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.

  • Rolando@lemmy.world
    89·
    1 year ago

    Their list:

     15 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

 14 Interstellar (2014) 

 13 Gattaca (1997) 

 12 Solaris (1972) 

 11 Ex Machina (2015) 

 10 Coherence (2013) 
 
 9 Sunshine (2007)  

 8 Primer (2004) 
 
 7 Stalker (1979) 

 6 Gravity (2013) 

 5 THX 1138 (1971) 
 
 4 Ad Astra (2019) 
 
 3 Contact (1997) 
 
 2 The Martian (2015) 

 1 Blade Runner (1982)

    doesn’t contain Arrival (2016) wtf.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
      47·
      1 year ago

      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???

    • mateomaui@reddthat.comEnglish
      25·
      1 year ago

      doesn’t contain Arrival (2016) wtf

      I agree, that was one of the most thought provoking scifi films I’ve seen in a long time.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • grahamja@reddthat.com
        9·
        1 year ago

        Lol I saw that movie this year and it was a valiant effort, but I thought it was ridiculous to see Charlie as a crazy astronomer.

    • Troy@lemmy.ca
      6·
      1 year ago

      Conspicuous in its absence: anything animated, like Ghost in the Shell (1995), which I’d argue is harder than quite a few things on this list.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      104·
      1 year ago

      Great movie, but I’m not sure it’s considered “hard SF.” There’s no real basis to anchor much of the science in it.

      • toddestan@lemm.ee
        23·
        1 year ago

        I’d say the same thing about “Sunshine” and “Interstellar”.

        Some movies I might consider including, in no particular order:

        • Moon (2009)
        • 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
        • Silent Running (1972)
      • Rolando@lemmy.world
        8·
        1 year ago

        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]

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film)

        • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          81·
          1 year ago

          If you’re trying to say that the fact that they invented a realistic language for the film makes it hard SF, I think that’s quite a stretch. What’s the basis for

          spoiler

          a language changing a human’s concept of time and allowing them to remember the future

          ?

          • Rolando@lemmy.world
            9·
            1 year ago

            Sure, good point, I think of the movie Arrival as two parts:

            For most of the movie, a scientist is struggling with a novel interesting scientific problem with guidance from subject matter experts who have established environmental knowledge but not theoretical insight, with a great deal of interference from funders, with inter-team rivalries and a collaborator / competitor tension with similar teams around the world. The problem in question is based on linguistics with the type of thoroughness that is never shown on screen and rarely in print SF. (Compare it to the “Shaka when the walls fell” episode of TNG. I like that episode! But it’s cartoony by comparison.) So both the practice and the principle of the research shown has a scientific basis, and if the movie had ended with the lead scientist solving the problem then I think we’d all agree it’s Hard SF. However, we also have the last part of the film.

            You question the scientific plausibility of the last part of the film. Regarding the story the film is based on, apparently:

            In the “Story Notes” section of Stories of Your Life and Others, Chiang writes that inspiration for “Story of Your Life” came from his fascination in the variational principle in physics. -source

            but I don’t know enough to judge that and though it was kind of uplifting, the last part of the film was qualitatively different from the first, and I agree seems a lot less “Hard SF”.

            To recap, I argue that at least the first part (a majority?) of the movie is Hard SF. Now the question is: does the last part disqualify it from a) being on this list and b) being Hard SF? Regarding a), the authors of the list say “Contact is hard sci-fi by association because it’s not a very realistic film” so they are taking a very forgiving definition of Hard SF. Therefore I stand by my assertion that Arrival is qualified to be on that list. By virtue of the quality with which the first part of the movie proceeds, I argue that it also deserves to be on that list. Regarding b) whether Arrival is Hard SF beyond the definition used by that list I am less certain.

            • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              6·
              1 year ago

              I’m with you on the first part, but the fact that the whole conclusion to the story - the solution to the mystery - ends up being as close to fantasy as to SF to me makes it not a hard SF film. But we’re talking about terms for things that exist on a spectrum, not crisply defined black and white. I don’t begrudge your take on it, I just feel differently.

            • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
              4·
              1 year ago

              I think there is a large gap between Contact and Arrival. Contact involves creating a giant machine that allows ftl communication. Arrival involves the idea that we are born with our neurons already physically imprinted with every memory we will ever save. This is already known to be wrong because we have observed change in neurons.

            • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              101·
              1 year ago

              I don’t think we’re connecting here. Hard science fiction is science fiction with an emphasis on scientific accuracy or plausibility. It’s sort of a subgenre, and this list is about movies in that subgenre. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t great SF movies outside of that subgenre, but this isn’t about those.

      • Hyperreality@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.