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.
Gravity is on this list? That movie had the most ridiculous physics.
And a ghost
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.
All of that including Clooney’s motion ( which I was specifically thinking of) falls under angular momentum. It was a subtle joke.
Is there any movie that would be hard scifi?
Moon maybe?
Silent Running shows Saturns Rings as dense micro asteroids when it’s sparse enough to fly though like Cassini did.
How does Clooney’s motion fall under angular momentum? The ISS wasn’t spinning. So everything is angular momentum if you include things that aren’t spinning relative to each other.
Orbital mechanics aside, following Newton’s laws of motion is kind of a basic requirement for any movie that’s not fantasy.
He’s orbiting the earth
That’s the joke about anything in orbit.
So what movie is hard scifi?
Primer, Robocop, Children of Men, Moon, District 9
Watching someone time travel by climbing inside a superconductor ring is hard scifi (Cern is giant superconductor rings and no time travel) but watching an object in space move in a way that it shouldn’t isn’t hard scifi?
Magical anti gravity in District 9 is hard scifi? But an alternative earth future (There is/was no Space Shuttle Endeavor. The Shuttle and ISS never coexisted. The MMU was retired in the 1980’s.) with a long range MMU and Hubble in a different orbit isn’t?
Edit:
Just looked at Robocop. It is filled with Hollywood physics. Man gets shot and gets thrown backwards 5 feet.
Oh and everything inside the base in Moon is Earth gravity.
Correct.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it. I don’t remember loving the movie, but I thought it got kudos for getting the physics right. No?
They flew from the Hubble Space Telescope to the ISS using a Manned Maneuvering Unit, nothing about that is “getting the physics right”.
The part that had me screaming at the TV was where George clooney’s character and Sandra Bullock’s character were tethered together. There are attached to the space station via straps. George Clooney releases the clip and immediately goes flying off into space. There’s no spinning, nothing at all pulling him away. If he unclipped, he would just hang there.
I’m not trying to be a stickler here, but if you’re making a movie about space following the basic details of how things move around in space is kind of important.
The media got paid for writing positive stuff about it. It was a really shitty movie and I will never understand it’s high rating in my life…
George Clooney was actually super annoying in it too. It was like putting the Oceans 11 character in a space suit with no changes in personality.
Both of them had no real personality in the whole movie, it was carried by CGI all in all.
Maybe you’re thinking of interstellar. They got a lot of kudos for the work they did imagining what a black hole would actually look like.
I might be conflating them? I saw both for sure. The more I’m thinking about Gravity, the more I’m remembering stuff that pissed me off. I’m also remembering a book where a woman astronaut gets stuck out in space and has to throw something to move the other way - maybe it was in Sevenes? I don’t know, I read a lot of SF and sometimes it runs together.
Could the book have been Gravity? There was an unrelated book with that title about a woman in space
Hmmm, no, I don’t think so, but good guess
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.