Science communication with science fiction movies

Main text

“It is not as easy as it looks,” Holden Thorp, Science’s chief editor, commented at the end of 2021, when explaining new research findings of the COVID-19 pandemic to the public had encountered great difficulties.¹ As a matter of fact, science communication has never been easy because serious scientific knowledge is prone to be boring rather than interesting. There is only one atypical medium for science communication, i.e., the science fiction movie (sci-fi movie for short), that has a huge amount of fans. By emphasizing actual, extrapolative, or speculative science, sci-fi movies provide detailed predictions about the dailies and the technological evolution of the future world. Hence, successful sci-fi movies, such as The Wandering Earth, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Avatar, etc., could easily achieve a double harvest in word of mouth and box office. Significant social influence has made sci-fi movies a mainstream cultural and scientific communication medium.^2,3

However, there are two challenges when integrating serious scientific communication into the production process of sci-fi movies. (1) There is a conflict between telling serious scientific pieces of knowledge and interesting stories. The interest of the public movie audiences is, of course, attractive stories, not a 2-h science class at the theater. The main focus of a sci-fi movie is prone to be scattered and sensational rather than systematic and progressive, as the traditional science literacy contents do. (2) Movie release cycles are often shorter than other media, such as books or articles, which is not conducive to long-term scientific communication. Sci-fi movies generally have a quite short release time in the theater, so the discussion of its contents in the public will then fade quickly. The dissemination of scientific knowledge carried by the movie will therefore be limited.

To overcome the above two problems, a complete scientific knowledge creation and communication methodology is necessary. One of the possible solutions, which the authors of this article have explored, is shown in Figure 1. It takes advantage of the entire life cycle of sci-fi movies and uses various forms of content, such as articles, drawings, and video clips, to create a complete, replicable scientific knowledge creation and spreading methodology. More specifically, we propose methods that combine the organization of the scientific knowledge and the participation of scientists, as well as the life cycle spread of the knowledge to the public.

Figure 1.

Scientific knowledge creation and communication methodology

Content: Knowledge mining and knowledge graph generation based on audiences’ interests from scattered fiction movie actions

Producing a high-quality sci-fi movie always takes literature and art in the first place, so maximizing the attraction of the audiences is of the utmost important consideration for the producer and the director. Scenes related to scientific knowledge are scattered everywhere in the movie and are from random research fields. How can we revise these pieces of knowledge in a more precise way for study purposes? One of the methods is to reorganize the scenes from sci-fi movies that contain scientific knowledge, adding familiar examples that can be easily understood by ordinary people. For example, it is possible to dig from famous sci-fi movies, such as The Martian Rescue, Wall-E, Avatar, etc., and select a dozen connecting pairs of knowledge points and story elements from the movies. We then expand these knowledge points to other relevant scientific knowledge with the help of knowledge graphs specifically designed for science communication.⁴ The term knowledge graph was proposed by Google in 2012 and will enable us to make searches more intelligent.

Moreover, the script of a sci-fi movie is the decisive factor of the movie’s success. An excellent sci-fi movie should be both literary and scientific and therefore needs professional scriptwriters as well as scientists from different research fields to work together. In recent years, there have been some cases of scientists coming onto teams, entitled “scientific advisors,” to help write scripts, incubating scientific knowledge beforehand. Some fiction movies, such as The Wandering Earth I and II, are among them, where scientific advisors in the field of artificial intelligence, including two of this article’s authors, deeply participated in the production process. The advisors take the logical idea of “what if” as the core and use scientific knowledge to reason out the detailed setting of the movie’s fantasy world. By doing so, the audience’s thirst for knowledge is piqued, which is a meaningful attempt to fulfill the idea of “first interest, then science popularization.”

Communication: The long-term cross-media propagation methodology for scientific communication after movie release

The best spreading time of hotspots from sci-fi movies is quite limited because the release time on the big screen is counted by weeks, and the scientific knowledge carried by the movies will then quickly be ignored by the public. How to attract audiences’ interest in the scientific content after the movie is taken out of theaters is challenging.

With the core idea of “cross-media storytelling,” a possible solution is to use a cross-media propagation methodology to run through the whole life cycle of sci-fi movies, which can keep the heat of a successful sci-fi movie on as many audiences as possible. Popular science content may cross multiple media, such as video clips, articles, and comics. This is what we named cross-media storytelling, which relies on different types of communication media such as movie series, peripheral products, and derivative interpretation to support one other. The cross-media storytelling method builds a large-scale, long-term science fantasy world, which can guide the audience to have a sense of exploration and participation in the relevant stories, to strengthen the learning effect of knowledge points from the movie by repeatedly studying them on different platforms. It is even possible to attract audiences to participate in the creation of science popularization content themselves, which is a meaningful attempt to bring more potential contributors to science popularization based on the sci-fi movie ecology.

People: Multiple-level audience influences that affect the population from the public all the way down to the movie professionals

The influence of the knowledge graphs and cross-media propagation methodology is also multi-dimensional. The most important influence is of course on the movie audiences, who will be directly “hit” by the well-designed and organized knowledges. Moreover, for those who do not enter the theaters, those knowledge points will also reach them because the various and abundant communication methods will make it a hot topic in mainstream social networks, so that they can see and be interested.

Last but not the least, involved in the above proposed scientific communication and movie production methodology, movie workers and sci-fi enthusiasts will also gain a deeper understanding of the fantastic worlds that sci-fi movies try to construct. In other words, they are trained by relative scientific knowledge that may help them produce better sci-fi works in the future.

In our practice, we have applied our methodology over a dozen of sci-fi movies, published 4 books,⁵ and produced 100 supporting video clips and a series of related articles. The books, video clips, and articles were for the purpose of science communication of 100 selective knowledge points in 10 famous sci-fi movies. We uploaded these contents to major Chinese social media networks such as Weibo, Zhihu, Douyin, and Bilibili, and the watch volume exceeded 100 million. Moreover, the topic popularity directly related to our content was 1 billion, and the indirect influence was 6 billion within 6 months after the release of our books and video clips, according to statistics from the above four media platforms.

In conclusion, the sci-fi movie is an excellent medium for science communication, and much of its potential has yet to be mined. In this article, a methodology to communicate scientific knowledge over sci-fi movies is proposed, where scientists have made contributions through the entire life cycle of the movies, starting even from the script writing. Methods have also been tried to organize scattered and unordered pieces of scientific knowledge in the sci-fi movies into a systematic knowledge graph so as to serve the goal of a better scientific knowledge learning experience.

Published Online: February 8, 2024