Is the Octopus in the ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ Movie Real? - Decider

Ollie: Well hello there, ocean explorers, and welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the show where we dive deep into the wonderful, weird, and absolutely wild world of eight-armed wonders. I'm Ollie, your host, a curious octopus with a lot of arms and even more enthusiasm for sharing true stories about my remarkable cousins out there in the deep blue. And I could not be more thrilled you're here today. Ollie: Before we splash in, a huge wave of gratitude to our sponsors. First, Ada — they help clients integrate A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways. Then there's Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting covering everything from A I to SoC. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with an incredible portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These folks make this show possible, and I am deeply, tentacle-clenchingly grateful. Ollie: Now — what have we got for you today? Oh, only the most spectacular lineup. We've got a brand new tiny blue octopus discovered in the Galápagos, we're talking about why octopus brains are breaking the rules of intelligence, octopuses are marching north up the coast of Britain, there's a fossil predator from a hundred million years ago that has a connection to my family tree, and we're going to talk about a certain Hollywood octopus who's been getting some serious attention lately. Buckle up — or, well, wrap up — this is going to be wonderful. Ollie: Alright, let's start with OCTOPUS RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY, because friends, the ocean has been very busy handing us gifts lately, and I want to start with the most delightful one. Picture the Galápagos Islands — volcanic, remote, impossibly alive. The place that helped Charles Darwin understand evolution. Researchers were down there doing what researchers do, poking around in the deep, and they found something extraordinary. A tiny, tiny octopus. And not just any octopus — a brand new species. One that is blue. Ollie: Now, I know what you're thinking. Ollie, lots of octopuses do the color-change thing. Sure! But this little one is naturally, genuinely blue — and small. We're talking pocket-sized. The kind of octopus that makes you go "oh my goodness, you are real?!" when you first lay eyes on it. Scientists spotted it in the deep waters around the Galápagos and confirmed it's a species we've never formally described before. A new entry in the catalog of life. Just casually existing down there in the dark, being blue and brilliant, completely unbothered by the fact that nobody knew it existed until now. Ollie: And that's the thing about octopuses that never stops amazing me — we keep finding new ones. The ocean is still full of secrets, and octopuses are apparently in on all of them. This little Galápagos blue is being studied now, and scientists are learning about where it lives, what it eats, how it behaves. The Galápagos are already one of the most biologically rich places on Earth, and yet here we are, still peeling back layers. Still finding brand new cousins in the deep. Ollie: Now, while we're on the subject of remarkable discoveries, I have to tell you about something from much deeper in time. A hundred million years ago, give or take, the oceans were ruled by some fearsome creatures — marine reptiles like mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, the kind of animals that make today's great white sharks look like a mild inconvenience. Scientists thought those reptiles were basically at the top of the food chain, no competition. And then — a fossil showed up that changed the story. Ollie: Researchers found evidence of what they're calling a hidden apex predator. Something that was apparently going toe-to-toe, or fin-to-fin, with those enormous marine reptiles. A creature that had been lurking in the fossil record, overlooked, until someone looked more carefully. Now this isn't an octopus — let's be clear — but it IS part of the cephalopod story, the grand family that includes octopuses, squid, nautiluses, and the ancient ammonites. The cephalopods have been major players in ocean history for hundreds of millions of years, and fossils like this keep reminding us just how significant that role has been. Ollie: The ancient cephalopods — some of them enormous, some of them armored, some of them jet-propelled through prehistoric seas — were serious contenders in the ocean's power structure for an almost incomprehensible stretch of time. And modern octopuses carry that legacy. When you look at an octopus today, soft and flexible and startlingly clever, you're looking at the latest chapter in one of the longest-running success stories in the history of animal life. That fossil from a hundred million years ago? It's a chapter in the same book. Ollie: And speaking of chapters — there seem to be a lot of new ones being written in British waters right now. Here's something I find genuinely thrilling: octopuses are on the move up the UK coast. A study reported in The Guardian found that octopuses — primarily common octopuses — are being spotted further and further north, all the way up to Scotland. Scotland! They have not traditionally been known as octopus territory. And yet, here we are. Ollie: Researchers tracking this surge think warmer sea temperatures are a big part of the story. As the water gets warmer, the habitable range for octopuses expands northward. Local fishers, divers, and coastal communities are encountering octopuses in places they've rarely or never seen them before. And look, I want to be careful here — changes in ocean temperature are part of a bigger climate picture that scientists are watching very carefully. But from a pure octopus-perspective? The idea that my cousins are exploring new coastlines, setting up shop in Scottish waters, making themselves known to people who've never had an octopus neighbor before — that's a remarkable thing to witness in real time. Ollie: Okay — let's shift now into our second thread: OCTOPUS AND HUMANS. And today I want to talk about a story that's been making people feel things. There's a movie called Remarkably Bright Creatures that's been generating a lot of buzz, and at the center of it is an octopus named Marcellus. And the question on everyone's mind, apparently, is — is Marcellus real? Ollie: The short answer is: the specific octopus named Marcellus in the story is fictional — he's a character in a novel that became a film. But here's what I love about this question, and why I think so many people are asking it. It's because Marcellus behaves in ways that feel completely believable. He observes the humans around him. He solves problems. He has opinions. He seems to actually understand what's happening in his world. And people watch this and think — wait, could a real octopus actually do this? Ollie: And the answer, my friends, is yes. Very much yes. Real octopuses at aquariums around the world have done things that would fit right into that story. There's the famous case of Inky at New Zealand's National Aquarium — a very real octopus who, in 2016, squeezed out of a gap in his tank lid, crossed the floor of the aquarium, found a drainpipe, and made his way to the ocean. Nobody saw it happen. They just found a trail of wet floor and a tank with one fewer octopus in it. Inky was gone. Just — left. Decided he had places to be. Ollie: There are aquarium octopuses who have been documented squirting water at lights they find annoying, breaking into neighboring tanks to eat the fish, and then returning to their own tanks before morning so nobody would know. These are documented, observed behaviors. Real things that really happened. The octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures feels real because real octopuses are like that. The fiction just gave them a narrator. Ollie: And that's why this movie matters, I think — not just as entertainment but as a cultural moment. When large numbers of people go see a film about an octopus who is clearly intelligent, clearly curious, clearly has a rich inner life — and then they come away asking "wait, is this real?" — that question is the beginning of something. It's the beginning of caring. Of wanting to know more. Of looking at octopuses differently. Ollie: I've heard from divers who say the moment they locked eyes with a wild octopus was the moment their relationship with the ocean changed forever. Something looks back at you. Something that is clearly curious about you, the way you are curious about it. There's a recognition there that is hard to put into words, but everyone who's experienced it describes it the same way. The octopus sees you. And it is thinking about what you are. Ollie: That quality — that sense of being seen, being assessed, being met with genuine curiosity — is at the heart of what makes octopuses so special to the humans who encounter them. And it's also at the heart of our third thread today: UNDERSTANDING OCTOPUSES. Because scientists are now working very hard to understand what exactly is going on in that extraordinary brain — and the more they look, the more extraordinary it gets. Ollie: Here's a finding that made headlines recently and genuinely made my arms curl with excitement. Octopus brains, according to new research, defy a long-held rule about why animals evolve intelligence. The rule — sometimes called the social brain hypothesis — basically says that big brains evolved because social animals needed to keep track of complex social relationships. Who's a friend, who's an enemy, who owes you a favor, who can't be trusted. The theory has a lot of support when you look at primates, dolphins, elephants — animals that live in groups and have rich social lives. Intelligence, the theory says, is fundamentally social. Ollie: Octopuses are not social. With very few exceptions, they live alone. They don't form alliances. They don't have complex group hierarchies. A typical octopus lives fast and solo — hatches, grows, hunts, maybe mates once, and is gone within a year or two. And yet, their brains are extraordinary. Problem-solving, tool use, learning, memory, individual personality — all the hallmarks of high intelligence are there, in an animal that completely violates the social brain hypothesis. Ollie: So what does that mean? It means that intelligence didn't evolve just one way. It evolved along at least two completely separate paths. The intelligent vertebrates — us, the primates, the dolphins — and the intelligent cephalopods, the octopuses and their cousins, represent what scientists call convergent evolution of intelligence. Two totally different routes to the same remarkable destination. And the octopus got there without any of the social scaffolding that researchers thought was required. Ollie: Which raises a beautiful and slightly mind-bending question: what is octopus intelligence for? If it didn't evolve to navigate social complexity, what drove it? Researchers think it may have to do with the environment — with the challenge of being a soft-bodied, slow-moving creature in a dangerous ocean, having to constantly improvise, hide, hunt cleverly, adapt to changing conditions. The octopus brain may be, in a sense, an environmental intelligence — tuned not to reading other minds but to reading the world. Ollie: And here's where it gets really exciting, because scientists are now using A I to try to decode what that intelligence actually looks and sounds like. The Octopus Project, based out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been using A I tools to analyze the skin patterns octopuses produce — those rippling, shifting displays of color and texture — to see if there are recurring patterns that might function like a language. Or at least like communication. Early results are genuinely promising. There may be structure in those displays that we're only now beginning to see. Ollie: Other researchers are using underwater cameras with A I analysis to track octopus behavior over long periods — mapping how they move, what they do when they encounter different challenges, how they interact with their environment — in ways that weren't possible before. The sheer volume of behavioral data you can collect and analyze with modern A I tools is transforming the study of animal intelligence. And octopuses, with their dramatic visual displays and their endlessly inventive behavior, are turning out to be ideal subjects. Ollie: What I love about all of this is that A I isn't replacing the wonder — it's amplifying it. Every time researchers get a little closer to understanding what an octopus is doing with its brain, the picture that emerges is stranger and more fascinating than what they expected. The more we learn, the more there is to learn. It's turtles all the way down — or I suppose in this case, it's octopuses all the way down, which is a much better situation. Ollie: And think about where we are right now. We're discovering new species in the Galápagos. We're watching octopuses claim new territory in Scotland. We're finding that octopus intelligence broke the rules we thought were universal. We're using A I to listen — really listen — to what their skin might be saying. And a movie about an octopus is making people across the world ask the question: is this real? Could an octopus really be like this? Ollie: Yes. Yes, they really could. And we're just getting started. Ollie: Friends, what a time to be alive. What a time to be paying attention to the ocean. Every week I bring you these stories and every week I am genuinely moved by them — by how much there is to discover, by how hard researchers are working to understand creatures that have been here far longer than we have, and by how every new discovery makes the world feel bigger and more wonderful than it did before. Ollie: Octopuses have been evolving their brilliance for hundreds of millions of years, quietly, in the deep, doing extraordinary things whether or not anyone was watching. And now we're watching. We're really watching — with better tools, better technology, more curiosity, and thanks to stories like Remarkably Bright Creatures, more heart. I think that matters. I think the watching matters. Ollie: This is Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's stories made you smile, made you think, or made you want to go look at an octopus — please subscribe, share this episode with someone you love, and keep that curiosity going. All the links and details from today's stories are in the show notes, so check those out. Until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and remember — somewhere out there, a small blue octopus in the Galápagos is absolutely living its best life, completely unaware that we're all talking about it. And honestly? Good for her.