10 Films That Actually Got Biology Right

10. Slime Mould - Life

Life is a perfect example of how to integrate biology into a film production without it taking centre stage. With the simple concept of an alien organism wreaking havoc on a spaceship, many life scientists recognised the instigating life form's design, as it's grounded in some interesting biology.

The alien in question was actually based on an organism called Dictyostelium, a type of slime mould routinely used as a model system in molecular biology. Biologists were fascinated by the ability of individual cells to come together at specific points in their life cycle to form 3D spore-like structures that act as a single unit.

So, consulting scientists suggested that the production should base the alien on this. The two groups then developed the idea further to create an entity that's visually interesting, where its hive-like mentality provides a distinctly unique threat.

The production also had a medical expert guiding them on set through certain scenes, which is always good practice. A scene involving a cardiac arrest (where a heart stops beating) came off as particularly impressive, with the expert drafted in describing it as "about as faithful as one could be". This is exactly how to make sci-fi plausible yet exciting.