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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Short Summary That Misses the Mark, January 4, 2008
This review is from: Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World (Hardcover)
While they are often not the sort of films to win Oscars, science fiction movies have been around for nearly as long as there have been moving pictures, and Hollywood continues to pump out tales about time-traveling cyborgs, alien encounters, and man-made disasters. Sidney Perkowitz's new book, Hollywood Science, takes a look at a number of popular films that not only feature extensions of science but also a look at scientists themselves, what appears on the silver screen often being a reflection of our own attitudes and worries in a changing world. Movie scientists struggle with personal problems, become heroes, descend into villainy, push the boundaries of what is known, and sometimes acquire a taste for world domination, but how much of any of that is real?
Throughout the book, Perkowitz follows a predicable (and often repetitive format); a subject such as "encounters with aliens" is picked, a few well-known movies that fit the topic are summarized in the first half of the chapter, and the latter half is spent quickly confirming or debunking prominent situations in the films. For someone who isn't familiar with Terminator, Gattaca, Blade Runner, Jurassic Park, or any of the other films mentioned this might be a fair approach, but for well-versed fans of science fiction this approach can be a little tedious. Even the discussions about the real science behind Tinseltown premises are a bit shallow and dry, and a more integrated approach, mixing discussions of the films with science instead of segregating them to opposite ends of the chapter, would have been more engaging. I could generally deal with the writing and format if the book was called "The Science of Science-Fiction" or something similar, but the book's subtitle "Movies, Science, and the End of the World" made me hope for content that was never really delivered. I was hoping for a book that looked at how science fiction films, especially those that involve disasters (either man-made or natural), reflected the worries of society during a given time period. Fears of alien invasions (as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) seemed to be more prevalent when concerns about communism ran high, more modern alien films like the remake of War of the Worlds instead taking cues from terrorist attacks. Films involving destruction due to nuclear weapons also were prevalent after WW II (like Dr. Strangelove) and took on new dimensions during the Cold War era (as in War Games), but these sorts of trends are barely mentioned in Perkowitz's book.
Even more bothersome is what is conspicuously absent from the book. Star Wars and Star Trek, perhaps the two most popular science fiction franchises of all time, are barely mentioned at all. I'm not a big Star Trek fan but I do understand that the show has had a major impact on many people and even on our technology, so it was odd the franchise was largely left out. Natural sciences were also largely left on the cutting room floor, which is likely due to two factors. First is that many people might not include "revenge of nature" films (often involving monsters created by pollution, radiation, experiments, unusual natural conditions, etc.) in the science fiction genre, probably because many people equate science with technology and medicine. The second factor is that Perkowitz is a physicist, and biologists still sometimes suffer from having their discipline regarded as "soft science" (even if we do have a proclivity for squishy things rather than equations). Still, scientists often appear in films involving the threat of a monster, from Dr. Serizawa in Gojira to Hooper in Jaws to Dr. Grant in Jurassic Park, and (for lack of a better term) "monster movies" provide plenty of fodder for study when considering science in films. Even lighter fare like Short Circuit, The Nutty Professor, and The Man With Two Brains are left out of the mix, the topic of scientists as nerds or socially-inept buffoons receiving little more than a brief nod to Prof. Frink of The Simpsons fame. I know I couldn't have expected the author to cover every conceivable genre and some things probably would have had to be left out, but some of the omissions are quite baffling.
I do not wish to be overly harsh in my review of Perkowitz's book, but while I feel that the book offers a fair summary of a few science fiction films and the science behind some of them, it ultimately falls a bit flat. A review of how our worries and fears have shaped science fiction (and how those representations are then fed back to us) would have been much more interesting, and while the seeds of such a discussion lie in the book they never fully germinate. If you know someone who is generally unfamiliar with science fiction films, Perkowitz's book might be a good place for them to start, but I have to be honest and say that I was a bit let down by this book as both a fan of science fiction and as someone interested in science.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Instructive Fictional Science in the Movies, April 21, 2008
This review is from: Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World (Hardcover)
"Hollywood Science" would seem to be a contradiction in terms. The Blob? Mothra? The Giant Mantis? Science fiction movies are a Hollywood staple, and they are also are disproportionately represented among the worst movies ever made. So how can Sidney Perkowitz, who is a research physicist and a professor of physics, take them seriously? Well, he doesn't take all of them seriously, but many he does, and even the ones that are turkeys have something to teach us. In _Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, & the End of the World_ (Columbia University Press), Perkowitz convincingly describes what is good and what is bad about science in the movies, and how sometimes even the bad is good. Movies are, after all, not reality, but the good ones have something to tell us about reality; and the ones that depict scientists or scientific efforts or disasters can prompt useful discussion, even in academic settings.
Perkowitz goes through sci-fi movies starting with the grandfather of them all, Méliès's _Le Voyage Dans la Lune_ (in which moon voyagers within a gigantic projectile are shot by cannon to the Moon). One of the movies he finds scientifically sound is _Twister_ (1996) which shows tornado-chasers trying to get research tracking gadgets sucked up into a huge tornado, so they can get more information on how tornadoes form. Another weather-themed movie is _The Day After Tomorrow_ (2004) which showed the things that might happen due to global warming. As Perkowitz points out, the rapid disasters in the film are pretty bad science, but still pretty good: the movie was very popular, and people who saw it came out with demonstrably higher concerns about climate change. Genes are a good topic for the movies. It doesn't take much scientific fudging for the events in _Jurassic Park_ to happen, for instance. It is a problem that getting dinosaur DNA from blood within a mosquito within amber seems as if it is just not going to be possible (given the DNA's degradation after so many millions of years). A teensy scientific suspension of belief in that detail yields a movie that is a primer into the science of cloning in understandable terms, and is also an introduction into paleontological research about how dinosaurs lived. Perkowitz's scorn is saved for a documentary on the wish fulfillment properties of quantum physics in the "documentary" _What the Bleep Do We Know?_ (2004), and the "make-up-any-science" _The Core_ (2003), in which the scientists portrayed in the movie just make things up as they go along, drilling into thousands of miles of rock and magma and setting off hydrogen bombs within the Earth to get the iron core spinning again.
"Find me a scientist!" yells the head of emergency management in _Volcano_ (1997). A scientist, any scientist, seems to be the order. There are plenty of scientists depicted in these movies, and Perkowitz details how evil or heroic scientists are portrayed in different ones. Characters introduced as "Doctor" or "Professor" are supposed to have their predictions taken as authoritative. They might even wear white coats, but if not, they show little attention to attire, and are likely to have rampant hair and to wear glasses. These are stereotypes, but Perkowitz says that movies often get the characters of scientists right, showing how they are smart and dedicated, and how they are more likely to enjoy tinkering in the lab than going to a cocktail party. Perkowitz also demonstrates the observation that many scientists other than himself truly enjoy science fiction films. At NASA, researchers would gather to watch both good and bad science fiction movies: "They were like children who want to hear the same fairy tale over and over again. These were the fairy tales of the rocket scientists..." Science fiction movies also played a role in the childhoods of many scientists, and actually led them into science majors. So Perkowitz is generous to Hollywood in this review, tolerant toward minor gaffes while even finding teaching value in big, stupid ones. It's a delightful book, and even ends with an appendix on popcorn science, to tell you of the physics of that favorite movie snack.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
"Hollywood Science" book catalogues movies' influence on scientific beliefs, June 30, 2009
This review is from: Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World (Hardcover)
The table of contents tells 99% of the story. Part I: "Dangers from Nature." Part II: "Dangers from Ourselves." So does Sidney Perkowitz, physics professor at Emory University, begin his tour of science's portrayal in the movies in his book, "Hollywood Science."
Why is this topic important? Well, as Perkowitz point out, "only about one in 300 Americans is a scientist." So your chances of running into one, as opposed to a Dr. Brackish Okun-like stereotype, are pretty slim. Couple that with the fact that "nearly one-third of American adults believe that astrology and fortune telling are 'very scientific' or 'sort of scientific,'" and we quickly see why movies are doing a better job of framing science than highschools.
All of which is to say (and Perkowitz says it best) "When new, little-understood possibilities and threats appear, science fiction films can inform, predict, and warn."
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