- Hey, everyone, it's Forrest Galante here
from Animal Planet's Extinct or Live.
I'm a wildlife biologist, and
you're watching The Breakdown.
[upbeat music]
First up, Ace Ventura.
- Check this out.
Look at that.
That's a true albino pigeon.
Some rich guy lost it.
He's offerin' a $25,000 reward.
- So I'm gonna pause it right there.
It's pretty funny just off the start.
If you're somebody who
lives in a city anywhere,
you know that there's nothing
that uncommon about seeing
a white pigeon.
You see them every day.
So just the fact that in this
clip, Ace Ventura is looking
for a rare albino pigeon
that's worth 25 grand
is absolutely hilarious.
It's a good start.
[whistles]
[birds chirp]
[dog barks]
I'm gonna pause it right there.
It's just so much fun,
you know, the whole idea
that Ace Ventura can wiggle
the keys and all of the animals
in his house that he's rescued
or he lives among will all
go and hide into various spots.
It's ridiculous.
It's not how it works.
It's not how animals work.
Doesn't matter if you're
the best-trained creatures
in the world, maybe you could
get the odd dog to do it,
but to get this cacophony
of creatures that all live
in this tiny, one-bedroom
apartment to all go and hide.
It's absurd, it's hilarious,
it's not realistic at all,
and it's a ton of fun.
As Ace Ventura blows the whistle
the first thing you see is
the beagle coming running
out, the dog, there's a toucan
in the frame, there's a whole bunch
of South American parrots,
which is hilarious.
Of course, these are common
birds in the pet trade,
but you certainly wouldn't
wanna have that many of 'em
living in a small apartment.
Now my favorite part of
the opening of this scene
is the otter coming out of the toilet.
That's an Asian small-clawed otter.
They're absolutely
hilarious, super inquisitive.
Of everything and how
unrealistic these clips are,
the most realistic part
of this is probably
an Asian small-clawed otter
hiding and playing in a toilet,
'cause they're just so
mischievous, they're so playful,
they're so much fun.
They would absolutely hide in a toilet
and pop out like that.
I love that clip, it's super cute.
Now this is a trained animal,
and each one of these animals
that you're seeing are
indeed trained animals.
So it's amazing that they're
capable of doing this
on command for the camera, but
it doesn't mean that they all
did it in simultaneity
when the whistle was blown.
It doesn't work that way.
You can be sure that when
they were setting this up,
they probably spent a day
getting the skunk to pop out
of the laundry, and another
day getting all the birds
to fly in, and another day getting
the Asian small-clawed otter
to pop out of the toilet.
It's beautifully done.
It's really clever of
filmmaking, but it's not the way
that animals work.
The notion that this many
creatures of this diverse
of species could all live in a
single, one-bedroom apartment
is pretty ridiculous.
That being said, animals are
incredible and they're adaptive
and they're very trainable and
they're very understanding.
Like, could you have otters
and parrots and puppies
and skunks all living together?
Absolutely, there's no big
predators in that group,
so they could all live in
harmony, but they couldn't all
live in harmony in a
one-bedroom apartment.
There's just not enough
space for the amount
of animals you're seeing.
So Ace Ventura, Pet Detective,
absolutely awesome movie.
Everyone should watch
it, it's tons of fun,
and it makes you love animals,
but ridiculous to think
that that many creatures
could all be crammed happily
into a one-bedroom apartment.
Next up, Anaconda.
Now if you're working with anacondas,
they don't have that build.
They don't have that kind of
flexibility that you're seeing.
What you're seeing in this
frame here is this animal has
maybe the back 1/8 of its body up in that
whatever building structure
is, and the rest of it's
holding up with its body weight.
That's unrealistic.
Those animals are not
capable of doing that.
All they can do is hold
about 1/3 of their body up
and off the ground at a
time, the front third.
Seeing as maybe that's, you
know, six or 7/8 of its body
being held up, it's unrealistic.
It's too skinny and it's too long.
That's not the way anacondas look.
Pause it there for a second.
So there's two species of an anaconda.
There's green anacondas and
there's yellow anacondas.
Now, what I'm seeing
here is neither really.
It's a red anaconda?
I don't know.
You know, I can see
what they're going for,
they're trying to make this
look like the green anaconda,
but it's got too much red.
It's too dark.
Maybe if the snake were about
to shed and it was really,
really old, it would have
that dark a coloration, but
really, it looks too dark and
the eyes look too humanoid.
That's not a reptilian eye.
And you can see why they've
done that, as human beings,
as bipedal creatures, when
we look at another animal,
we connect to them through
eyesight, through ocular vision.
When you see bigger, meaner-looking
eyes like what they put
on the snake, it's instantly
scarier than when you see
the actual snake's eyes, which
are far more peaceful looking
than this animal's.
I'll hold it there for a second.
As you see, the snake wraps
up with the back third
of its body to coil its victim.
Now there's two pieces to that.
The one part that's accurate is that
anacondas are, indeed, constrictors.
They will absolutely wrap
their prey asphyxiated
by crushing the rib cage
and then consume it.
But they will never ever
lead with their tail.
They do not have the ability to do that.
When a constrictor snake attacks its prey,
it leads with its head,
latches onto something,
and then uses that grip with
its mouth to then wrap around
its prey or victim.
So the notion that it can
just kinda use its tail
like Indiana Jones' whip and
wrap around and then continue
to do something else with its
head is, well, just silly.
[hisses]
Hold there for a sec.
Now what you're hearing
is an anaconda screaming.
Now that's a real piece of
movie magic for ya right there,
ladies and gentlemen, because
there's no such thing.
I've caught hundreds of
anacondas, I really have,
and none of them have ever gone grrr
and growled or screamed at me.
They just don't do that.
The most noise that
animal's capable of making,
is releasing air from its body
to let out the hissing sound
that we're familiar with in snakes,
which is a bit of a sssss sound.
But this whole notion that
it growls and grunts as it's
fighting with this guy, it's
just complete add-in audio.
Hold there for a second.
Now what you see is the snake's
trapped in this net, right?
But it's still got its two
victims within its coil.
You're really anthropomorphizing
the animal here.
And what I mean by that is
this thing's out for vengeance,
right, it's not even there to
eat its prey, the two people.
It's there just to kill them.
That's why it won't even
let them go in a net.
Well, if you've ever caught
any kind of wild animal,
you know the second
that it's under stress,
it doesn't wanna continue to try and feed.
It doesn't wanna continue
to try and attack.
It wants to get away.
These are all things
very far from real life,
but if this situation were
to happen in real life
where you were being
constricted by an anaconda
and it hadn't latched
onto you with its teeth,
and you were trapped in a
net, the second that something
dramatic like gunfire and nets
were comin' up and around it,
it would release and do everything
in its power to get away.
[hisses]
Hold there.
Now the speed is really,
really interesting.
The reason that anacondas get so big,
is 'cause they live a long time.
Anacondas, like many reptiles,
grow until the day they die.
As you get bigger and bigger,
it makes it harder and harder to move.
It takes more energy expenditure.
So the largest anacondas
that I've ever caught,
the 21 plus footers, are
so big and so heavy that
out of water, they can barely slither.
I mean, it's like you can
see the amount of effort
going into every motion.
And here we have our
60-foot long anaconda,
of course it's three times the
size of anything in reality,
but it's moving at this lightning speed.
First of all, the bite's bad.
A bite from a big snake sucks.
They have a recurved
tooth system, like this,
and when it goes down, they
interlock and then you're stuck
within those teeth.
So you really don't wanna end
up with a bite from a big boa
or big python like an anaconda.
That being said, the bite's
not the part that'll do damage.
Sure you're gonna take
these three-inch long
recurved needles into your
body, but it's the coiling
and the asphyxiation
that creates the problem.
You can get an anaconda to
release from you, or any snake
for that matter, by wedging
something in its mouth
and prying it open, but if
you're attacked by a big snake
like this, or a realistic one,
you gotta get your buddies,
which I've had do to me a couple
times, run around uncoiling
the thing as it's trying to wrap you up,
'cause that's the dangerous part.
If the snake feels like it's
being attacked, it's not going
to continue to try and consume you.
The only reason a big
snake is holding onto you
is because it's trying to eat you.
Otherwise it's a defensive bite.
It's a strike, bite, and
release on their own.
If you're in the situation where
they're already coiling up,
it's because you're
restraining it and it's trying
to do some damage, or because
it's trying to eat you.
Of everything I've seen, the
most realistic kind of bite
and coil, you see the
snake there lunges forward,
he grabs the guy by the
shoulder, pulls him back
into his own body, and
starts to wrap around him.
That's actually how the snakes do behave.
Very different to what you
saw earlier where it used
the back half of its body like
a whip just to wrap around.
That's complete nonsense.
This is at least anatomically
somewhat correct.
[hisses]
Hold there for a second.
This is actually pretty good.
The teeth aren't bad.
They're relatively anatomically correct.
What I was talking about
earlier, the backwards facing.
There's a lot of 'em, which is right.
Now these snakes can open
their mouths up wider than
the width of their body, which
you're seeing him get ready
to do here to consume the guy.
It's actually not bad.
Whoever scripted this,
probably had actually seen
a snake eat something before.
I've never been inside a snake,
so I don't know how real that is.
So when a constrictor consumes its food,
it's almost always completely dead.
In this case, the guy's
feet are literally wiggling
as he goes down the snake's throat.
No animal would do that at
risk of injury to themselves,
because if they're going
to consume something that's
clawing and scratching on the way down,
it's going to do damage
to vital internal organs.
Again, we're back to a little
bit of Hollywood magic,
but at least it's somewhat
anatomically correct.
They do feed from the head
down, not from the legs up.
So that part's right.
He would go down head first.
There would be that kinda
bit of gulping you're
seeing the snake do.
That part's all accurate, but
the reality is, the prey would
already be killed by asphyxiation
before the snake ate him.
And then as you see,
as the prey goes down,
in this case the guy, its
body's actually expanding
to the size of the meal,
and that's accurate as well.
Snakes will do that.
If you feed a snake something,
it can eat something larger
than its own head, because
its jaw can stretch so much,
and their skin is stretchy
enough that they can actually
consume things bigger than
them, and you'll see that
big lump in them as it goes down.
So in this case, what would
typically happen is, a big snake
eats a big meal like that, it's
gonna get pretty lethargic.
It's gonna settle down.
It actually can't have that
meal disrupted too much.
If it does, it will be regurgitated,
because there's so much
whole food in there.
It slowly has to kind of let
the muscles work the prey down
and get to the stomach acids,
which'll dissolve
everything, including bone.
The animal has to kind of
chill in order to do that.
So you can't have a snake
that's gulping down a huge meal,
aka a guy, and then
turning around to gulp down
the next three, because
it's just too much energy.
They're not really capable of that.
Now those are real anacondas
for the first time.
That's kinda nice to see.
In that scene, we've gone
from our monster CG anaconda
to a couple real green anacondas.
These are likely from a zoo or
a captive breeding facility.
And you can see the difference
in what I was saying earlier.
The coloration, you can see the marking.
They're not jet black
with those evil eyes.
They're a nice pale green color,
and they're very beautiful,
they're very sleek, they're very shiny.
There we have the regurgitation
I was talking about.
So this is,
I don't wanna say correct,
but it's not too far-fetched.
If a snake were to eat a big
meal, like a guy like that,
of course it would kill him,
and then if it got bumped
and it was running around,
there's too much energy exertion,
it would just throw him back up.
So watching this scene from Anaconda,
look, it's not my favorite.
It demonizes snakes, one
of my favorite animals.
They shouldn't be demonized.
It's very fabricated for Hollywood.
The behavior of the
animal, the way it whips
its tail around, the way it's out
to actually get someone, it's silliness.
It's not real.
That being said, there's
a couple relatively
anatomically correct things.
The kind of shape of the
animal, the way that it does
constrict its prey, the way
that it bites, the way it
has recurved teeth, all
those things are correct.
So it's a little bit of a balance,
but overall, it's not for the best.
Next up, The Revenant.
[growls]
[yells]
Bears scare me, man.
I'll tell ya, I've worked
with a lot of wildlife
and bears are, they're
tough, and what you see here,
the idea that Leonardo DiCaprio
is hunting and he's kind of
dropped his guard, and all
of a sudden, the ferns start
moving and this animal
charges, totally realistic.
Now the bear looks a little
CG, but the behavior,
totally realistic.
You could be out in the
woods, especially up in the
far north, you're out
hunting, the bear's onto you.
It could be in the springtime
when they're trying to store
up fats, so they're willing
to risk their own bodies
in order to hunt a large
meal like a human being
or a caribou or something
like that, and this whole idea
of it hunting you, charging
out of the bush, totally real.
[yells]
Hold there for a sec.
Now the way he's mauling
Leonardo DiCaprio, again,
seems pretty realistic to me.
He's on top of him, he's overpowering him.
Now bears are highly
intelligent and they know
if they're making a kill,
that's the way to do that.
Again, it looks pretty real.
He's digging in with his claws.
He's doing a lot of damage
in as efficient a manner as
possible without letting any
damage be inflicted on himself.
So that is the way a bear would attack.
I mean, this is a CG bear,
but it's obviously supposed
to be a grizzly or a brown bear.
You know, black bears
are pretty much smaller.
They wouldn't behave in this manner.
They're far more timid.
This is clearly supposed
to be a grizzly bear.
As opposed to CG sounds, like
in some of the other clips,
these are actual bear sounds
that have been put in.
Now they may have been kind
of stretched and warped
a little bit to fit the scene,
but these are real bear noises.
[bear moans]
So a bear's attacking like
that, it's going to cut very,
very deeply, not just because
of the sharpness of the teeth
and the sharpness of the claws,
but rather the jaw pressure
and the immense amount of
strength that that animal
is putting into it.
The teeth and claws, they're
sharp, but they're no sharper
than your puppy dog's at home.
It's just they have so much
strength behind those teeth
and claws that that amount
of damage is, I mean,
they're gouging really, really deep.
Now this part, I kind of don't understand.
And what I mean by that is the bear's
just standing over him.
Now not to say that couldn't
happen, 'cause it could.
A bear could be tired
from making the kill,
tired from the mauling and
just catching its breath,
just admiring its prey, but
I don't know if it would
need to necessarily.
This wasn't like a big
battle for the bear.
He kind of caught Leo,
pinned him down, beat him up,
now it's time to eat and he's not.
He's just standing there for a second.
It almost feels a little
bit too prolonged,
but certainly not outside
the realm of reality.
A bear's gonna attack for two reasons.
The least likely is that it
sees you as a prey source.
That's very unlikely.
The more likely one is that
it's a defensive, aggressive attack.
What I mean by that is, say
this is a sow, a female,
and she has a couple cubs
nearby, she will absolutely
attack to defend her cubs.
She thinks you're another
big predator, and you are.
As human beings, we're apex predators.
That could be the case here,
where the attack is simply
a mauling and it's almost
like a warning that does
a lot of damage and then
she's going to leave it.
She doesn't wanna eat
you, she wants to move on.
So when a bear attacks,
there's two mentalities really.
If it's a black bear, you wanna be loud,
you wanna be aggressive,
and you wanna be dominate.
The reason being, they're
a little bit smaller
and they're far more timid and shy.
A grizzly bear like this,
the accepted idea is that
you play dead, and because
once you play dead,
the animal is done expressing dominance.
It no longer feels
threatened by your presence.
So she's gonna leave you
alone and go back to her cubs.
If it comes in, you can
keep quiet and go limp,
obviously really hard to do,
let the bear attack happen,
then the idea is that she will
retreat, go back to her cubs,
and you can get up and run away.
- [Cameraman] You can hear the cubs.
- You can hear the cubs in the background?
Great, so what that tells me straightaway,
this mother did not
attack out of predation.
She wasn't trying to eat Leonardo DiCaprio
'cause she was starving.
Instead, she felt threatened
by his presence as another
predator in her habitat and
she's protecting her young.
So now she's come in, she's
mauled him, he's rightfully
played dead or he's so injured
that he seems like he's dead,
and the bear's beginning to retreat.
Now it looks to me like
Leo begins to kinda sit up
and say what's going on, is she gone.
And that prompts another attack, right?
She turns around and charges,
and I think as he does,
as anyone naturally would, he
has a firearm and he fires.
That, of course, inflicts
injury on the bear
and provokes an ongoing attack.
So overall on The Revenant,
I would say the bear attack
is the most accurate one that I've seen
of all the clips today.
All right, The Grey.
[growls]
Pause this here.
So now, they're really riffin'
apart, because when you see
Anaconda, you can kind of
forgive the bad CG from 1997.
I think The Grey was made two years ago.
It's hard to forgive such bad
animal CG in this day and age
when you got things like
Avatar, where you're like
wow, this is incredible.
And the first scene of The Grey,
where I'm seeing this here,
you've got this terrible
black CG wolf with the
dripping fangs and the
huffing and puffing of breath.
I mean, it's truly,
we've created a monster.
This is more of a
werewolf than a real wolf,
and that's a bit sad, because
this is supposed to be
telling a story of actual wolves.
So this guy's doing the
absolutely wrong thing here.
He's low to the ground,
he's making eye contact
with the animal, and then he's backing up.
Like, you couldn't do anything worse.
If you're threatened by
a canine, in a one-on-one
stand-off situation like
that, you make yourself big,
you lower your gaze so that
you're not challenging it,
'cause when you make eye
contact with a canine,
specifically a wolf,
you're challenging it.
That's a threat display.
But drop eye contact, say leave me alone,
get big and get loud, and
let the animal retreat.
By being low to the
ground, you're being small,
you're not intimidating, and
by retreating, that instantly
triggers the attack
response, because it says,
I'm prey, I'm scared of you.
If you're ever faced
with an apex predator,
you wanna show them you're the boss.
Whereas if you retreat, straightaway,
they go, I'm in charge.
So he's small, he's retreating,
and he's threatening it.
Like, he's doing everything wrong.
If you were faced with this situation,
you got five of your buddies hangin' out,
and you're all starin' off
a wolf, if they all got loud
and advanced at it, that
wolf's not gonna stick around.
You can't take on five full-grown people.
A wolf's 100 pounds.
That animal would turn and hightail it.
Instead, they're standing off.
They're actually inviting
combat to this wolf,
as opposed to just being
aggressive, being a dominator,
and making the animal retreat.
All right, let's skip ahead.
[dramatic music]
Pause there.
So here we see Liam Neeson,
he's in the den, right,
and we're establishing
that by movie magic.
We see the remains of old animals.
We see the animals underground.
Now you can tell that he
has actually put himself
in too much of a threatening position.
And what I mean by that is, a mother wolf,
just like a mother bear,
she's gonna do everything
in her power to protect her
cubs, pups in this case.
If you're in a wolf's den,
that's a very bad place to be.
No longer are you trying to
trigger the fight or flight
response from the wolf, but
now you're the aggressor.
You're putting yourself in
a position where the mother
has one option, and
that's to get rid of you.
[snarls]
[intense music]
[growls]
Pause there.
Now wolves are very social, pack animals.
They hunt as a pack.
They work together.
They work in unison.
They use audio communication signals
and body language signals,
and they're actually doing
a pretty good job showing that here.
Not only do you have all of
the wolves surrounding Liam
the way that a pack would when
there was a single intruder,
but you have the alpha male,
the dominant male, the largest,
strongest wolf standing on
the highest ground in the best
attack position while
the other animals watch.
Now if there's one animal
that's going to advance
over the others, the first
one should be that alpha.
Then would come in the support players,
all of the other animals,
and they know that
based on the alpha's body cues.
Now we're back to
anthropomorphizing animals.
We're giving them human qualities.
What we're saying is the
alpha is like our villain
from the superhero movie,
and he's like, all right,
this one's mine.
You guys back off.
No wolf's gonna do that.
They're not stupid.
Instead, his pack would stand
there and watch and he may
be the first aggressor, the alpha male,
but then the pack animals
would join in as needed.
Wolves are actually the
most demonized animals
throughout human history,
dating all the way back
into the ancient Romans
and the ancient Greeks
where hieroglyphics where
a man would fight a wolf
and we'd combat a wolf all
the way into cave paintings,
and what's interesting is if
you look into the records of it
there's only ever been
something like three fatal
wolf attacks on humans in history.
In this frame right here, he's
showing a lot of aggression.
His brow is furrowed.
His lips are curled back
expressing his teeth.
He's locked on his gaze with Liam Neeson.
These are all typical canine behaviors,
expressing a challenge,
saying I am here to fight you.
And that part's quite accurate.
What's not accurate is
the way the animal looks.
It just doesn't look like a wolf.
It's too shabby.
It's too dark.
It's just too CG.
Now another movie about wolves
that I haven't seen, Alpha.
[growls]
Hold it there for a sec.
That's actually, straight off the bat,
it seems more realistic.
I mean, one, the wolves
are clearly still CG,
but the way that the wolves
are somewhat communicating,
they're expressing dominance.
You can see they're working
together and they're hunting
like a pack.
That's how wolves do hunt.
- [Cameraman] Are black
wolves a common thing?
- Grey wolves come in a variety of colors,
from basically pure white to
pure black, and these Grey
and brown and tan colors
that you see in between.
In our minds, black wolves,
like black panthers,
they're scarier and more evil,
and that's why in Hollywood
they're the leaders
and they're the biggest
and they're the meanest.
That's absolutely not the case in nature.
[wolves howl]
So here you hear the animals howling
as the kid's stuck in the tree.
It's not unrealistic because
wolves howl to communicate
and signal to other packs and
other animals where they are,
but if they've got prey
cornered in a tree,
they probably don't need to
howl to call others over.
It's kinda pretty and it's nice.
I don't necessarily know
that's what would be happening.
A second ago you saw the
wolves howling while the boy
was in the tree, and
then the very next scene,
the wolves are all gone.
So that actually makes sense.
The wolves corner this kid in the tree.
They go, eh, we can't get him.
He's up there, we're stuck down here.
Let me call and see where
the rest of the family is,
the rest of the pack is.
They howl, they hear in
the distance, oh the pack's
three clicks to the
left, I'm goin' that way.
And they all take off.
But the one animal that's
left behind is, of course,
the one that's injured.
That's interesting, because
they have a real wolf dog
in that clip, meaning an
animal that's the hybrid
between a real wild wolf
and a domesticated dog,
has more wolf traits
physically, but they've used
a real animal and they painted
a bit of fake blood on it,
and I already like this more than The Grey
because the kid's showing some compassion.
He doesn't wanna just murder the wolf.
He knows that the wolf's
an animal, it's a predator,
it was trying to eat him,
but now it's injured,
it can't eat him, and they're
leaving each other alone.
I think in this situation,
the wolf would be far more
terrified and aggressive.
I can understand it's very injured
and it's probably dehydrated,
so it probably doesn't have
a lot of energy to be aggressive,
but I think it would be
growling and snarling if
someone were to approach it.
Keep in mind, this is an animal.
Of course, this is dated
a very long time ago.
This is an animal that's
likely never even seen
a human being before.
Then he picks up the wolf really nice
and now we're gonna fast forward a bit.
Now they're buddies, right.
He's swimming, he's playing with the wolf.
Now it's fun and it's enjoyable to watch,
but wolves are not pets.
They're just not wired that way.
I've worked with a lot of
wolves, even domesticated wolves.
At no point could you be pickin' up
and throwin' a wolf around.
They still have wolf behavior,
they still have pack mentality,
and that would be you trying
to dominate an animal that
otherwise wants to be dominate.
Here you see the wolf is dominate.
He's far more capable of
hunting this wild boar
than the kid is.
I love that.
I love that scene.
It's grounded in historical
scientific theory,
which is that wolves
followed human beings,
humans slowly domesticated
the wolves over generations,
and they worked together to hunt and feed.
Here we've seen it all in the
span of an hour in a movie,
and really it probably took
many, many generations,
but it's great to see the
idea, the human and animal
working together to benefit
each other, and that's why
dogs are man's closest friend.
[growls]
Love that, absolutely love that.
Pause that there.
Here you see the pack's return.
The wolf that's been with
the boy, they've established
a bond, and when the pack,
the alpha from prior, the big,
black, bad wolf comes in to
make the attack, he sees that
the other wolf has become friends
with the boy, so to speak,
and the body language cues
allow that other wolf to relax.
I don't know that it would
be that instantaneous
as you see it here, but the
idea that these animals are
intelligent enough to
say hey, this is my pack,
that's your pack, let's
not fight, is very great,
and it's true, because
animals do respond that way,
especially canines that are
as intelligent as wolves.
Great, love it.
Now I think we're
learning that's a female.
You see the Grey wolf that
the boy's been with and then
the big, black wolf, they
stand off, and then the big,
black wolf drops his guard,
the body posture relax,
and the Grey wolf comes in
and nuzzles under his neck.
It's a mate.
They'd suddenly do that in
body language, and it's nice,
it's well done.
When you compare the The Grey
and Alpha, you see one movie
that truly demonizes
and villainizes wolves,
and another movie where wolf
becomes man's best friend.
So for me it's an easy choice
as to what the better message
and the better movie is.
It's the one where we
respect the animals enough
to bring them into our home
and have an understanding
and learn from them.
It's Alpha.
Next up, The Shallows.
[intense music]
[thuds]
All right, so I'm gonna there.
Okay, so there's a couple things here.
First of all, we have Blake
Lively on a surfboard, right.
She is clearly getting
picked off by a tiger shark.
Great, accurate, done wrong.
Absolutely tiger sharks attack surfers.
Now tiger sharks attack a lot of things.
They're known as the dumpsters of the sea.
But the reason specifically the
tiger sharks have been known
to attack surfers is because
when you're dangling your arms
and your legs off your board,
you look like a sea turtle,
and that's tiger shark's favorite meal.
You have a big round thing in
the middle of your surfboard,
which looks like a shell
and your four flippers bobbin' around.
When tiger sharks do
attack surfers, it's when
they're paddling out or
they're sitting in the lineup.
The notion that this
shark would actually come
through a wave, risking
its own safety to attack
the board is silliness.
It doesn't look like a sea
turtle, it's moving too fast,
and sharks generally don't
want to put themselves
in the surf line.
That's why, for the most
part, you're safe swimming
in the shallows, 'cause sharks
don't wanna come in to waves
where they're gonna get
rolled up onto the beach
and get their gills and
everything else damaged.
It's good that it's a tiger shark.
It's accurate that it's
possible that it could
attack a surfer.
It's bad that it's doing
when she's standing up
on a wave at speed.
[yells]
[splashes]
Hold it there for a second.
Look, having been bitten by
two different sharks myself,
never anything that bad,
I can tell you that looks
like the way that it would go.
The shark would never come up
and knock her off her board,
but at this point where she's
swimming, she's thrashing,
she's making commotion on the surface,
now she looks like an injured fish,
or an injured marine mammal,
or an injured turtle.
The shark comes in for what
they call an investigation bite.
We have hands and fingers, right.
If we wanna figure something
out, we pick it up and go,
hey, check it out.
This is a remote.
If you're a shark, you're
doin' that with your teeth.
- [Cameraman] Where have you been bitten?
- I got bitten here
this year when I was out
doing Extinct or Live,
working with tiger sharks.
This bite was from a lemon shark.
This guy came and lunged
at me to go for my arm,
and I just pulled back and
just caught a single tooth
on the side of his mouth.
If I'd been another second,
that woulda been my hand gone for sure.
[intense music]
Is that a dead whale?
Totally, so, all right, I'm
gonna hold that right there.
All right, now it's adding up.
Now we've got a tiger shark
that's attacking and eating
because there's a dead whale.
Now there's two pieces to this puzzle.
Will there be sharks
around a whale carcass?
Absolutely, but are they going
to bother attacking something
thrashing and swimming around
when they've got an entire
whale to feed on?
Questionable, that's why
I say there's no right
or wrong answer.
They absolutely could, that
instinct could be triggered.
They could see that splashing and go,
I want that fresh meal, or
they could be so full of whale
and lazy and know that
they've got this buffet lunch
over here that they're
not even gonna think
about the thing surfing.
That being said, if I'm
findin' a dead whale on a beach
in Costa Rica, I'm not
surfing anywhere near it.
Talk about a bad place to
be trapped, stuck on top
of a dead whale floating on
the ocean with a shark bite.
So right there, I can see
the bite on her thigh.
First of all, that's in a bad place.
There's some major arteries
there that could be cut
and you could bleed out.
But the shark that I
saw on the wave earlier,
you're talking about a 13
or 14-foot tiger shark.
The jaw of a 14-foot
tiger shark's this wide.
So if that's putting
your thigh in its mouth,
it's taking most of the thigh with it.
There are those investigation
and release bites
like I mentioned earlier,
but the way that it grabbed
and pulled, that's going to
rip flesh as it pulls down.
So that bite is not accurate
for the scene we saw earlier.
What you're looking at is a
bite of something that took
a nibble that's maybe five
feet long, as opposed to
something that's 15-foot long
and dragged her under water.
That entire thigh would be
missing based on the scene
we saw earlier.
All right, I've never seen Jaws,
so let's watch the ending of it.
[splashes]
All right, let's hold
it there for a second.
You can see this toilet
paper roll of a shark
that's launching out of the
ocean and basically sinking
the back of the ship.
Now that's grounded in
the thought that sharks,
like in Seal Island, they'll
launch out all the way
to kill prey.
I get that, but no shark is
ever going to attack a boat
that's four times the length
of it, and beach itself
to try and sink the boat.
You're putting way too
much faith in the animals
intelligence and desire to get
something off of that boat.
- [Cameraman] What about the way it looks?
- Yeah, it's not bad.
It doesn't look great, but
the white around the jaw,
the size of the teeth, the
pointedness of the snout,
it looks like a great white shark.
It doesn't look fake.
Chompin' on board bits, I don't think so.
The notion that this animal
would just be sitting up
on the bow, on the stern of
the boat just flopping its head
back and forth like Pac-man,
just kinda hungry, hungry
hippos, anything that falls
down the boat is cartoonish.
I can't think of any
other way to describe it.
That animal would get
one bite of net and board
and be outta there in a heartbeat.
It doesn't wanna eat those things.
This is graphic. [laughs]
All right, look, let's break it down.
We've got this monster,
murderer, great white, right.
He's way too big, he's way too plastic.
He's smart enough to body
slam a boat to sink it
and then go hungry, hungry
hippos on everything that falls
into his mouth, and then
he gets a bite of flesh,
whatever it is.
It's this guy.
He's gonna chomp it and then he retreats.
I mean, there's so many
things wrong with it.
A shark would never behave like that.
It's never gonna put
itself in that much risk,
but more importantly, I
think, big picture is why?
Why would this animal do that?
That is so much more work than
swimming a couple feet away
to the seal rookery and grabbing
himself a nice tasty snack.
It's funny to even consider this reality,
and maybe in the '70s
when this movie was made
and we had a very poor
understanding of shark behavior,
then sure, but nowadays, we
know that great white sharks
have no interest in eating people
If you swim with great
white sharks in clear water,
they're not going to attack you.
They know that you're not on the menu.
The only instances where people
get attacked by white sharks
are when they're either
provoking them, or when there's
a case of misidentification,
usually because
the water's very dirty.
This whole notion is pretty ridiculous.
So I've now seen clips of
Jaws, clips of The Shallows,
two movies I've never seen
before, but I've now seen
the clips of 'em, and
thumbs down for me as far as
that wildlife behavior goes.
All right, this is Jumanji.
Ah, the big, mean crocodile.
[screams]
- Swim!
- Let's hold that there for a sec.
So I've worked with a lot
of crocodiles and I've never
seen one with stegosaurus
spikes comin' off
of his back like that before.
That thing is ultra mean.
But you know, this is a fantasy movie.
Nobody's saying that this is
the actual wilds of Africa.
He goes to a whole new
world called Jumanji,
and maybe in that world these
animals do behave differently
and they have big back spikes.
I know it's a crocodile.
It's not an alligator.
There's a couple reasons.
One is we're seeing all
African animals in Jumanji.
There's no alligators in Africa.
But secondly, crocodiles are the ones
that are dangerous to people.
Alligators don't hunt
large mammals like people,
but in this situation,
the Jumanji film here,
this animal's actually actively hunting
Robin Williams and family.
When he turns the corner,
based on the fact that he's
from Africa with all the
other African animals
and he's hunting people, this is a croc.
- Alan!
- Judy, swim!
Keep going.
[screams]
I'm gonna hold it there.
So here's somethin' kinda funny.
Now everybody's gonna think
I'm crazy for sayin' this,
but of all these movies that I've seen,
the comedy Jumanji
movie with the fake croc
from the alternate universe
of Jumanji, is probably
the most realistic in behavior so far.
I've seen and been hunted by crocodiles.
Obviously, they haven't gotten me,
but I've seen them hunting,
and that slow motion
along the surface, that
keeping the eye level down
to the water, that totally
cuing in on the prey source,
that's all really accurate
as far as how a crocodile
would actually come into attack something.
Even the bite in the attack
there, dropping under water
before attacking the prey so
that the prey doesn't know
which direction it's coming
from, coming up, jaws open
for the bite, it's pretty good.
Let's just hold it there.
Crocs are very mobile
and they're very agile.
He's not just gonna sit there
while something's pushing
on his jaws, he's gonna do
one little flick of the head
and he's got you, no problem at all.
So the idea that, stay
away from the pointy end,
using your feet to keep the jaws away,
that absolutely wouldn't work.
[screams]
Hold there for a sec.
Now, interestingly, when you
think of telling these stories
of these big, scary animals
like we saw in The Grey,
like we saw in Jaws, and
like we saw in Anaconda,
all those animals are super-sized,
like, they're way too big.
They're double the size,
or in the case of Anaconda,
three of four times the size
of what the animals actually get to.
This one's not.
When you see a crocodile this
size, where his head takes up
most of Robin Williams' torso,
that tells me that you're
looking at about a 20-foot
crocodile, which is very real.
There are 20-foot crocodiles out there.
At one point you see Robin
Williams has his arms
around the crocodile's jaw.
Interestingly enough, he
could actually do that.
The animal has an incredible
bite force going down,
but they do not have a lot of
muscles for opening their jaw.
I've been able to hold
15-foot crocodiles' jaws shut
just with two hands like that.
So holding animal's jaws shut,
the animal's now in trouble,
right, so it goes into
typical crocodile behavior,
something called a death roll.
And you see that as he
submerges with Robin Williams,
and you see it start to roll.
Now when a crocodile attacks,
what it does is it bites
onto something, and then it
rolls it, and it rips the flesh
or rips the limb off
something and then the animal
bleeds out and it eats.
They use it as a defensive
mechanism as well,
as you're seeing here, to
try and shake Robin Williams
off of the croc.
It's actually pretty good.
It's actually anatomically pretty correct.
So I've watched a bunch of the clips now,
and I've seen a lot of different stuff.
Some of it's anatomically
correct, some of it's correct
in behaviors, but
overall what I've seen is
a demonizing of animals, which
I really don't like to see,
because animals are wonderful,
incredible creatures,
and I can understand why you do that.
It tells a good story and
it makes for a good movie,
but as long as people can
realize the difference
between how great animals really
are and a Hollywood animal,
I think you're okay.
