12/19/02: Just saw the thing last night again on DVD.

Posted By: herman_the_german


I like the movie, so I am willing to ignore minor things in it.

Mira Sorvino essentially says they do not know what they did, so the mechanisms involved are more complex than mere evolution. The Judas Breed is a composite cockroach, termite & mantis, with even further genetic manipulation. So, yeah, mere evolution wouldn't do it. But the movie doesn't say that is merely what it is. And anyway, do we understand how mimicry comes to exist? No, we don't. Saying that mimicry evolves thru selection pressure in the contact with another species is naive (if not ridiculous) as long as we do not understand the mechanisms involved.

Another point is that you say nobody has encountered them. Well, the movie clearly says that humans HAVE encountered them, we just haven't realised it. But I agree 3 years is not enough to develop human mimicry. In the original DAW short story, Wolheim says that the bugs have been among us all along, and that nobody has ever caught on. That would be an even more difficult thing to pull off in the film. And the story itself in the original is nonexistent: after a short description of bug mimicry, the story starts with a dead bug found, a detective kinda has to figure out how this bug came to exist, and interviews some people who had met it without realizing it wasn't human. That is it. So, the movie does improve on the story, while keeping the cool concept of bugs living among humans.

The movie is absolved by not going into ludicrous detail, though we know that it is an impossible story (square cube law, and all that, same reason why THEM is impossible). The original story is one of my favorite stories, and the treatment here is fine. Compare to other similar treatment of giant killer cockroaches or bug mimicry such as:

Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)
Bug (1975)
The Nest (1988)
Meet The Applegates (1991)
Men in Black (1997)

And by the way, has anybody seen The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971)? It definitely counts as Science Fiction, but there is no way you could have it in this site, it is too old.


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