The Hotline Set Up by Scientists to Make Movies More Accurate
Scientific inaccuracies in movies are forgivable at best, and suspension-of-disbelief shattering at worst. Most of us understand some liberties have to be taken. For example, shooting a car's gas tank almost definitely won't make it blow up, but I sure like watching that happen, so I’m not going to make a stink about it.
Still, some things cause the collective public’s eye to twitch, and we’re very questionably educated. For actual scientists, goofs like various acids destroying a door lock in one second flat have to cause scholarly sighs.
What can you do, though? Do you want every movie to hire scientists to review their scripts and stand around on set explaining how slowly chloroform actually works? What do you think, the movie industry is made of money? Actually, let me rephrase that: What do you think, the movie industry wants to decrease their gluttonous profits by a single dollar?
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Given that reality, scientists took it into their own hands, and set up a free hotline — 1-844-NEED-SCI — that anyone, from James Cameron to backyard filmmakers, can call with questions about scientific accuracy.
Of course, that doesn’t mean filmmakers and studios actually call it. They’ve apparently helped with more than 1,300 properties, which feels like a lot until you realize that’s basically how many movies Netflix puts out a month. They may have had a hand in some of your favorite movies and shows, though, with one example being Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., where they were consulted on what might actually end up in a super-strength serum.
If you watched the show and heard them rattle off ingredients including anabolic androgenic steroids and liver-enzyme inhibitors, you have real-life scientists to thank. The gorilla testosterone, though? That one was, unsurprisingly, poetic license.
