Are you the kind of person who watches 120 minutes of astronauts being chased through an abandoned spaceship, battling an apparently death at the hands of a face-hugging, shadow-dwelling, murderous alien monster and is left thinking ‘rubbish. that doesn’t seem very realistic at all’?
If so, you might just be a terrible person in need of a new sense of imagination.
But it is true that the sci-fi genre often seems to lean rather heavily on the fi, with not so much of the sci. And you would be forgiven for thinking that Ridley Scott’s Alien falls into category. Masterpiece of suspense cinema it is, scientific tract it is very much not.
“This is the kind of film that teenagers watch and want to become biologists”
But according to the folks at Pop-Up Screens, there’s more science to Alien – and a host of other sci-fi classics – than you might expect. And, they reckon, it’s about time the audience learnt a bit about the real-world background to their favourite films.
Helen Arney is hosting the first of the #ScienceFliktion screenings in Chelsea Old Town Hall, and she says there’s a real appetite amongst film fans to understand the scientific realities of sci-fi cinema.
‘I think you enjoy the film more, especially if you knew it already, once you understand a bit of the science. It means you can see things in it that you never would have spotted.
‘If you love sci-fi, there’s something about you that loves the science too. When you see that something’s authentic, it just gives it that extra kick of knowing that this stuff has a chance of being real.’
“I’m looking forward to finding out how plausible it would be to have acid for blood”
Furthering the public’s comprehension of science in pop-culture could have an air of eat-your-vegetables nobility about it, if it weren’t for the fact that this event has much more in common with a comedy gig than a lecture.
As one third of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Helen is well-versed in the world of science comedy, and has even performed at CERN.
‘Science and comedy sit together very well’, Helen says. ‘My favourite comedians are the ones who dig away at the real world by observing something unusual about it. They dig under the surface of what’s ordinary; I think scientists do exactly the same thing’
Fellow panellist and comic Richard Sandling is a film and sci-fi nut; having run Richard Sandling’s Perfect Movie for years, there’s no doubting his credentials as a movie fan, but he’s less confident of his scientific standing.
‘I’m definitely just the comedian here. I did a media law degree at Luton Uni. Trust me, it’s of no use to anybody.
‘What I’m most looking forward to is finding out how scientifically plausible it would be to have acid for blood or for an alien to penetrate someone through the mouth, come out their stomach and kill everyone on a spaceship.
‘I’d just like to be sure of whether that’s feasible.’
“I’ve been in situations where I’ve told serious writers or directors about real-world biological phenomena and they say “shut up, that is bull****””
There is one person on the panel whose ability to lecture the full-house on science is beyond reproach. Dr Adam Rutherford, presenter of Radio 4’s Inside Science and more documentaries than most of us have GCSEs, has also served as a science advisor on a number of huge Hollywood films.
He reckons that the worlds of science and Alien do overlap: ‘From a biologist’s point of view, the Alien is a parasite. I’ve got slides of real-world parasites which, amazingly, are weirder than the xenomorph in this film.
‘If you go to a screenwriter and say “well, there’s the emerald cockroach wasp, which has a piercing stinger which identifies a set of neurons and incapacitates a cockroach’s ability to walk, but nothing else.
‘It then lays an egg on the roach’s abdomen which burrows into it and eats it from the inside out”, then they’d probably just go with the alien that basically shags your face and lays an egg inside. It’s more believable!’
Despite that, Adam is struggling to come to terms with his role in the evening’s proceedings. ‘I’m appalled at myself; I’m appalled at this whole evening. Cinema is a church, and the audience is a blight in that church.
‘Good films – and they don’t come much better than Alien – should be watched on a big screen and in silence. I just hope that the audience all know this film well enough that having us all talking over it doesn’t ruin it for them!’
As the lights go down and the audience of sci-fi aficionados settle in to find out just how realistic that xenomorph actually is, there is, at least, one thing that everyone appears to agree on. Thank the sweet Alien gods that we’re not watching Prometheus…
Popcorn and projector 