A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Night at the Museum

Date Viewed: 12/26/06

Details:

Ben Stiller

Robin Williams

Ricky Gervais

Carla Gugino

Dick Van Dyke

Mickey Rooney

Bill Cobbs

Director: Shawn Levy

Score: +

The Review: Entertaining fluff; a feature-length advertisement for New York's Museum of Natural History.

The gimmick has been well-advertised: at night, all the exhibits in the museum come alive. All of them -- dinosaur skeletons, dioramas, statues, the hall of African mammals -- you name it. The movie focuses on who (the new night watchman [Stiller] provides the point of view), why, and the consequences, the resultant social interactions -- oh, and there's also a bit of a criminal element twisted up in here somewhere (nothing is ever as simple as it seems).

High-brow humor this is not, but the premise is so attractive that it will carry you quite a ways in, past the slow part at the beginning -- character establishment, some would say; boring, I say -- and then you'll be hooked. The first instance something seems wrong at the museum is rather subtle, so much so that I missed it at first. Instead, I kept thinking, "he's going to try to find the ladies' bathroom across the hall." Shows you where my mind was...

But the premise / curse / spell has some curious consequences that are not probed in this superficial entertainment. Applying a bit of thought, and an overly exercised sense of fantasy and science-fiction, brings some curious issues to mind. Everything that might be reanimated is affected, irrespective of actual past live status (fossil, mummy), or models of life (wax figures, fur-covered armatures, ancient stone statues), or scale (two-inch high diorama figures versus life-size statues versus a whale). There's clearly some memory permitted the reanimatees, extending between evenings. And there is an explicit recognition by the reanimatees of their situation and status (e.g., "I'm just a wax figure..."). So how is memory mediated? How is consciousness mediated? How did the reanimatees obtain knowledge of their characters? (Because they do act in character, besides recognizing their status.) How did they obtain their individual languages, or learn to understand each other's languages? How can the curse / spell distinguish between inanimate constructs of architecture and potentially-living model armatures? Why does not the museum itself become reanimated? What are the criteria placed on what objects might be reanimated? Has the spell made any mistakes? How is the protected ground of the museum delineated?, or sensed by the reanimatees? And where are the refugees from the pre-Cambrian diorama? Inquiring minds want to know.

From a 1993 juvenile novel by Milan Trenc.

(*) Curious news tidbit: whether or not it's related to the success of this film, the real Museum of Natural History in New York has recently announced it will re-institute "sleepovers" in the museum -- a practice they abandoned back in 2000, but have decided to rejuvenate. For beaucoups bucks, you and your offspring can spend a night at the museum, wandering around exploring (to a limited extent) and sleeping on cots. Sounds cool to me.

(26-Dec-06)

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