When the invisibility serum is injected to Kevin Bacon, he begins to “dematerialize” from the outside, inward. Skin goes first, then muscle tissue,and so on.
Hmmmm. Although this is necessary to achieve the fantastic visual effects of the film, isn’t this opposite of what would actually happen? That is, if the serum was introduced introveinously, wouldn’t he disappear from the inside, outward? The injection would spread to the heart, then feed out to the rest of body, organs first, then muscle, then skin. This is just a wag, but still sounds logical to me, since the major organs of the body consume most of the blood supply.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but assuming that he really can go invisible, and the drug is introduced to his blood stream, then yes, I would think that it would start from the outside in.
Hmmm, from the reviews I’ve seen, it sounds like the script was the big boo boo.
It would be pretty easy to make the pseudoscience argument that the invisibility serum is photoreactive (light activated). So in order for it to get to where the sun don’t shine, the outer layers go first. It’s a lot tougher to make the argument that external dead skin and hair cells would be affected at all, unless he also shampooed in the stuff.
In the movie, do they address how he sees once his retinas have become invisible?
When critiquing bad sci-fi, as when arguing with religious fundies, you can’t argue logic where there was none to begin with.
The whole notion of invisibility is full of holes that can’t be easily addressed. To be truly invisible, your skin, organs, bones, etc. of all varying densities would all have to have the same refractive index as air (at its current density) otherwise you’d be a human shaped “lens” that would be easy as hell to spot. Once you’ve done that your own eyeballs no longer focus because they no longer have a different refractive index than air. Ipso fatso, it doesn’t work.
A couple of movies did that invisible/camoflage thing with that limitation in mind. Predator’s predator, changed himself to match the background, but had subtle movement that gave it away to the audience. The Klingon cloaking device in some of the Star Trek movies distorted the stars it would have been occluding.
Ohh! I want to see the human shaped lens thing! It would be much cooler than Hollow Man. (Not hard, I admit.)
I was puzzled on the whole hair thing, what possible reason would your hair have to disappear because of a chemical in your blood? I could accept the bones going, almost, but hair?
It was a fun excuse to play with special effects and I though the movie was worth it just to see a decent actor recite the Superman joke. Not that I’m going to rent it ever.
Okay, so I came in here expecting a review. Is that it, “it sucked”? “Bad sci-fi”? Was it a “so bad it’s good” kind of thing? Sometimes those are fun.
I saw a trailer for it during X-Men and I actually thought it looked kinda interesting. I’m not real picky about the technical stuff anyway, as long as it’s got a reasonably logical premise.
Signed,
ONE OF ONLY 20 PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO ACTUALLY LIKED SPECIES
Sorry, that should be, “One of only 20 people in the
world who actually like Species for some reason other than the fact that Natasha Henstridge spent much of the movie running around half naked.”
Aside from that, it was a pretty generic “genetic mutant escapes so a set of poorly equipped idiots have to track it down in the sewer and kill it.” flick.
To get back to the OP, the SciFi Channel is running a series called The Invisible Man which, despite a bunch of other scientific improbabilities, at least handles the invisibility issue a bit better by having the character generate a substance that bends light around him or anything else he covers in it. At least this addresses the issue of hair and skin turning invisible, and it avoids the problem of having the main character strip everytime he wants to turn invisible.
There was also an Invisible Man episode of Batman: The Animated Series. A company had invented a fabric that would bend light around it if it was charged with a small electric current.* An employee stole enough fabric to make himself a suit. What was interesting was not that he made the suit just so he could steal some cash, but also so he could see his daughter. (He’d lost custody of her in a divorce.) Interesting that they would make a child custody dispute part of a Batman cartoon. Oh, and the criminal had also managed to make his car invisible.
*Of course if light was bent around a person so that it didn’t touch him, it wouldn’t reach his eyes and he’d be blind. Also, I wonder what would happen if you turned on the headlights of an invisible car? Would they put out invisible light?
Personally I found the last half hour hilarious. Why didn’t the sprinkler system come on when Kevin Bacon tossed the first bomb in the lab? And shouldn’t they ALL have been electrocuted when the thingie shorted out, since they were all standing in water? And on and on.
I guess it only takes about 10 mins to turn evil, once no one can see you. I wanted to see the downfall more, that’s what appealed to me. I hate that the movie turned into your standard action flick.
Is it just me, or did Shue’s boobs get bigger the further we got into the movie?
Also, wasn’t Bacon’s schlong bigger in ‘Wild Things’? Does invisibility have the cold water effect?
I don’t think that the magnet on the door thing would work. Maybe I’m wrong.
Plus I had two margaritas prior to the movie, and when I lost my buzz, the movie started sucking…