Scientists Help Movie Writers Make Films ‘Plausible-Ish’
Do they really?  At the risk of letting my inner hipster movie snob out in force, I&#x27;ve found modern sci fi movies to be bottom of the barrel as far as any sort of plausibility&#x2F;immersion goes.  (As an example, I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting &quot;astronauts&quot; when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations)<p>Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent &quot;hard sci fi&quot;, whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy.<p>I&#x27;ve found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can&#x27;t tell the difference.  Perhaps that&#x27;s what the article means by &quot;plausible-ISH&quot;, and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the &quot;ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses&quot; (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don&#x27;t believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be &quot;more correct&quot; one or two levels deeper.<p>A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things.  One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head.  &quot;You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings&quot;; Fine, but if you concede that, don&#x27;t try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing.  I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be &quot;hard&quot;, I&#x27;ll hold a different standard.  Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired.  I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it&#x27;s very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component (truly &quot;leading the story&quot; as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.