I finally watched "Turbo"

I read about snails so you don't have to!

If you enjoy children's movies as much as I do, then Turbo is sure to provide average-or-better entertainment value for about two-thirds of its 96 minute running time. In terms of movie-watching efficiency, it ranks well above tired retreads like Happy Feet and Toy Story, but is not as good as Up, How To Train Your Dragon, or house favorite Wall-E.

Mild Spoiler Alert, If You Are So Simple-Minded That You Are Unsure What Might Happen In This Movie, Which Obvious Thing Is Exactly What Happens By The Way, And You Do Not Wish To Find Out Just Yet, Yet You Still Expect Me To Provide You Entertainment, However Brief Or Mild, Which I Cannot Do If You Refuse To Work With Me, Then Against My Better Judgement I Will Still Pander To Your Selfish Needs: Please Enjoy This Video Titled, DUBSTEP PUKING RAINBOW GIRAFFES. You Can Thank Me In The Comments.




As I watched little Theo the snail ooze about, narrowly avoiding disasters and lucking into physically improbable greatness, I could not help but think about how his asinine ambition to race the Indy 500 affected those around him. Theo dreams a big, pointless dream. He dreams his dream in the most selfish way possible, putting himself and others in danger, hurting the well-being of his family. His dreams reach their peak alone at night, as he masturbates to the image of his idol, the great and media-savvy racer Guy Gagné. And when, for no obvious reason, his dreams come true, Theo lacks the maturity to cope with greatness. He is passionate but becomes arrogant in his nitrous oxide-derived powers.

A brief digression on the vascular system of snails. The movie clearly shows Theo's transformation from ordinary if somewhat dippy Helix Aspersum to Turbocharged Man-Child. Here are some stills from the movie, courtesy of Ricki Hobson's amazing screen-capture skills:

Engorged Snail Heart

Snail Blood is called "haemolymph." It does not look like this. Do not search for haemolymph images online if you are creeped out by horseshoe crabs.

The amazing part of this all is that it is at least a partially accurate representation of Snail vasculature. Theo's heart has a few too many protuberances for my taste, but in a snail those protuberances do indeed divide into smaller and smaller doodads which fill the space, wimbly-nimbly, oxygenating and circulating. Just like in the movie!

Mostly the film is accurate in that snails have hearts, and their blood/lymph is bluish, even if it does not glow so brightly. An interesting fact about snails though, is that they do not have erythrocytes, the inner-tube looking cells that make breathing worthwhile, for those of you vertebrates who have to breathe. Because the picture above clearly shows erythrocytes, I believe there was an accident in the editing process and instead we were treated to an image from a different creature, one with red blood cells. Perhaps a giraffe. It is too bad they included the wrong footage because what really should have been shown was a bunch of amebocytes, which cells snails actually do have crawling around inside them. Cells. Crawling. Inside of them. AMAZING!

So in the movie, Theo and his nitrous amebocytes end up making it into the Indy 500, despite the fact that nitrous oxide is expressly forbidden in Indy car racing. Gagné, upset at being upstaged, takes a last minute swat at Theo, which somehow debilitates the snotty snail. To be fair to Gagné, he is the greatest racer in the world, about to be defeated by an illegally-nitrous-powered Gastropod in his first race. At the end of the film Gagné shows what it takes to be a true hero: his car destroyed, himself badly burned, he gets out and drags his 3000+ pound Indy car towards the finish line, an act of devotion unheralded in all the literature of man. What does Theo do? Theo is fine. He did not catch fire, or get caught up in a 32-car pileup at 220 miles per hour. He merely lost his magical gift 20 feet from the finish line. Does he soldier on, as Gagné does? No, he curls into a ball, a child in a grownups' race. He cowers there until his brother dives in on a murder of crows (long story) and convinces him to come out and finish the race. That Theo finishes, barely beating out the horribly injured Gagné dragging his 3000-pound racer, is a shame of modern storytelling. Theo is all dreams and no heart; when things get rough, he wants to quit. Gagné is the real hero of the movie, soldiering on despite terrible adversity. This time, I side proudly with the losers.