just make up science and nobody will notice. Alas, it doesn’t tend to work that way in real life. If I’m watching a film and notice that what they’re doing is totally against some fundamental physical law that can easily ruin the whole film for me. Maybe that makes me a geek, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that I’m going for a drink with people I’ve only met on the internet on Saturday makes me a geek. Maybe the fact that this time last year I went for a drink with an entirely different group of people I’d only ever met on the internet makes me a geek. Who knows? But the point which I am slowly spiralling towards like a taxi driver who knows he has plenty of petrol and his fare is drunk, is that science is a real thing that actually exists. For all I know The Sin Eater was gibberish. For all I know every single piece of text they refer to, every phenomonon they enounter, and every half-way religious concept in the film was made up, but I didn’t notice because my knowledge of organised religion ends at a mild dislike for unleavened bread. Somebody who actually knew a lot about the church and ancient writings might object to the film because it was a pile of made-up gibberish, but that person might not have questioned The Core because for all they know current might arc through the air when there’s a perfectly servicable chunk of metal for it to flow through. I, on the other hand, get irritated by it because I happen to know that the metal is a good conductor and that much air would have needed 100,000 volts across it before there was even a spark.
I mean, I know all about the willing suspension of disbelief, but disbelief is like lumps of iron in a way which is not immediately clear: I can suspend a certain amount of it, but if I try and suspend too much I snap in exactly the same way that a suspension bridge blasted by microwave radiation wouldn’t. I find it much easier if the nonsense part is introduced right away and never explained. I enjoyed Being John Malcovic a lot, and at no point did that film even attempt to make a shred of sense. The Force in Star Wars didn’t bother me one bit, because that was the central premise of the film and they never once tried to claim it was a product of the residual electromagnetic field of the human brain interacting with the world’s bioneural field.
I’m told Event Horizon is a very scary and excellent film, and I’m not happy about that. I feel like I’m missing out on a treat because my education won’t let me enjoy it. I’m being penalised for knowing too much. I expect some people will tell me that no, in fact what I’m being penalised for is being a closed-minded little pedant, but I’ll have those people know I’m not little. The way I see it, if you want to make something up, make up something that doesn’t already exist. The same applies to history; if you’re out to make a film based on a true story, stick to the story. If you want Americans to swoop in heroically and save the day, don’t try to base it on a true story because you will suddenly find there is something of a dearth of true stories where Americans do that, and it turns out that as much as people like to watch made up stories, people get angry when you make things up which directly oppose things they already know. It’s cheating, to be honest. You’re far better off making up a story about made up people and made up events. That way nobody can say “that’s not what happened”. Equally I think that you’re far better off making up something like the Force than trying to claim what you’re peddaling is science.
Event Horizon wasn’t so bad for science. It was let down by its CG effects, which weren’t quite up to the standards I expect from joke videos made by geeks with nothing better to do and no budget, much less Hollywood films, and the fact that for some obscure reason the crew of the Event Horizon chose to put out their distress signal in Latin, of all languages. I’m willing to suspend enough disbelief for the wormhole to take them to Hell, I’ll even forgive the black hole being held “behind three magnetic fields” when in fact you can’t have more than one magnetic field in one place, but the continuity error inserted at the end for no apparent reason bugged the hell out of me.
The Core, on the other hand, would have really annoyed me, had we watched it for any reason other than that my brother recognised it from The Insultingly Stupid Physics Movie Website as the least convincing science-fiction movie ever. I actually can’t think of a single science scene that wasn’t wrong. Not one. Even the shot of the main character — a geophysics lecturer — talking to a class of students about how sound waves travel through rocks had mistakes that a sufficiently alert GSCE student should spot.
It annoys me, is all. It’s just lazy. Like people who can’t be bothered to learn how to apostrophise correctly. It’s not difficult, and yet I routinely see possesive its spelled with an apostrophe. I suppose I can forgive that; it’s fairly clear what it’s supposed to say. It’s apostrophes in plurals that annoy me. Or the word ‘his’. Or ‘want’, as is, “I wan’t to punctuate but I don’t know how”. But the worst thing is the current trend for saying that this apparent lack of readability is simply the language evolving and I should stop being so uptight about the fact that not one cretin on the whole damned internet can spell the word ‘lose’ correctly. Yes, the language is evolving, but that doesn’t mean that whatever violent mutilations you choose to inflict upon it are the next step in that evolution. Far more likely, I’d have said, is that they are the lingual equivalent of a terrible degeneriteve genetic disorder, which by the time you realise is killing you, you have already passed on to the next generation of poor wretches, and as much as you want to cure them, they remain as adamant as you were that they are fine and you are just being overly pedantic over silly things like semicolons that clearly don’t matter in real life.
Whatever you do in life, spend the extra couple of minutes getting it right. Trust me. I know I’m not the only person who ignores things if they’re hidden behind too much gibberish.
Lastly, at the start of this rant I seem to remember mentioning how a bad ending can ruin a good movie, and also that I saw The Italian Job this week. If you have seen it, or if you have been told how it ends by an inconsiderate world that thinks 35 years is quite long enough to see a damn movie, thank you very much, and can we please discuss it yet, then you’ll doubtless want to know what I thought of the ending. Let’s put it like this: