Hollywood Wants to Kill You
by Rick Edwards and Dr Michael Brooks
Allen & Unwin
Threatening to kill is how to get people’s attention and perversely it makes us feel alive to have a brush with death. According to the authors of this book, “that’s what makes us better people and encourages make the most of our lives”.
Rick Edwards is a television presenter with a Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge and Dr Michael Brooks is a journalist with a PHD in Quantum Physics and consultant for New Scientist. Their entertaining book explores the science behind the death and mass destruction in some of Hollywood’s best loved blockbusters.
There’s food for thought, such as thanks to advances in technology, robots can kill us. Just as scary as some of the films about rogue robots, statistics from the International Federation of Robotics show about 3 million robots working in out world’s factories, even though they are not the ones that make it into Hollywood movies.
Some of their research will give you nightmares, just as the explosion of horror movies since A Nightmare on Elm Street. They explore real life narcolepsy where people can suffer from sleep paralysis. The brain wakes up but the body is stuck in REM-paralysis. People become paralyzed and unable to even cry out for help from terror of their vivid nightly hallucinations.
The book reminds us of the scary predator movies where “vicious single-minded murderers” are out to get innocent people, and the huge amount of creatures and plants in our world that could possible get us … all much worse than Spielberg’s Jaws that kept people out of the water.
Hollywood also allows us to flirt with the unknown such as what it is like to die as in the classic Flatliners and life after death as in the unforgettable Ghost. We are also able to explore the desolate aftermath of nuclear Armageddon, with the authors highlighting Stanley Kubrick’s classic black comedy Dr Strangelove that was made over 50 years ago.
Films remind us that infectious diseases can wipe out populations or make people into mindless homicidal zombies, extreme climate change can decimate the population and asteroids can collide with Earth. As Charlton Heston says in Armageddon, “It happened before, it will happen again, the question is when.” Be prepared.
Lezly Herbert
