4 Movie Inventions That Should've Instantly Saved The World
Movies are an exercise in "what if...?" What if someone built a theme park with dinosaurs? What if a man could talk to animals? What if Vin Diesel wasn't just fast, but also furious? There seems to be a point where those screenwriters just lost all wonder, though, and they missed some game-changing aspects of their own premise. Like the fact that ...
Pokeballs Ain't Just For Pokemon Anymore
From the size of a worm to the size of a bulldozer, a Pokeball captures all Pokemon in a beam of light and stows them in what looks like an iPrison for easy transport.
This is science. This is how science works.
How it should have changed the world:
As far as we know, Pokemon, much like everything else, are made of matter. If a Pokeball can condense and stow a living being without harm, that changes the whole world. Even if we're limiting ourselves to purely organic matter for some reason -- putting aside the Pokemon made of rock, or metal, or pure unmitigated terror -- the implications of Pokeball technology are huge. Never mind the easy stuff, like food and livestock storage -- long distance travel would be a breeze: just pack a whole plane full of people in a rucksack. Unless Pokeballs are fun-size existential boredom hells, living things in the ball aren't aware of the time passing. Imagine a world without smelling airplane farts. Truly, that is the definition of utopia.
Plus, mirrors on the ceiling! Score!
In Face/Off, Travolta and Cage swap identities by taking one another's faces ... off. If you don't believe us, watch Nic Cage say it like sixty times. They're able to pull off this radical surgery, despite the fact that they have different blood types (pointed out multiple times in the movie) using "state-of-the-art, morphogenetic templates." Those are essentially plastic face adapters: a female side in the shape of your face and a male side in the shape of another person's face. With one of those babies in place, it's just a simple matter of slapping on their face skin, attaching all the muscles, tear ducts, and nerve endings, then learning to talk with a stupid accent you have absolutely no way to pull off.
In order for the face/on to be believable, there could be no gnarly scars, you'd have to retain full use of all muscles, and presumably your whole head going into sepsis would also ruin the illusion. So the movie exists in a reality where a major tissue transplant can happen between people with different blood types, doctors can reconstruct even the finest nerve endings, and all procedures are utterly free of infection.
Minus any STDs these guys already had, of course.
How it should have changed the world:
Being able to perform a tissue transplant across blood types would be the medical breakthrough of the century. You wouldn't be able to hear the rest of the movie over the constant cheering of formerly terminally-ill patients. Sure, in the movie they use this top-secret procedure to stop a bomb from going off. But that's really burying the lede in comparison to the millions that would be saved if they didn't waste time creating a Cagevolta Frankenstein.
And then destroying a Cagevolta Frankenstein.
Even just consider the reconstruction of severed nerves to create complex movements in a foreign end effector. That's a technique that could allow people with severed spines to walk again. Basically, everyone in Face/Off would be living in a medical utopia if they didn't reserve that technology for Mad-lib quality movie premises.
Everyone After Star Trek Into Darkness Would Be Immortal
At the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, Captain Kirk is brought back from the dead by a medical breakthrough the ship's doctor refers to as "super-blood." No, the guys who wrote the title "Star Trek Into Darkness" aren't good with names? Say it ain't so!
Isn't that right, Keenser?
Anyway, Bones tells us that he synthesized a compound from Khan's "super-blood" that brought Kirk back to life after a lethal dose of radiation. There is no mention of this in the third film.
When we needed it the most.
How it should have changed the world:
Penicillin was a pretty good discovery. It won Sir Alexander Fleming the Nobel Prize in medicine and secured his place in history forever. "Super-blood" makes penicillin look like baby aspirin. A dose of radiation that can kill you in a matter of hours (as happened to Kirk) destroys your body at the cellular level. You are absorbing so much energy that your cells are literally breaking apart. You're basically dissolving.
Radiation can't burn away those boyish good looks, though.
That means that in order for this compound to save Kirk, it is somehow putting his cells back together again and arranging them in all the right places. That's not just a cure for death via high doses of radiation, it's a cure for death, period. Since Bones has tons of the super-blood, and hell, they manufactured those super-soldier's blood in the first place, every first aid kit moving forward only needs one thing: super-blood injectors. Disease? Thing of the past. Mortal wounds? Super-blood transfusion, baby! Overdose on super-blood? Some more super-blood should fix ya right up!
Ant-Man Was Too Myopic To End World Hunger
In Ant-Man, Hank Pym has mastered a technology that can change the size of objects (spoiler alert: In particular, a certain man can become the size of an ant). In addition to a shrinking suit, he also has little discs that can shrink and/or expand matter. One of these expands a Thomas The Tank Engine toy to full scale, while another embiggens an ant to the size of a small dog. It also presumably works on, uh, other things ...
"Time for a 'Galactus' cameo ..."
Hank developed this in the 1960s, and as a super-genius he clearly understood the import of his invention. He didn't want it to be used as a weapon, but as a good guy, he was morally compelled to use it to solve the world's problems.
How it should have changed the world:
And of course he didn't. Much like the rest of the Marvel Universe, Hank decided to completely ignore the massive implications of his discovery and instead, just make a dope key chain. Had Pym decided to act like the virtuous super-scientist he claims to be, he would have used this technology to solve global problems like hunger and homelessness. Blight strike your crop this season? Super-size one burrito to feed literally thousands of people. No house? Make one out of Lincoln Logs and stand back. Global warming starting to become a real issue? Raising fewer livestock would improve our greenhouse gas emissions by leaps and bounds -- why raise a million cows when you could raise one, then enlarge it to one million times the size of ... okay, yeah, we see the problem with that last one.
One gigantic Paul Rudd could feed the entire continent of Africa.
Nick is a lawyer who hopes his writing career will continue to keep him out of the courtroom. Don't follow Nick on Twitter, because he doesn't have one.
It's Spring Break! You know what that means: hot coeds getting loose on the beaches of Cancun and becoming imperiled in all classic beach slasher ways: man-eating shark, school of piranhas, James Franco with dreadlocks. There are so many films about vacations gone wrong, it's a chore to wonder if there's even such a thing as a movie vacation gone right. Amity Island and Camp Crystal Lake are out. So what does that leave? The ship from Wall-E? Hawaii with the Brady Bunch? A road trip with famous curmudgeon Chevy Chase? On this month's live podcast Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff are joined by some special guest comedians to figure out what would be the best vacation to take in a fictional universe. Tickets are $7 and can be purchased here!
For more ways fictional characters dicked up great innovation, check out 5 Powerful Sci-Fi Technologies Wasted By Their Own Movies and 6 'Brilliant' Movie Scientists (Who Suck At Their Job).
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