We took a trip through decades of the genre and came up with a list of the most important and best hard science fiction movies of all time. They are the essence and the foundations of the book of sci-fi rules that's still being written as we, the audience, become much more self-aware of our relationship with technology, the future, and whatever those two will bring.
Doesn’t contain Moon, 12 Monkeys, The Arrival, Alien, District 9… there are quite a few movies I would out ahead of Ad Astra and Sunshine at the very least. And possibly Gravity and Solaris too. Also, listing 2001 in 15th place???
Doesn't contain The Arrival either. Or Moon, or Alien or Twelve Monkeys… Basically there are a lot of more deserving candidates then Gravity, Ad Astra and Sunshine.
Both the book and the screenwriting required the invention of a form of alien linguistics which recurs in the plot. The film uses a script designed by the artist Martine Bertrand (wife of the production designer Patrice Vermette), based on scriptwriter Heisserer's original concept. Computer scientists Stephen and Christopher Wolfram analyzed it to provide the basis for Banks's work in the film.[32][33] Their works are summarized in a GitHub repository.[34] Three linguists from McGill University were consulted. The sound files for the alien language were created with consultation from Morgan Sonderegger, a phonetics expert. Lisa Travis was consulted for set design during the construction of the scientist's workplaces. Jessica Coon, a Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages, was consulted for her linguistics expertise during the review of the script.[35]
IRC when I watched it, it seemed to make references to the work of Niklas Luhmann, systems theory and of course Sapir–Whorf.
Sure, those aren't hard sciences, but then again Asimov's the Foundation is also about sociology.
Certainl y as deserving to be on the list as Solaris or Stalker. I absolutely love those movies, but they're very religiously inspired rather than science based.
For me it was just the sheer improbability of getting out alive. Missions to space are about precision and there's no room for error. I figure that anyone on the ISS will be on the escape module before such relatively large detectable debris even hits. The film was a bit of a dramatisation to say the least.
If your complaint is they didn't realistically portray angular momentum and also she went crazy and imagined someone who wasn't there, then the only hard scifi movie in the list is The Martian.
Not just angular momentum. She flew hundreds of miles and drastically changed orbit in an MMU. And when George Clooney died there was nothing pulling him away from the space station. The movie is called gravity, but they weren't following the basic rules of how things work when there's no gravity.
It would be like someone hopping on a child's scooter and chasing down a bullet train three states away, or having a character randomly able to fly. If you're going to break the basic rules of how the universe works, you have to provide an explanation. If the explanation is magic, you have to have things that are magic and non-magic, and a system of how magic works. This is as much hard science fiction as the Fast and Furious movies.
I don't even care about the ghost, people hallucinate.
My only nit pick about the Martian is that there isn't enough atmosphere on Mars to cause the kinds of winds they show. Still a solid movie though.
That's very subjective. I hate Interstellar because I think it's laughably dumb but many other people have a raging hard-on for that shitty movie. Ad Astra was very weird and very boring, but I liked the interesting visuals.
That site is awful. Has a nice little "Accept all" button for its popup, but you gotta go through thousand partners it sells your data to in order to even try to reject.
This is some serious malicious intent shit.
Hmmm, strange, I just got the pop-up saying I was running an ad blocker, but there was an option to continue without disabling and nothing further came up.
One of the rare examples of sci-fi mixed with a skillfully unfolded mystery. Even when you know 'the answer', there are plenty of 'how did they do that' film-making mysteries.
I forgot to mention his entirely 'I, Robot', VG 2004 film ... maybe because robots don't don't seem so science-fictionish these days...
I loved Niven’s books, one of my favorite sci-fi authors. However, he might be a hot potato for studios, he is an outspoken libertarian and may not be the best to put in front of a camera with many studios keeping a close eye on stars' public persona and statements.
Plus, I don’t know how you’re gonna make films about Luis Wu fucking his way around the Ringworld with various aliens. Really gonna have to sanitize the story a bit, or all of Niven’s aliens are going to have to be transformed to Star Trek aliens, basically humans with some weird shit on their nose and forehead.
All of the aliens that Wu is fucking on the Ringworld essentially are Star Trek style aliens.
Spoilers for decades old scifi: >!Star Trek aliens are almost all humanoid because a humanoid progenitor species seeded the galaxy with DNA that would eventually give rise to humanoid life. Ringworld is even more direct than that: it was originally peopled by the humanoid Pak, but they left a bunch of gaps in the ecology and stopped maintaining the ecosystem, so humanoids evolved to fill the empty ecological niches. Hence, humanoid otter-people, bison-people, and jackal-people, all of whom can fuck each other.!<
I enjoyed Big Hero 6 but one of the top defining “hard” sci fi movies of all time, in the same list as Metropolis?? All because of its supposed sophistication in portraying AI? “AI is good for once!” Uhhh it’s totally a case of green light means good robot and red light means evil robot. Cute movie but this list is hot garbage.
I know Internet lists and opinions and all that, but I'm sorry but any list that puts 2001 behind Interstellar is one to ignore, at least the rankings.
The long, slow scenes in 2001 are fairly unique. Unlike long scenes filled with action like you get in, say, Children of Men, the long slow scenes in 2001 - the space shuttle dockong, the moon landing, the scene at TMA-1 excavation sites, not much is happening, or if it is, you understand whats happening fairly quickly. I like them personally, and I compare them to being on an airplane waiting to taxi - inherently boring with nothing to do, but unique and exciting for some and being exposed to all sorts of interesting things out the window like luggage carts, pushback tractors, other jets milling around. Boring, but fascinating. Its a very different style from modern fast-paced films though.
I agree. At this point I get excited when I think a list has mostly the right things on it (this one is hot and cold there) - getting the order right, or even close, seems like too much to ask.
Solid first few, then it went to kid’s films? Really not impressed by the list at all, like the furthest they reached back was Blade Runner and only mentioned it because it’s popular, not because it was a genre defining film.
Blade Runner absolutely brought cyberpunk to the big screen, it was absolutely genre defining for a lot of people. Prior it was just Neuromancer that imagined it.
Plus they had "Metropolis" from 1927, did you read the whole list? Lol
Really excited to see Coherence on a list with so many other greats. It’s a great thriller movie and one of my favorites to watch with others. Provokes fun conversation about “what would you do in that situation?”
I liked its portrayal of “how would I outsmart myself, an identical me that’s also trying to outsmart me back?”
Watching 7 people all try to do that together makes for a lot of interesting drama, and shakes out much that they’d hoped to hide about themselves. In fact that’s exactly how some of the characters try to outsmart themselves: by going for that jugular vein of deep dark secrets no one knows. Fucking brutal.
And all that would be impossible to portray without sci-fi. This movie’s vehicle for the sci-fi elements is dumb as rocks: a comet passes overhead and fractures quantum spacetime. Wut? It’s not an important point but damn, at least make it sound like you tried.
Finding this on the list was nice because I'd watched Coherence on some pirate streaming site and then forgot the name of the movie. Such a great movie.
No Europa Report, probably the hardest of sci-fi movies ever (~9.5 on Mohs scale)? Most movies on that list are somewhere around 5...6 on the Mohs scale, with some (GATTACA, 2001, Ex Machina) around 7...8 and only Martian at 9. Sunshine, Stalker and Coherence are not hard scifi at all, ~2...3.