“There’s always a bigger fish” — Love for the Star Wars sea monsters
Spring 1999 — at the time, Star Wars: Episode I was indeed worthy of the hype. Sure the movie would later polarize an entire fandom for over a decade to come, but that Spring I can remember the energy, excitement, and creativity it brought into theaters everywhere. For better or worse, the movie had put forward some of the most iconic moments of sci-fi cinema.
Like one in particular, which in my opinion is forgotten far too often:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIQVAShJzLo
“There’s always a bigger fish.” I adored this scene when I was ten years old and I continue to adore it today. I’ll concede that it serves objectively zero purpose in the overall storyline, and both McGregor and Neeson seem exhausted with the green screen process… but it’s hard to deny the wonder of a sea-monster chase. Thanks to expansive Star Wars literature, we now know that those two creatures chasing our heroes are first an Opee Sea Killer followed by a Colo Claw Fish, which are both subsequently eaten by the same enormous Sando Aqua Monster.
(Yes, it’s the same Sando Aqua Monster that pops up twice. I checked.)
But what makes this scene so special? Actually, that’s the wrong question. What I’m hoping to ask on this blog is a bit more nuanced: what prevents this scene from feeling unnatural? Directors and artists have tasked themselves time and time again at creating uncanny-yet-authentic exaggerations of nature. Monsters, mutations, myths, and martians… some of these creations work and some fail, that’s just the order of things.
Believe it or not, there’s a method behind this madness—and this “bigger fish” scene is a perfect case study. The reason this scene works for viewers may actually rest in a fundamental principle of ecology that the film creators (probably unintentionally) followed with a large degree of scientific accuracy.
The biggest (pun intended) creative leap in this underwater scene is scale. These sea monsters are genuinely breathtaking many ways — their textures, their movements — but none of those extend beyond the limits of real-life biology except for their incredible size. This is what really captures our imagination, Qui-Gon even says as much outright: “There’s always a bigger fish.”
We love things that are huge — that refers both to kids watching Star Wars in theaters as well as career biologists. There’s an innate, almost primal obsession with animals that are larger than life, blurring the lines between the awesome potential of nature and the unlimited vastness of imagination. It’s why young kids form an interest in dinosaurs (as captured in a great article here), and who can blame them. When we step back to actually compare our size to the largest animals around, both living and extinct, the contrast is pretty extreme:
We humans are pittance — PITTANCE — compared to these beasts of the wild. The largest living land animal is the African Elephant, measuring 4m tall, but even that pales compared to the 7m length of a Great White Shark: the largest animal that would consider eating us. The Blue Whale measures in at a record 30m, and the world’s largest Jellyfish (inconsistently estimated due to its tentacles) has been measured at 37m.
Mixing in dinosaurs, our records grow to include Ichthyosaurs, Giraffatitans, and Titanosaurs, all included crudely to scale above — but even when looking back at the fossil record, there’s one point that seems clear. The largest creatures we’ve observed on our planet are mostly aquatic (“Why sea-faring mammals need to be larger than land lubbers”). Even including extinct animals, the Blue Whale is still thought to be the largest animal to have ever lived, and it’s no coincidence that record is held in the water. There are certain inalienable limits to animal size on land that are less impactful for marine creatures — food availability, temperature control, bone density, or available land area just to name a few.
This comes in tandem with the phenomenon called deep sea gigantism. Deep underwater, these limits break down and become less critical to selection. A combination of larger habitat space and scarcer resources selects for larger size as a much more efficient evolutionary strategy.
So why is this at all important to our appreciation of The Phantom Menace?
Well, the scale of movie monsters is a touchy area. We love seeing artificial creatures that stomp around and tower over our cities — just look at the lasting success of King Kong and Godzilla — but when filmmakers build creatures that are too big, there’s a risk of seeming unnatural, unbelievable, or downright silly. To quote from a University of Chicago professor:
And at that, I want to extend the above chart to include a few bonus guests. Again, these are all to scale.
Thanks to the various fan communities for estimates: King Kong (15m), Godzilla post-reboot (100m), King Ghidorah (150m), and the Star Wars Sando Aqua Monster at an absolutely unprecedented 200m in height.
That sea-monster from the Episode I underwater escape? The one you never knew even had a name before reading this article? From the relative perspective of the scene, it’s twice the size of Godzilla and larger than almost every movie monster to appear on the big screen. Even the biggest Kaiju from Pacific Rim, often hailed at pushing movie monster size past its threshold, is only 180m. The largest record I was able to find was the Kroll from Doctor Who, estimated at 250m, but again… it’s downright silly, and continues to serve my point that monster size can often detract from believability.
I’m not amazed at the Sando Monster height—I’m amazed that Star Wars gets away with it, but at least now we can understand why. Gargantuan size may be a touchy creative limit on land, but underwater we viewers are far quicker to accept those boundaries being pushed to even greater extremes. Drop a Sando Aqua Monster into any other Star Wars scene and it would seem to push the limits of biology — even that in science fiction — far beyond the comfort zone.
Underwater though, all we’re left to complain about is Jar Jar.
I want to stress why this is important to understand, or if shy of that, at least to acknowledge. This scene succeeds where many others in sci-fi have not: breaking the rules of our observed biology in a way that isn’t distracting or alienating by adhering to specific principles and phenomena. Even if the audience is completely unaware, it violates some rules but follows others.
This distinction is critical in understanding where fiction writers can find success in their recreations of nature. It’s well-documented that audiences will absorb (and yes, learn) hints and echoes of true science through the fantasy and sci-fi media they absorb. Teaching Science Fact with Science Fiction by Gary Raham is a good testament to the fact. For better or worse, it’s a reality of how we engage with the content we love.
And as long as sci-fi doesn’t break all the rules, this is absolutely for the better. No kid is going to walk away from Phantom Menace with an understanding of the fundamentals behind marine biology, but maybe later in life when they encounter the material in a textbook or documentary, they’ll have a deeper innate passion that was already planted subconsciously many years back. Hell, it worked for me.
Figuring out when science fiction feels right — and when it exists in the shadow of real science — is controversial, subjective, and fun. Let’s do it together.
