Bad Natural History

[urbpan]

Okay, so when you watch a movie with animals acting like people (you know, talking and such), you must suspend some of your disbelief. I'm okay with that--it has been this way since Aesop.

But these days the filmmakers are mixing in lots of actual Natural History with animals acting like people. For example the fish in "Finding Nemo" look (and to some degree behave) real, but they don't eat one another. In "Antz," there are both male and female worker ants. (This movie, which I am only halfway through, is the reason I'm posting. There's an awful lot that I could say, positive and negative about it, but I need to finish it, and I probably have to watch "A Bug's Life" for comparison, and the go see "The Ant Bully," too.) Even the bug scene in "King Kong," while exciting, is laughable from a Natural History standpoint (beyond even the bugs' great size--I'm talking behavior).

I want to know this, from you all:

At what point does faulty Natural History interfere with your enjoyment of a movie?

Comments

[medusasowl.livejournal.com]

I'm more inclined to let animation slide than I am live action. People are more inclined to suspend belief and not take mistakes like that to heart. Anaconda, for example.... SO so very awful... And the sad thing is people who don't know anything about the animals actually believe that's what they're like! It's scary how many people get their "learnin" from Hollywood...

Probably the most painful example I've seen was a local commercial that caused me actual physical pain a while back. It was for some lawyer firm. They show a cheetah chasing a gazelle on the savannah, then with heroic music cut to Bald Eagle flying overhead... with some evergreens in the background... Suggesting in the script that the eagle saves the gazelle. yadda yadda yadda... finish it up by saying "It's a jungle out there." Drove me nuts.

[ankhanu.livejournal.com]

When watching movies or TV, when it comes to natural history, I realize that simply, there is a lot of ignorance. Truth is far less important than entertainment.

With that in mind, it takes a fair bit of faultiness to mess up my enjoyment... unless the errors are excruciatingly obvious and flaunted :P

People really only relate to anthropomorphized concepts... I mean, could you imagine how it would be received if all the workers in Antz and A Bug's Life were female?? Man, that would have caused an uproar based on the statements it would make on females in society, yadda yadda yadda.

[iheartoothecae.livejournal.com]

There's nothing like cute little hooded domestic rats running around in a horror movie. Or BIG SCARY Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches. It simultaneously annoys me (because it jolts me out of the movie experience) and delights me (lookit da widdle beasties!).

My icon -- a slug with a humaniod mouth -- is acceptable because it was a MUTANT slug.

My annoyance is Gaussian

[sarache.livejournal.com]

Little errors don't annoy me, because I figure the screenwriter tried but didn't quite understand the subject, but at least they tried. Movies that gleefully make science up don't annoy me either, because they know they're ridiculous and the audience knows it too (cf. _Evolution_, which is cheerfully implausible in so many vast ways that it's just entertaining to this evolutionary biologist. I particularly like the scene where David Duchovney analyzes some alien DNA in his community college lab for an hour or so and discovers that it's 4-stranded (6-stranded?). That's some speedy X-ray crystallography equipment he's got there.)

But movies in the middle irritate me. When they try to convince the audience that they're showing real science, and they clearly haven't bothered to crack open a book to even look up the words they're using -- then it grates. Single most teeth-grinding science moment in a movie: When the character in _Red Planet_ holds aloft a cockroach-ish, blatantly arthropody thing and exclaims, "Look, a nematode!"

[desu.livejournal.com]

Strangely, I'm not bothered by bad natural history in animated movies. I can kick back and watch Nemo with no problems. What we can barely stand to watch in this house are natural disaster movies such as Dante's Peak and Volcano. The popcorn and invective really starts flying then. ;)

[djinnthespazz.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Nemo. The fish had eyelids and the turtles didn't have nostrils (http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/PD--10115845/SP--A/IGID--883107/Surfing_the_Current.htm?sOrig=CAT&sOrigID=15366&ui=E7C0340E396A43E9879EC3E51E8C7E37#).

wtf?

[peecekeeper.livejournal.com]

Strangely, I kinda really really like it when I notice continuity or research errors in films. It makes me feel like I caught the movie-makers out, or something. I tend to much more bothered by ideological problems - i.e. oh look another token leather clad sex babe amongst the team of twenty males who must eventually be saved despite her ability to kick ass. #sigh#