K-SCORE: 14
Director: Joe Johnston
Writer: Ed Naha, Tom Schulman, Stuart Gordon, Brian Yuzna
Starring: Rick Moranis, Marcia Strassman, Matt Frewer, Kristine Sutherland, Thomas Wilson Brown, Jared Rushton, Amy O’neil, Robert Oliveri
Spoiler Level: Moderate
Mad scientist Wayne Szalinski overcomes a handful of barriers when he invents a device which can “shrink matter” by “eliminating the empty space between atoms.” One thing’s for sure: he shouldn’t be living in a small house in suburbia. I had a few questions about this scientific achievement, which I’ve listed in no particular order.
If Wayne eliminates the empty space between atoms, he would effectively be making them closer together thus changing it into a more solid state. How does the beam target only solid matter and leave it solid while not turning the air around the beam into a dense block of nitrogen and oxygen?
How does he solve the heat problem? Molecules forced into tighter spaces move faster, thus heat. Shouldn’t shrinking an object like a person down to the size of a thimble also cause it to spontaneously combust?
How does the beam choose what to shrink and what not to shrink, striking a person, group of people, or piece of furniture in a specific spot and then minimizing them entirely while leaving the surroundings the same?
How are human lungs that have been shrunken down to a thousandth their normal size able to move enough air to create the same sound waves, the same tones that they were able to create when they were regular sized?
Can we agree that empty space weighs nothing? If all the machine does is eliminate the empty space between matter, shouldn’t the weight of shrunken objects be the same as they were before they were shrunk? If so, how is Wayne able to lift four children up in a dustpan, not notice the dustpan is suddenly holding roughly three hundred pounds of flesh, and thoughtlessly put it out with the trash?
Does a shrunken object produce the same smells as a full-sized object and in the same potency? Is this why the family dog can intuit that the kids are miniature and in need of saving? Is this why he heroically bites his owners leg to stop him from darkly ingesting his youngest child along with a mouthful of Cheerios?
What’s going on with pressure? If the kids are a hundred and twenty pounds or more, but the size of a peppercorn, then each step they take would be the equivalent of them driving a huge weight down upon a small surface area. Why aren’t they nailing their limbs into the ground or perhaps drilling themselves right through the house and the ground, into the mantle of the earth where eventually magma would liquefy their bodies?
If the kids don’t weigh that and weigh about as much as a peppercorn, how are their muscles and organs maintaining the strength to sustain their lives in miniaturized form? How are their bones not so frail that the trauma of, say, being scooped up by a spoon snaps them like the thinnest, dryest, and weakest of twigs? There’s a reason tiny living things in nature develop as they do.
Why doesn’t the ant eat them? Ants are known for their strength to weight ratio and if the kids are shrunken down but maintain all their body ratios somehow, shouldn’t meeting the ant be terrifying beyond reason for it would be much like a regular-sized human meeting a hungry tiger, only one that is actually fifty times stronger than a normal tiger?
Can we agree that both gravity and air resistance on Earth stay the same despite the shrunken kids? If they are suddenly lighter and smaller than a Lego, why aren’t they blown around by the wind when they’re thrown outside? And if they gain a better strength to weight ratio as would be needed to sustain life at such a size, why can’t they sprint around the garden or even take flight using a broken blade of grass? Compression of a falling object scales quadratically with the radius of the object because gravity and air resistance are constants, so are the kids actually proportionally more durable than they were before? Does this change stay in effect when they’re reverted to full-sized?
What is it about the molecular composition of a baseball that makes Wayne’s machine more effective? A baseball is mostly leather, rubber, and string. How does that integrate with circuitry?
Why can you see electrical currents passing over the circuitry of the machine in Wayne’s attic? How is that not a sign that it’s very much broken? How does the exploding apple not indicate that perhaps he hasn’t invented a shrink ray but rather a death ray? Why would that neighbor, notably salty in his relationship with Wayne to begin with, volunteer to stand in front of something that will surely kill him?
Why is there a scorpion in Wayne’s backyard?
Is a blown up turkey more nutritious? Doesn’t it just expand the amount of empty space in the turkey, which wouldn’t change the calorie count? Why is this how Wayne applies his technology? Shouldn’t he start by patenting it, securing funding, mass producing these machines (can’t be that expensive - he built it in an attic), and then using them to miniaturize garbage or any other waste product, or innovate industrial shipping? All the materials a construction crew needs to build a house could be mailed in an envelope.
But let’s put aside those questions and focus on what the movie was really about - suburban life. Is the intraversible lawn a metaphor for the futility of the everyday existence of our nation’s youth? Is the shrink ray a metaphor for our relevance in the larger world? … no no. Forget that too. There’s only one question in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids that matters.
Why in the actual fuck did Wayne build his shrink ray on an automatically swivelling machine-gun style turret?!
Perhaps it will be answered in Honey, I Blew Up the Kid.