Films you might not know were based on books Part 1

AKA the Books behind the films. We all know classic examples like The Godfather and Jurassic Park, but here are a few lesser known examples

Shrek

The long-running Dreamworks franchise revitalised Eddie Murphy's flailing career and used to include the highest grossing animated film of all time (Shrek 2, until it was replaced by Toy Story 3). It is inspired by "Shrek!", a picture book written and illustrated William Steig in 1990

Mrs Doubtfire

As lowbrow as this may be, it's in many respect a powerful demonstration of how Robin Williams can often squeeze so much from so little. A comedy about divorce and a transvestite nanny, it was based on the slightly more serious novel Madame Doubtfire, (also known as Alias Madame Doubtfire) from1987

Jumanji

This great 1995 family film features Williams again, this time in a story about a jungle based board game coming to life. The special effects look dated now, but they were cutting edge at the time. Based very loosely on a short illustrated story of the same name by Chris Van Allsburg


Homeward Bound

I adored this when I was a child. Its basically about some household pets who get left behind in a move, and cross the country in search of their owners and their new home. Very funny when you're young, especially Michael J Fox. It was based on The Incredible Journey  by Sheila Burnford, and actually a movie of the same name was also produced in the 60s. Another version of the same story exists with home appliances called The Brave Little Toaster which I also recommend

Psycho

A Hitchcock classic, which gave us the now oft-referenced shower scene, and an oddly soulless remake by Gus Van Sant. It was actually based on Psycho by Robert Bloch, which was released a year before the film was

Die Hard

Arguably the greatest action film ever made, this is a film that every man in the entire world loves. Its contained action comedy gave us a cocky hero who looked like he's gone to hell and back by the end, and a delicious euro-baddie in Hans Gruber. It was based  on Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp although much license was taken, including making the hero younger, and adding more comedy

Dr Strangelove

IMDB often lists this as the greatest comedy ever made, and while I wouldn't go that far, it is a great bit of film making. It rarely outright jokes, though little throwaway gags do crop up, but the ingenuity is how the absurdity of the potential Apocalypse plays out with such realism. It was based on Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert, although the original simply details the ease with which Armageddon can occur - Kubrick turns this into a fully realised black comedy

Roger Rabbit

 A cult classic, and quite a clever idea to boot, this was a tale of a classic noir detective, crossed with looney toons style hijinks. It was based on Who Censored Roger Rabbit by Gary Wolf

Howl’s Moving Castle 

 This story of a young, inexperienced wizard is actually one of my least favourite Studio Ghibli productions and I guess this is one reason why. Instead of being an original idea, it is a modified version of the young adult fantasy book of the same name by Diana Wynne Jones.

First Blood

One of Stallone's 2 great franchises (although he's working hard on establishing his third), the first is by far and away the best. Dark, and claustrophobic, the tale of a Vietnam vet with PTSD trapped by a local sheriff was based on First Blood by David Morrell, written back in 1972 novel. If Hollywood had followed the novel's bleaker ending, we could all have been spared Rambo III

John Carter

This may have been a major box office flop, but I quite liked it. With some sharper scripting and editing, it may even have been our generations Star Wars. Unfortunately it was a bit confusing and unevenly paced, and the romantic chemistry lacklustre. It is based on A Princess of Mars, a 1917 pulp science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which is the first in a series of eleven. Hollywood had their eyes on sequels but the massive box office failure has killed all those plans

Hugo

Scorsese's first Children's/family film was met with great critical praise, but I never fell in love with it. It was sweet, but it all seemed a bit too forced for me, a bit like Burton's Big Fish. Also the British accents just grated for some reason. It is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

This is an unusual one, in that the film is now very famous, as an example of errant American Youth in the 80s. What's less known is Cameron Crowe adapted the film from his own book of the same name, published a year earlier, which was a non-fiction account of his time undercover as a student in a high school

Girl, Interrupted

This mental institution drama features Angelina Jolie is one of her better roles, alongside shoplifter Ryder. It was based on Susanna Kaysen's memoir of the same name

Brokeback Mountain

I've not seen this, but its well know, unfortunately, as being "that gay cowboy film," though in truth I'm sure its much more. It was based on a 1997 short story of the same name by Annie Proulx


Friday Night Lights

A quiet little film by Peter Berg which itself spawned a 5 series TV show, this all began as a non-fiction book called  Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. It was an account of the Primeron Panthers, a High school Football team in Texas, and the biases and inequalities Bissinger observed during their season

List of Sci-fi Technologies, and the (possible) Science Behind Them, part 1

 Hey guys, here's the second half of tis post. Apologies it wasn't out sooner, I wrote it and then Blogger lost/deleted it, So I had to finish it again from an old copy!

Laser Guns
In nearly all sci-fi, the guns of the future are no longer metal projectiles, but rather some form of laser or ray gun. Let’s break these down to basic types.
Some Guns show a shot of bright laser shooting off from the gun to the target. Since lasers travel at light speed, this is clearly inaccurate. The only way to produce such a weapon would be sort of luminescent projectile weapon, like a gun that fires miniature torches. The projectiles/bullets themselves would be more like mini missiles or torpedoes, a bit like laser bombs. The technology for such projectiles is probably not far off, but the bigger question is, why would you bother? There are other cheaper, simpler weapons, which are just as effective.
A laser weapon in the most accurate sense, would fire a continuous beam, like a very confined line of torchlight. The Star Trek phaser is probably the most similar weapon in this regard. Lasers already exist today, (laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) but even with the phaser model there are several limits. Firstly, comes the issue of beam confinement. Obviously a precision laser is too narrow, unless you want to burn a 1mm hole in your enemy. What's needed instead is a large bore weapon, which is more difficult to produce. Interestingly enough, Microwave beams may hold the answer, Masers instead of Lasers
Secondly, comes the problem of power. A laser can cut through incredibly dense materials, as hard even as diamond, but this cutting takes a long time, which is a bit useless in a weapon. The solution is a much more powerful laser, which runs at a much higher temperature. The beam would only fire for a fraction of a second, before automatically turning off, but in that time, the energy would already have cut some way into the material: you could do some serious damage. The beam would have to turn off, otherwise you'd always run the risk of shooting behind your target. It would be like firing a gun with bullets that never stop. There are currently limits to what power we can produce but also the size of this power source. Giant batteries and lasers needing a mains power socket are obviously impractical.
Lastly, the Geneva Conventions ban laser and microwave weaponry, so production has effectively stalled. Verdict: very much within humanity's grasp

Artificial Intelligence
This is used both regards to both robots and androids, as well as with modes of transport. We all remember KITT from Knight Rider, and most sci-fi ships have some form of intelligent operating system. Even in the real world, there have been leaps and bounds in this area, with huge investment in various projects. MIT even hosts its own yearly competitions. The older thinking was to structure the computer code like you would most machine code, analysing inputs, checking against databases, and producing appropriate responses. This could certainly mimic human responses, but it wasn’t truly intelligent. The newer methods employ bots: code that behaves like a robot. Programmers have taken a leaf out of nature's book, and decided that rather than building a fully formed system, it’s better to build a simple bot, which actively learns. Verdict: Plausible, but true AI is still a long long way off

Force Fields
Force fields are basically invisible energy barriers, which are effectively impenetrable. They are used as prison doors in Buck Rogers, plasma containment fields in Star Trek, and spaceship shields in pretty much everything.
How they work is only ever been explained vaguely, as a layer of electrons, or some other mumbo jumbo. The reality? Far more complicated.
When one object touches another, the two layers of atoms at the surface are repelled by electrostatic forces. Its these forces which prevent one object from passing right through another, and incidentally its these same forces which must be overcome to cause nuclear fusion. So how do we artificially reproduce this effect?
There are 2 main schools of thought on the subject. Both are cheat methods, but the first is slightly less so. This method uses electrostatic forces and involves creating a very thin film made of fabric threads, which are essential a long line of tiny electromagnets. The collective field generated by the mesh produces a constant electromagnetic charge. The US military looked into this idea as an anti-espionage system, but the truth is a proper force field is just not plausible. Given the architecture and the energy requirements, the field could never be powerful enough to repel a person, and at that high a power level, secondary ionising and ferromagnetic effects would occur. Also it’s not a proper force field, because once you turn it off, you still can’t walk through it.
The second option is not to think of it as a shield, or a wall, or a layer. Instead, visualise it as a shape or space, which cannot to breached. Then, if an object tries to fly into the area, an opposing force or neutralising effect can be initiated. It’s a bit like throwing golf balls at a building with an excellent sniper. Each time you throw one, if it reaches a set distance from the house, no matter what the angle, it gets shot out of the sky and blown away. From the outside, it would appear as if nothing can pass a certain 'invisible wall' around the house.
This doesn’t work in the context of containment shields like jail doors or those functioning as solid matter, but it does have applications as a feasible equivalent of a spaceship shield. The big problem is the number of repellent beams/turrets. If you fire ten shots at a ship at once, you expect all ten to be blocked, but any system like this, will have to have a maximum limit Verdict: Highly unlikely, maybe even impossible

FTL travel and Time Machines
I’m not going to go into much detail in this, because pointlesstown has already covered a lot of this topic HERE. Essentially any FTL journey involves an element of causality violation. While there are theoretical solutions to the problems inherent in time travel, the only way such equations can be solved involves employing some very complex theories, which currently don’t hold anywhere near conclusive evidence. Even if these ideas worked, the generation of super intense, localised gravity fields and energy levels high enough to cause objects to approach light speed, are well beyond our grasp Verdict: near enough impossible

List of Sci-fi Technologies, and the (possible) Science Behind Them, part 1

This is quite a long one so we're gonna have to break it into 2. Here's the first part:

Transporters
These are used to instantaneously 'beam' objects from one location to another, in shows like Star Trek and Stargate. In theory, this would require a computer system capable of mapping each individual atom in an object, in sequence, fast enough to make a copy before the structure of that object changes ie from heat, air currents, and in the case of living things, ageing. It would then require the object to be destroyed, and the atomic dust fired off to another location, at which point another computer would rebuild the atoms from scratch, reforming the object.
Obviously the computing power required for even small objects would be absurdly beyond our capabilities, and the machine to break down and rebuild atomic structures from the ground up is well beyond our capabilities. Firing the atomic dust beam also creates a problem, since it has to be able to pass though walls etc or else you could only beam between two separate regions of a vacuum or low density gas. This may potentially be solved by the concept of quantum tunnelling, which in simple terms means the following:  In Quantum theory, Sum over Histories states that a particle follows every possible path between two points, and thus it has no set value for its momentum or position, but rather an infinite range of possibilities which all have differing probabilities, nine of which can be zero. So when you fire a beam of particles at an impenetrable barrier, logic dictates that the barrier stops them, seeing as how its impenetrable. But quantum tunnelling predicts that some make it through since the probability that they're on the other side can't be zero. Its a fascinating subject, which might just hold the key to teleportation.
The alternative to all this mumbo jumbo is simply not to transport the atoms. Afterall, there are plenty of free atoms lying around, why not just use those to rebuild the object at the destination site? The answer is mainly philosophical. Questions arise as to whether the new construct can be called the same object, even though it structurally identical. In the case of human transport, issues of rebuilding 'the soul' also come into play.
Verdict: Unlikely to ever be possible

 Artificial Gravity
While the idea of a spaceship with gravity seems logical,  the reality is, the idea came about due to restrictions with film effects and budgets. Creating a zero gravity effect requires filming inside a high altitude aircraft sharply descending, and even then, the descent only gives you a few minutes without gravity. The film Apollo 13 required  thousands of these descents to film. So more to the point: is artificial gravity actually possible? The short answer is, 'it depends'.
Our understanding of the laws of gravity may be good, but its mechanisms remain elusive. The graviton is the boson responsible for generating the force in question, but that hasn't seemed to help us a lot. I read about an experiment several years ago involving metallic plates, which allegedly reduced mass readings by 2%, and even caused a column of cigar smoke to rise. Ive heard nothing since on the subject.
The most realistic version of this concept I've seen, was on the space station show Babylon 5. Rather than some magic, unexplained device, it showed large rotating components as the answer. The space station was essentially like a giant centrifuge, designed such that there was a giant rotating drum, the inner surface of which served as a habitat. Calculations have shown the viability of such a system, with the inner surface so large that the curve becomes barely discernible to humans on the surface, whilst the centripetal force is strong enough to mimic gravity. The major physics problem left to overcome is inertia, but there's a more fundamental issue: construction. A component this large and complex is far far beyond our current capabilities.
Verdict: Artificial gravity in its truest sense will probably elude us, but alternatives to mimic it may one day be viable.

Androids and Cyborgs
Lets start with the first one. Androids are basically entirely made of robotic machinery, arranged in a somewhat humanoid form. Sometimes these are helpers, sometimes soldiers, and they come in a variety of shapes and sizes from Lost in Space to Forbidden Planet to I, Robot.
Our current level of technology in the field of robotics is frankly astounding. We can make robots these days with incredible speed and balance. Even so, we have a long way to go. The innervated,muscular nature of the human body provides a very large range of diverse, complex and intricate movements, which is difficult to replicate robotically. Diversity is the main problem, as robots can often mimic some elements of the human body, but not all. Key current problems include a sufficient power supply, durability/life span, and especially circuitry limitations. The human nervous system allows for very intricate muscle movements, but the equivalent robotic circuitry encounters problems. As the circuits get smaller, certain electro-physical effects start to come into play. The only way to circumvent them is with even smaller computers, working at the atomic level, which is still some way off. The research is there, and computing power is growing exponentially, so its only a matter of time.
Now to Cyborgs. Unlike androids, which are entirely robotic, cyborgs are part robot, part organic flesh. One thing limiting this field of study is psychological, since the thought of us as humans built over robotic skeletons, is distinctly unpalatable. Blending robotic technology with muscle and nerve tissue is tricky business, but there have recently been great advances in organic computing, and myoelectric prosthetics are commonplace these days.
Verdict: Highly likely in the future

To be continued...