The Monte Hall Effect
Science - Fiction - Film
About the show
Tim Lloyd and Tola Marts are two leaders in the Seattle aerospace community with over forty years of experience between them dealing with aerospace and high tech issues. They're also avid film buffs, and in each podcast they'll take a different science fiction film and discuss three key facets:
*Science: How well do the scientific ideas in the film reflect real science.
*Fiction: Do the film's plot and characterization take the viewer on a fun or intriguing journey? And…
*Film: Does the movie make the most of cinematography, so that it works better in conveying its ideas than it would in a book, or graphic novel, or play?
At the end of each podcast they’ll give the film a percentage ratings for each of those facets.
NOTE: there will be spoilers for the film being discussed, but they will try to keep spoilers for other films to a minimum.
The podcast theme music- intro and outro- is written and performed by Guy Ellis, and more of his music can be found at https://soundcloud.com/gu42 and https://www.facebook.com/cloudcoverband/.
Episodes
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2: Ad Astra
May 1st, 2021 | 1 hr 38 mins
Tim and Tola discuss the 2019 film "Ad Astra." Director James Gray said that this was going to be the most accurate portrayal of spaceflight ever put in a movie. Did he succeed? No. No he did not. Yet we found this film's scientific failures were actually overshadowed by its artistic failures. But along the way we had a lot of fun discussing the fetishization of human spaceflight, historical spacesuits and visual motifs, HALO jumps, what would really happen if we were ever hit by a gamma ray burst, the durability of modern aircraft, how gravity and acceleration work, why there are basically two kinds of rockets, and how we're hoping "exploding the monkey" becomes the new "nuking the fridge." Along the way we share a number of hard-learned aerospace truths, such as: a flame trench turns out to be a trench for flame, hot stuff comes out of the end of a rocket, and you try to keep the poison on the outside of the crew capsule. As usual, there are lots of spoilers for the film being discussed, but we try to stay away from spoilers for other films.
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1: Sunshine
April 16th, 2021 | 1 hr 26 mins
Tim and Tola talk about the 2007 Danny Boyle film "Sunshine." A bunch of people travel to the Sun with a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan. What could possibly go wrong? Some of the things we talk about: engineers vs scientists, risk analysis, what happens if you suddenly find yourself in outer space (tl;dr: you don't explode), why you shouldn't cut holes in your heat shield, purposely dabbling with opium when you're part of an Arctic expedition (tl;dr: bad idea), the limits of realism, and the tradeoffs you have to make as a filmmaker between scientific accuracy and dramatic necessity. Tola tells a Polish space joke (it's OK, he's Polish.)