Don’t expect movie plots to a) represent reality, or b) develop logically. Movies are meant to entertain us, not teach us, and Hollywood does their best to follow that edict.

It is too bad that directors and producers on big budget movies feel the need to cut corners. They should realize that they can produce a movie that is both fun and realistic! While some liberties need to be taken to spice up the plot, and make the characters a little more interesting (or else every movie would seem like a Seinfeld episode), there is usually no good reason to ignore science or take illogical leaps. The recent movie I commented on, Supernova, is an example. The producers wanted to spice up the title, and the plot, by making naive viewers think that the Sun exploding into a Supernova was possible. It is not. Neither will it be possible to put a nuke on an asteroid or comet that is hurtling through space at 25 km/second toward the Earth, and deflect it. Not if the object is a few kilometers long, and within the orbit of the Moon, as Armageddon proposed. Sure, it makes for exciting cinema, but it is not plausible from a scientific point of view, even if you do have the best damn oil riggers around in space suits.

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert who writes a column for Wired magazine, wrote a piece that extends the idea of bad movie plots. He observes what is obvious to many of us, and does it in a concise manner. He states that the “war on terrorism” has to be focused at banning “pointy things” from airplanes and checking our shoes, in order to “appear” to be doing something. The point is not to really have effective security, but to address certain dramatic and specific threats (usually after the fact) to put on a political show. Read his commentary here, http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,68789,00.html.

I strongly believe that the only solution to many of our worst problems, and long-term prosperity is to have a broad, accessible and through education system. Everyone needs to have better training, and we need to stop teaching our kids that math and science are boring at an early age, because it limits their potential for the rest of their lives. Things that are hard, are not necessarily bad. When children are young, they are eager to learn to read and write and learn mathematics. They wonder how the world works. It is adults who shut down this curiosity, in preference for rules-based games and monotonous chores which are easier to manage. This makes for great little soldiers, but not great inventors and innovators. So, children are admonished not to ask questions and their curiosity and skepticism is quelled. This is why, in the mundane world we live in, we come home after a long day of drudgery and are satisfied with blue-collar sitcoms and movies with shoddy science, that have big explosions. We eventually give up caring about the details, like that. We don’t care if movies get their facts straight, or if politicians are selling us snake oil, as long as it makes us feel better about ourselves.

We have to face the fact that we’ve become intellectually lazy. We want big toys, loud explosions and music playing non-stop from our iPods. When we leave work, after doing adequately in our mediocre jobs, we don’t want to be responsible or accountable. We don’t want to have to think. We figure if we take things at face value, and don’t judge things too harshly, no one will judge us back. We put our kids in day care, and pay other people to manage them for us. While, we should be dealing with our children on an individual basis, not putting them in groups all the time. When you scale the effort for care-giving for a group of children, you find out what the military learned long ago, that it is easier to manage children if you pigeon-hole them, and reduce their activities to simple rules and tasks. We train them to be ready for a boring career and a boring life, don’t we? And, at a fundamental level, we no longer care if the world around us is real as long as it seems real. We don’t feel the need to understand how things work, and why, as long as the colors and sounds are pretty. We are satisfied with Jerry Bruckheimer movies, and politician’s spin, because it is too much effort to hold them accountable. It is easier to believe what we want, and live in our own “bubble of reality” where we view the world through rose-colored glasses. For some of us, it might mean believing there are WMDs in Iraq because it fits with our world-view. For others, it might mean believing that GW is to blame for natural disasters. By that I mean, people tend to split into those who see the world as working with a bright tomorrow, because of how they filter what they observe. While others have a dire outlook, and assign blame to this individual or that, because it is self-consistent with their world-view. It is possible to take every event and treat it in a rational, logical manner – but, gathering and examining facts in an unbiased way is difficult and time consuming and it is easier to categorize and stereotype and ignore our subconscious biases.

This tendency to satisfice, and filter our senses so the world is self-consistent to us is a natural human response. Just like our brain wants to invent stories and explanations for things we don’t understand or see patterns (face on Mars, conspiracies, ghosts…) where there are none. It is how we are hard-wired. The great thing is, as intelligent beings, we can overcome our genetics. We can be better than we naturally tend to be. We can start by demanding a little more intellectual integrity and skepticism ourselves. We can demand the same of our politicians and hold them accountable. Maybe we can even spend more time with our children, and encourage their curiosity and enthusiasm about the world from a young age. It takes an effort to live in the real world, and to question the irrational and illogical, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s worth it. =j=

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