Even though it would have been totally radical, or “sick” if you will, for some people to have evolved horns, webbed feet, and x-ray vision; nature didn’t set out to make us as rock-on as we could possibly be. Apparently, we never went through a phase where we tended to regularly ram out heads into walls or each other, so we didn’t grow horns. And as much as we love Hawaii, we never swam enough to get webbed feet. As for x-ray vision, I guess if you really want to see a girls panties that badly, you can always just rape her, and we perfected that tactic so long ago as to make see-through eye powers totally redundant. If that weren’t enough, we couldn’t even maintain our ability to synthesis vitamin C endogenously because we needed that extra metabolic energy for something else; like making brains capable of science, the internet, and cosplay.
For these reasons, though I am no expert, evolution strikes me as a bit of a lazy game, or if not lazy, then just at least a “fiscally conservative” one. You get barely what you need, and almost none of what you want; just like love (*bitter-tears*).
So it makes me really amused to see how the film industry takes this and spins it into: EXTREMEvolution: Let’s electrify them!
The latest inspiration to pass through my left ventricle on this vein is Pandorum, which I saw last year on the plane to London and then again recently at home. I have to confess, I actually like this movie. It was a bit of breath of fresh space-air. Someone finally made a mostly original Sci-fi story and a studio actually had the guts to put money into it. It obviously shares traits common to all deep-space sci-fi horrors - monsters, giant quasi-anthropomorphized space ships, dirty sexy ninja orphans with Eastern European accents, flashbacks of last-time-I saw-my-crying-wife, and apocalypses on Earth involving our beautiful yet tragically dying sun - but it also worked pretty well as a psychological thriller and it wasn’t totally obvious or predictable. The only thing about it that I thought fell flat in the realm of suck was the monsters.
*Spoilers* It will come as no surprise to anyone who has any knowledge of basic story structure, we are introduced, in the beginning of all places, to a set of antagonists, and they are bionic-gray-11th –dan Taekwondou-master-shrill-screeching monster-men (women and devil children make cameos later) with giant shards of blue superman’s-cavern crystals growing out of their backs. We soon learn that they are actually the descendants of some of crew who originally piloted the mission to somewhere out there, and they brought many people with them to start a new civilization. However, some key members went space-crazy; aka Pandorum, though on earth we know it as “losing our shit in the face of loneliness and isolation with no hope of relief”. They did something to the ship (see, I’m not spoiling everything), but most of the colonists were still in hypersleep (?), so they stayed people, whle everyone who wasn’t spent some insufficient number of mission-years living their sad, doomed lives and bred successive generations who morphed into cannibal monsters that “evolved to suit the ship”.
Excuse me, but what the shit? “Evolved to suit the ship”? Ok, so these post-humans had to evolve superior martial arts skills, the strength of ten elephants, and jaws that can engulf and severe a human head in one chomp in response to prey that consisted solely of groggy half-naked people who periodically fell limp and confused from their space-sleep tubes, and threats that were limited to the interior of the ship, which never went “Event Horizon” on their asses, and was mostly just dark and greasy.
Now, I understand that with all works of total fiction, willing suspension of disbelief is required for full effect (ala the bible, etc.) but there comes a point where the viewer is asked to suspend too much, and there are bread-riots in the streets of our minds hungry for reason. If all those people ever had to challenge their adaptive capabilities was essentially helpless prey, and a few slippery pools of hydraulic fluid on the steel causeway, they could have just as well evolved into sticky Jellyfish-like flesh balls that rolled over their prey and digested them with an external stomach, like sea urchins. For Pete’s sake, they could have evolved into a parasitic fungus and done in their prey almost as easily.
They should have been fighting that, but they were fighting these.
Let’s say they went full sea urchin and kept the shards, but that wouldn’t make any sense either as there were no otters or gulls on the ship, so big balls of jelly-flesh is more likely. The Blob managed to be scary when it’s monster was just a slow moving mountain of pink pudding, because the film relied more heavily on suspense and the hopeless feeling that no matter how slowly death was coming, it would eventually get you no matter what. And that film was set on Earth, where the protagonists could have gotten in car, driven to a plane, and flown to a remote atoll and safely assumed that they wouldn’t have to deal with the blog for many years, if ever again. These humans were on a dying space ship with severely limited options for escape; so why couldn’t they have gone with the scary blob people? They did a great job creating the whole suspense and mystery around who had actually gone crazy in the first place and sent the ship off course, and where hell were they now anyway; PLUS they had the time pressure of trying to restart the reactor that was failing after over 900 years of smooth operation (if only Fukushima Daiichi had been built so well). Why not just run with that and add to that list of trouble the fact that slow-moving acid blobs of post-humans that had evolved perfectly “to suit the ship” were oozing after them at every turn? I would have put my pillow over my face in horror, and not eaten Jello for weeks.
But that just isn’t good enough these days. Even Edward the Vampire was apparently slated to a kung-fu fisted vampire bounty hunter before the studio decided to let him be the sparkling undead romantic underwear model of Stephanie Meyers dreams. Is anything with even hint of sublety (i.e.more-truth-than-fiction) is doomed to be steam-rolled over by the likes of Wesley Snipes, Kesha, CG, Fox news, and the Vatican’s facebook page.
Please oh please, give me back my creeping blob, and my windy creek in the valley, and some nice, slow cooked, ghoul-free Pandorum stew to boil in.
