William A. Hainline: Reality Engineer

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Please! My Kingdom for Some Scientific Continuity in Sci-Fi Movies! TRY HARDER, DAMMIT!

Y'know what I hate? When a movie's own creators don't follow the established shooting script, or, worse yet, the book it originates from, when explaining the (pseudo)-science behind how all the different sci-fi gadgets work. For instance; there was an instance in Ant-Man, the original screenplay, where Hank Pym explained — in detail — (in other words, used real science to justify) — the workings of the Pym Particle. The finally edited film had none of that carefully woven science-fictional exposition in it. (And this is somehow always the producers' or the studios' fault, always, always, always, by coming in and monkeying with what the writers and director and so forth are doing. I hate the Suits at any studio who make decisions like these.). And in Buckaroo Banzai, Across the 8th-Dimension, the 1984 film, we get the most horrible, unacceptable explanation for how the Oscillation Overthruster ACTUALLY works (in the finished film), BUT if you LOOK at the original screenplay, by Earl Mac Rauch, there's the GOOD version of an explanation for it, right there in the dialogue, and its a good bit more complex and intellectually stimulating — and in-line with real science (sorta at least) — than the explanation given in the finished film itself. A final instance (one of but many I could pick) is "The Matrix." In the Wachowski's original screenplay for the film, Morpheus says specifically that the Machines wanted to use human beings as NOT electrical devices, like batteries, but that — instead of what the final, shot, and edited film says — instead, that they wanted to use our BRAINS as network nodes in a CPU-grid, or as co-processors for themselves, and that the Matrix was the result of the machines' interpreting the makeup of our world when they were first created and "Dreaming" about the past. This always happens: The producers dumb down the scientific explanation (the one that would make SENSE to a rational person, or for more complex ideas, would be sensible to a "real scientist," or at least "real science" enthusiasts), and use in instead, well, the dumbed-down version of it. Which, usually, makes no goddamn sense at all. Sorry, but I had to rant about that.