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

[mandy-moon.livejournal.com]

Jurassic Park got on my nerves because the animal that they referred to as the velociraptor looked a lot more like a deinonychus. Deinonychus was my favorite as a kid by far because- just DAMN, they're so cool!

I think "velociraptor" was a catchier name, but deinonychus is a cooler-looking dinosaur, so they combined the two. The actual velociraptor has a longer snout and I dont think they have that huge toe-claw and didn't leap around as vigorously.

I know that it's also a velociraptor in the book, but in the book he at least didn't pretend that velociraptor had the form of a deinonychus.

[bunrab.livejournal.com]

Oh hell, accuracy was so shot to hell in Jurassic Park, starting with the damn title, it was pointless to even regard it as being about dinosaurs from this planet.

[mandy-moon.livejournal.com]

Ha, I forgot all about that part- most of the dinosaurs were Cretaceous species, right?

Funny though- I was totally willing to suspend disbelief for the whole DNA from mosquito blood thing.

[tsunami-ryuu.livejournal.com]

I've spent some time in paleobiology classes, which effectively ruined Jurassic Park for me (even though it's a fun movie and all). We actually had one bonus class session in which we went to the campus' big lecture hall and watched Jurassic Park on the projector, critiquing it in Mystery Science Theater-style.

So much of the content is either incorrect, or simply lacks evidence, and it makes me augh.

One of the things that really bugs me now is how velociraptors were referred to as "raptors," and worse than that, how the term has spread in popular culture such that the average Joe Shmoe on the street is likely to call a dromaeosaurid a "raptor." As my prof said, he knows of no paleontologists/paleobiologists who refer to dromaeosaurids as raptors. Raptor, in the biology community, almost always refers to the birds of prey, not dinos.

Not to mention the venom-spitting, frilled dilophosaurus (no fossil evidence for venom-carrying fangs nor frills), the mystery of how Alan Grant somehow knows that T. rex hunts based on visual acuity despite there being no way to know jack about eyesight-hunting connections through fossils, the whole making-embryos-straight-from-DNA! thing, etc.

Heh, sorry for the rant. XD