From an earlier era there was Marvin Minsky who consulted on AI for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Ed Fredkin who ended up as the model for the rather eccentric Dr. And then there’s Kip Thorne (famous for the recent triumph of detecting gravitational waves), who as a second career in his 80s was the original driving force behind Interstellar-and who made the original black-hole visual effects with Mathematica. There’s Jack Horner, who worked on Jurassic Park, and ended up (as he tells it) pretty much having all his paleontology theories in the movie, including ones that turned out to be wrong. I hadn’t personally been involved-though I have quite a few science friends who’ve helped with movies. Alien spaceship movie#But I think having good science content-like, say, good set design-can help elevate a good movie to greatness.Īs a company we’ve had a certain amount of experience working with Hollywood, for example writing all the math for six seasons of the television show Numb3rs. Of course, to be fair, science content usually doesn’t make or break movies. Sometimes they’ll get as far as calling a local university for help, but too often they’re sent to a hyper-specialized academic who’ll not-very-usefully tell them their whole story is wrong. They can tell if things are out of whack at a human level, but they typically can’t tell if something is scientifically off. The first is that movie-makers usually just aren’t sensitive to the “science texture” of their movies. There are, I think, several reasons Hollywood movies often don’t get as much science input as they should. So I decided that even though it was a very busy time for me, I should get involved in what’s now called Arrival and personally try to give it the best science I could. When I watch science fiction movies I have to say I quite often cringe, thinking, “someone’s spent $100 million on this movie-and yet they’ve made some gratuitous science mistake that could have been fixed in an instant if they’d just asked the right person”. But there were definitely interesting science-related themes in it-albeit mixed with things that didn’t seem to make sense, and a liberal sprinkling of minor science gaffes. I couldn’t tell if the actual movie would be mostly science fiction or mostly a love story. But just based on the working title (“Story of Your Life”) I wasn’t even clear that this movie was science fiction, or what it was at all.īut then I heard that it was about first contact with aliens, and so I said “sure, I’ll read the script”. Alien spaceship professional#Now it so happens that through some combination of relaxation and professional interest I’ve probably seen basically every mainstream science fiction movie that’s appeared over the past few decades. Well, in our company unusual issues eventually land in my inbox, and so it was with this one.
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