Seeking Employment: Skilled spider biologist seeking opportunities to serve as a scientific consultant on movies starring or utilizing spiders in the plot. Horror, adventure, or romance-themed films, all acceptable. Knowledgeable biologist will provide the insight to greatly enhance plots and increase thrills by providing more engaging, realistic, and terrifying reality-based spiders than is currently provided by screenwriters who lack depth in their understanding of these animals. Has watched Arachnophobia more than 20 times and recognizes how that film relied on enough realistic biology to be especially powerful. Truth is, I’m not really looking for work. But when science can help inform dramas built all around it, a case can be made for utilizing the knowledge we scientists have to make a story really come to life with pretty amazing aspects of the natural world.

I watched Interstellar and came out deeply disappointed. Since then, I’ve read many other reviews, of both the science and the filmmaking, and I keep thinking maybe I’m being too hard on the film. Yeah, some of the science was bad. A lot of movies have bad science, and this one also had a lot of really good science. And it’s just a movie! So maybe I should give it a pass. Maybe I should say, “It did a really great job explaining relativity!” (which it did) and leave it at that.

In the 1997 film Dante’s Peak, the volcano is really the star, stealing the show from all the merely human subplots of romance, stubborn grannies, and the inevitable dog that needs to be rescued. Our human protagonist, Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan), is a lone, workaholic volcanologist who gets sent out to the Cascade Range in Washington State by the U.S. Geological Survey to check up on a mountain which has been rumbling. The town on the slopes of Dante’s Peak has just been honored with the “second most desirable place to live in the United States, population under 20,000″ award and the mayor (soon to become Harry’s love interest) has done a great job in making the town a prosperous, happy place to live. It’s the perfect setting for a natural disaster.

The premise in Luc Besson’s movie Lucy is the silly trope that 90% of human cerebral capacity goes unused. This is flat-out false. The human brain uses 20% of the body’s total energy but it represents only 2% of the body’s mass. Natural selection drives biological organisms to minimize waste; why would an animal build such a costly organ and let 90% of it go idle.

Despite an excessively maudlin depiction of a philosophical odd-couple romance, Mike Cahill’s new science fiction film ‘I Origins’ does manage to create a somewhat plausible way for scientists to discover evidence of reincarnation. Ian Gray, our molecular biologist protagonist played by Michael Pitt, is obsessed with eyes: He takes photographs of them, and is particularly arrested by the peepers of Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), an enigmatic beauty. When he’s not photographing eyes, Gray is working to provide concrete evidence that eyes evolved naturally, to counter intelligent design arguments that the organ is too complex to have assembled without divine intervention.