When it comes to unraveling the mysteries of film,
no mission is impossible.
Hello, internet! Welcome to Film Theory.
Now, you guys all know how much I love movies from video games, right?
*Laughing*
Sorry,
I just make myself laugh sometimes.
Anyway, this one's a little bit different, since
today, we're talking about Hitman,
which is much more "Bourne identity" and much less
"Super Mario the movie."
In case you haven't seen it yet, the non-spoiler premise of Hitman: Agent 47
is that a top-secret organization has been modifying human DNA to splice
together the best genes and create superhumans.
They train their little genetic creations from birth to become the ultimate killing machines,
and
that's about all I can talk about without stepping into spoiler territory,
so, hey! Avert your eyes and go to the movies, then come back and watch this, because
this episode is really, really good. Or better yet,
click on the Film Theory
playlist, rack me up some retention time,
YOU go see the movie,
come back, and then watch this video.
we all win!
But mostly me, because that sweet
sweet retention time.
Seriously, you're gonna wanna watch this one.
Okay, you back?
Picking popcorn kernels out of your teeth?
Wiping artificial butter substitute off your fingers,
but still getting your keys all greasy?
Good.
On we go.
So Agent 47 is cool and all, but for me, the most interesting
character with the least interesting name is John Smith,
who has this bizarre knack for staying alive despite being SHOT.
Repeatedly.
In a typical spy movie, you have your villains! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sure, but they're just regular guys.
When you finally shoot them
(which, granted, does take about six scenes and two expensive car chases)
they do tend to, you know...
die.
In Hitman though, the problem is that when the hero
shoot the bad guy, John Smith,
they have to keep shooting him.
Like, this guy seriously cannot die.
BANG! You're dead!
Oh.
No, just kidding, you're...still here!
Oh! Okay, you're back again...
Discount bullets are the worst!
There's literally one line in the movie
that actually explains how he's pulling this off.
"He has subdermal body armor."
"Pretty crazy, huh?"
That's it! That's all we get in terms of exposition.
"Subdermal armor."
As in, he has a bulletproof shield that sits under his skin.
Yeah.
Okay.
Nice try.
Why doesn't John Smith just say resurrection stone?
That would have been just as plausible, right?
Wrong.
Believe it or not, the technology to create bulletproof skin actually exists.
Basically, what we're talking about here is a bulletproof vest.
But instead of wearing it under your clothes, you wear it under your skin.
Okay, what do we know that's bulletproof? Obviously, old Zachary Q isn't installing
steel plates under his skin, So we need a few other ideas.
Let's start with the most famous bullet stopper:
Kevlar.
It's weird, isn't it, that whenever someone's like "Oh yes! The shield was
fortified with kevlar", everyone's always like "Ah!" "Yes!"
"Oh!" "Of course" "Kevlar!" "How droll."
As if any of us actually know what Kevlar is.
I mean, we all pretend like we're super familiar with it because it shows up in
every episode of Burn Notice, but until doing the research for this episode,
I, for one, had no idea that it's actually just really strong plastic.
Not like this plastic, or that plastic,
but like the Superman of plastic.
In fact, it would be stronger than the old "Man of Steel," since it's five times stronger than steel by weight.
More importantly than just strength, though,
we need to take a look at its tensile strength.
Tensile strength is a measure of a material's resistance to tearing,
Or, basically tells you how much force it takes to break through it.
Units of tensile strength are megapascals. MPas. So the MPa of a
piece of armor tells you the force you need to put on it to break through it.
Kevlar has an unbelievably high tensile strength of about 3,750 megapascals,
compared with steel, which is about 650.
Making it a super appealing option for bulletproof vests and helmets,
but not so much for putting under skin.
Even though Kevlar is light, it's nowhere near that light.
And perhaps more importantly, it's still nowhere near as flexible as human skin.
In the movie, we see John Smith ducking, rolling, jumpin' n' jivin'.
In other words, his movement isn't limited
by whatever he's got under there.
And by "there" I mean his under skin armor not his Fruit of the Looms.
In other words, our armor needs to be extremely flexible.
It takes at least 20 layers of Kevlar to stop a bullet, and these layers aren't
like your normal fabrics.
They're plastic, so no Downy softness here.
And while it's a lot lighter than steel, it's still too heavy.
We see ol' John Smith running and jumping at top speed.
It's true he's genetically engineered to be strong,
but it would be a big burden to be slowed down by armor.
With Kevlar vests weighing in at eight to ten pounds,
Johnny would have a hard time keeping up with Agent 47.
But if you thought Kevlar was the cutting-edge, ha!
Someone hasn't been reading their American chemical society publications lately.
No? That one's just me, huh? Ok, fine. Let me catch you up on what you've been missing.
There are a few new players in the miracle substance game lately.
One of which is nanocellulose.
Nanocellulose is like the high-tech material for hippies.
Made from all natural organic nano-sized particles that
actually come from wood, algae, or even bacteria, and are basically purified all
the way down to the molecular level, then pressed together to form a crystal
structure that's eight times stronger than steel, more flexible than plastic,
and when thin is even see-through.
There's also a lot of really cool applications for nano cellulose, from
display screens for phones, bendable organic batteries, and, you guessed it,
bulletproof armor.
The tensile strength of nano cellulose is reported to be
different things based on the preparation, but by weight,
it's comparable to Kevlar. And because it's not plastic, but instead an organic material,
it's more flexible and could theoretically be implanted under our skin.
One of the less intuitive things that we can gather from the movie is
that the armor John Smith is using has to be biologically safe.
This may be sci-fi, but at a fundamental level, John Smith still has human DNA,
which means his body is susceptible to the same things we are.
And the human body generally doesn't have a whole bunch of unidentifiable junk sitting around it.
This "au naturale" armor would seem to make a good
candidate, except for the fact that it's a bit too "naturale".
In the sense that it could actually react with your body.
Cellulose is a material found in plants.
If you remember from fifth grade biology, it makes up plant cell walls.
It's in a ton of our foods, and people eat it all the time,
because even though we humans can't digest it it makes us feel full.
The way it does that, though is by reacting with what's already in our bodies:
Water.
Cellulose is extremely porous, and it attracts water molecules that stick to
it on every side.
Nano cellulose, exposed to water, blows up to hundreds of times its volume.
That's why eating things with cellulose make you feel full. Because literally its
bloating you with water.
if you were to put nanocellulose under the skin, the water that's in your body
would be absorbed and stretch you out like a human balloon.
Oh my gosh! does this nano cellulose make me look fat?
Even though the armor itself would be relatively light, the water that pulled
around it would add pounds, and give your whole body of bloated, pillowy texture.
And definitely not the svelte Johnny Smith we've come to know and love.
But wait! We're not done.
There is, in fact, a miracle substance that will allow us our perfect
under armor, or I guess, under skin armor:
Graphene.
Like its compadre, nanocellulose, it's a carbon-based sheet, but unlike nano cellulose,
there's nothing else in it.
While other materials are a mix of carbon, oxygen, and a couple other elements,
graphene is unique, because it's made completely out of
locked carbon crystals that can exist as thin as one molecule and can be
stacked in layers to form a crystal lattice.
If that concept doesn't sound familiar, it should.
In principle, it's the same structure that's used to build a diamond,
the hardest substance in the world
If you were to wear under skin graphene armor,
you'd literally be wearing diamond armor under your skin!
If you're talking tensile strength, compare Kevlar's 3000 megapascals to
Graphene's 130,000!
And not only that, compare the weight of Kevlar or steel to graphene,
where a single layer of graphene covering an entire football field
would weigh less than a gram.
An entire football field! Less than a gram!
And if you're worried about fitting it under your skin, don't!
Since graphene is truly only one molecule thick, you would need to stack three million layers
of this stuff to get one millimeter in height.
Which is mind blowingly thin,
but begs the question:
"How thick does this stuff need to be to fulfill the 'bullet stopping' part of our bulletproof skin theory?"
Well, it turns out that tests are already being run on graphene using micro-bullets
literally micro pellets shot at thin layers of graphene to test it's stopping power.
In experiments at Rice University, with micro bullets being shot
at three kilometers per second,
3x faster than an AK-47 bullet,
a 100-nanometer thick layer of graphene stopped the bullets. 100 nanometers!
The way it's stopping these micro bullets was by stretching and spreading the
impact force out over a wide radius, which caused the graphene to bend a lot,
sure, but not to break. Yes, it's only been tested on a micro scale, testing it
against steel shows that even in very thin layers it works ten times better
than steel armor, with a tiny fraction of the weight and practically unlimited flexibility.
Which makes it sound like the perfect fit to our John Smith
mystery, but then what about the human body?
We talked about the bloaty inconvenience of nano cellulose, but is graphene any better?
Actually, yes. Otherwise, this episode would have a really unsatisfying conclusion.
Because graphene is made of, in theory, a perfectly uniform carbon structure,
it's almost totally nonreactive.
If any of you remember high school chemistry,
it's never really the carbon atoms that are doing anything exciting.
It's always the oxygens, or the chlorines that are getting all the action.
They're like the swinging singles of the atomic world.
Carbon is like the married friend that doesn't come to the bar with the gang on Friday nights
anymore, because once it's in a molecule, it's just happy to hang out.
This means that graphene isn't going to be reacting with water, and it's not going to dissolve.
It's just gonna stay there until you need it to help avoid death for the
twelfth time this weekend.
Seriously, John Smith, consider your actions.
So all in all, when Johnny Smith is wearing his graphene armor, it's just
sitting in an ultra-thin, ultra flexible sheet of diamond-like hardness right under his
skin, made completely of carbon, reacting with nothing except the bullets he's
taking a few times an hour. So graphene has a tonna superlatives.
You know what else it's the best at? Conductivity.
Graphene has been classified as the most conductive material in the world
meaning that would protect the wearer from bullets better than any other
substance, it's not the kind of thing you'd want to be wearing in a thunderstorm.
But still, not a bad trade-off for being indestructible.
So, in the end, what started off as one of the most improbable villains in an action movie,
John Smith's "subdermal titanium body armor" turns out to be an awesome example of
cutting edge and completely plausible tech.
Wait, did they just say subdermal TITANIUM armor?
After all this, and he's not even wearing the stuff?
Ugh. Well, in the end I suppose it was
just a theory. A Film Theory! and cut.
Welcome back to the
SUPER AMAZING END CARD TOURNAMENT!
where I'm curious. If you had the chance to implant yourself with subdermal super
skin like graphene, would you do it?
Like, it's a cool idea in theory, I get it, but seriously,
what are you doing in your life that you would need something like that?
It's not like you're getting mugged every time you're
headed to the corner store for a gallon of milk,
or if you are, I'm sorry for that joke, and I would also
recommend trying to move.
Please move from your current residential area.
Anyway, I was just curious what you would do.
Yes or No? Click on one to cast your vote and get sent to the channel page where
you can watch all the other nifty videos we've been making lately.
Digital movies and Frame by Frame have had some stellar uploads lately, so I'd
go and check out those series if you haven't yet.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a bow tie to tie.
I don't care how smart you are, those things are tough.