Flash! Ah ha! He's for everyone of us!It's Easter, a time for chocolate eggs and good TV. I'm spending my Saturday afternoon watching Flash Gordon on ITV4, a sexed-up movie that manages to squeeze blatant anti-communist messages into the same package as gold foil suits and a landscape that looks like it is made out of flake bars...
I love science fiction. I like it because it's fiction. When I don't want fiction, then I put down Asimov and pick up the Scientific American.
But for Dustin Hoffman, that's just not good enough. He wants movies to contain more accurate science stories, which is why he's the new face of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an initiative of the National Academy of Sciences. It claims to be championing the kind of good science in movies like Jurassic Park (er?) and bemoaning the more flaky science found in movies like The Core (fair enough).
Dustin's perfect for this campaign because he used to be a chemist at the coffee company, Maxwell House, before he made the leap into the unrewarding and less lucrative career of being an actor.
I admit, there's nothing more annoying than glaring scientific errors in a movie, but then there are few members of the public out there that believe what they see on screen, especially if the source is Hollywood. We like escapism. What would happen to movies like Flash Gordon if the imagination of its creators had been tempered with a hefty dose of reality?
4 responses:
I like Dragonball Z....Haaaa
Rocker
The best science fiction plays with and reimagines the stuff of real scientific possibility, but it doesn't have to be actually feasible scientifically. Which is another way of saying, Quantum Leap is lush.
By the way, you should know that *someone* in my facebook network has referenced your blog and is most upset.
Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Universe!
Sounds like an old married couple to me.
Flash is great - it is camp and honestly so.
I find SciFi that tries to be serious but has impossible guff very annoying, especially if they prattle on about it or break what is already known.
So Star Trek and iRobot is ok, but Chain Reaction "science" is not, in my view.
Worse still, Dr Who had a "London bus" this week that was a fake and that grated, just as in Larkrise to Candleford had someone counting money into piles of 10...
Post a Comment