If for some reason you've read my past reviews, you'll realise that my clever plan for deciding what movie to watch is to show up at the theatre at any time and see the next thing playing. Well, that's basically because I'm too lazy to read the paper ahead of time, but anyway.
I got to the theatre, psyched about seeing Vampires, only to discover it didn't start for another two hours. Damn my laziness! Well, I bought a ticket to What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams.
Basic premise of the show : Robin Williams goes to hell to save the soul of his wife.
This has got to be one of the saddest movies I have ever seen. I cried during the entire movie. This was a first. It was a touching story about the power of everlasting love. I was glad to be alone in the theatre, because I towards the end I was making these choking sob-noises.
And hey, I didn't even cry when the killed Ol' Yeller. Stupid Mutt.
Of course, you know, there's going to be a bad point.. and here it is : The main problem I had was all of these Robin Williams floating underwater shots. Is this so he looks younger? I didn't get it. There's got to be at least five in the last half hour.
It started driving me nuts.
So, overall, I gave it an eight on the spiff-o-meter. Go, and take a date.
Godzilla!
Well, this is an old movie, an old video release, so I'm going to assume you've seen it, if you haven't, well, I should give away too much of the plot, but feel free to leave now . . .
To be honest, I didn't pay a helluva lot attention to the movie. I was more concerned with the lifespan of the average earthworm.
To refresh your memory . . .
In the beginning, Nick [Matthew Broderick] was doing research on genetically mutated earthworms at Chernobyl. He found that the earthworms had increased in size 17% due to the massive amounts of radiation they had been exposed to.
The whole explanation for the Godzilla creature was that the egg of a land iguana had been contaminated with nuclear radiation when the French did testing in the South Pacific (note : I'm not sure how historically factual that is).
It seemed to be a "look, the worms got bigger, so could the lizard!" thing.
This brings into question the lifespan of an earthworm. I'm going to assume nine months, I looked for a couple of hours for a hard number, but given that they don't state the exact species of worm it would all be speculation anyway. So nine months it is.
It's been 12 years since the Chernobyl incident. Let's assume that there have been 15 generations of worms in that period. There may have been more, there may have been less. Let's assume 15. It's all speculation, remember.
How impressive is 17% bigger growth over a period of 15 generations? Not very. I'd be interested in seeing a similar study done on the past 12 years of earthworm growth in America, I would imagine there would be some growth.
So, the radiation changes the worms' DNA, and they get bigger. But how much bigger? Remember that we are talking about the 15th generation exposed to a constant amount of nuclear radiation. That's what I think would be interesting - How much does each successive generation grow?
ANYWAY. Now there's Godzilla. Mutated land iguana. I'm no iguana expert, but, I'm generous. I will say that, max, if they lived to be 60 years, they could grow 40-50 feet. Godzilla was roughly ten times this.
Am I supposed to honestly believe that this single egg was so mutated that a creature that size could be born? And that it would walk upright, which would, evolutionarily, take dozens of generations to develop. And born pregnant? Where the hell did he pull that from? Isn't that a bit much for the first generation mutation to preform?
Chernobyl was exposed to radiation roughly 100x that of Heroshima. I'd guess it's at least that much more than the South Pacific.
So where are the huge mutated earthworms?
Uh oh, I just gave away the plot to Tremors IV - Resurrection of Kevin Bacon's Career!
