At the 41st annual Academy Awards, the film did not receive a nomination for Best Picture, even though Kubrick was nominated for Best Director he lost to Carol Reed for Oliver! 2001 won one Oscar for Best Visual Effects.īut it had an ending that people still talk about today.Īfter Dave and his crew head from the moon to Jupiter to investigate some mysterious monoliths, their computer system, HAL, takes over the ship. 3.When 2001 was released, The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, for one, called it “monumentally unimaginative” but now we see Kubrick’s masterwork and one of the most significant films of the 20th century. “I’m just amazed at how rigorous these people were,” Summers told Nature. This way, when Nemo’s dad, Marlin, gets sucked into a whale’s mouth and blasted out through its blowhole, she could accurately portray the inside of the whale. She actually reached her arm into the blowhole and mouth of a beached, dead gray whale to take some photographs. Robin Cooper, head shader for the film, gets extra credit though. Director Andrew Stanton attended the lessons along with animators, producers, writers and character developers involved with the project. But, as Kirby points out, this is just one of many measures the filmmakers took to ensure scientific accuracy.Īccording to an article in the journal Nature, Adam Summers, then a postdoc in fish biomechanics at the University of California, Berkeley, and other experts he recruited gave lessons during the movie’s production on a wide range of topics, including fish locomotion, how fish scales reflect light and the mechanics of waves. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)Īs I mentioned in my previous post, animators painstakingly removed all bits of kelp from the coral reef scenes in Finding Nemo after marine biologist Mike Graham of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in Moss Landing, California, explained that kelp only grows in cold waters. Here are Kirby’s top five “science done right” moments in film: 1. The movies Iron Man, Tron, Spiderman, Prometheus and The Avengers and TV shows Fringe, The Good Wife and Covert Affairs have all benefited from the service. “We were told, if we built it, they would come-and they did.” Since the program was launched in November 2008, it has received three to five new calls a week and arranged a grand total of 525 consults. “We have Nobel Prize winners on speed dial,” said Ann Merchant, deputy director for communications at NAS and a fellow panelist. The Science & Entertainment Exchange, a program of the National Academy of Sciences, actually matches TV and film professionals, even video game makers, with science consultants for free. Today, filmmakers have little excuse for error. However, the astronauts could not wear clear, goldfish bowl-type helmets, as they did in real life, because they created too much glare for the camera. For instance, Destination Moon, a sci-fi flick from 1950, was one of the first to show space travel in a somewhat realistic way. The “bad science” those movies sometimes portray is not always the fault of filmmakers, Kirby says in many cases, it is due to the limitations of technology or simply a reflection of the state of scientific knowledge at the time. Kirby is actually quite forgiving when it comes to science fiction movies heralding from those early decades. Directors hiring scientists to review the science they portray on screen goes back to the 1920s and 1930s. I had heard Kirby talk about the history of science advising in the TV and film industries at “Hollywood & Science,” a recent webinar hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). If you missed it, Kirby’s list touched on asteroid predictions, natural disasters and a cloning incident-all bogus, when dissected by a scientist. The other day I wrote about five horrendously inaccurate scenarios in science fiction movies, all selected by David Kirby, a trained geneticist and author of Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema. Warner Brothers filmed parts of the movie Contact at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array in New Mexico.
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