There are no limits when it comes to hard sci-fi. The following movies are proof of the essence of the genre, which allows us to see the inexplicable.

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
    86·
    11 months 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
      46·
      11 months 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
      24·
      11 months 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.

      • grahamja@reddthat.com
        9·
        11 months 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.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      103·
      11 months 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
        22·
        11 months 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
        7·
        11 months 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
          71·
          11 months 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
            8·
            11 months 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
              5·
              11 months 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
              3·
              11 months 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
              71·
              11 months 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.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      11 months 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.

    • Troy@lemmy.ca
      6·
      11 months 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.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      94·
      11 months ago

      Haven’t heard of half of them. And no Alien? What silliness.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      23·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • Landmammals@lemmy.world
        6·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
          11·
          11 months ago

          She flew hundreds of miles and drastically changed orbit in an MMU.

          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.

          • Landmammals@lemmy.world
            1·
            11 months ago

            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.

            • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
              11·
              11 months ago

              How does Clooney’s motion fall under angular momentum

              He’s orbiting the earth

              So everything is angular momentum

              That’s the joke about anything in orbit.

              following Newton’s laws of motion is kind of a basic requirement for any movie that’s not fantasy.

              So what movie is hard scifi?

                • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
                  41·
                  11 months ago

                  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.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      12·
      11 months ago

      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?

      • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
        161·
        11 months ago

        They flew from the Hubble Space Telescope to the ISS using a Manned Maneuvering Unit, nothing about that is “getting the physics right”.

        • Landmammals@lemmy.world
          6·
          11 months ago

          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.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
        71·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          11 months ago

          Both of them had no real personality in the whole movie, it was carried by CGI all in all.

      • Landmammals@lemmy.world
        3·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          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.

      • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • nodimetotie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      I hate Ad Astra so much. I was so hyped for it and then almost left the theater when we were watching it.

      Gravity is not too terrible. Rewatched it recently. It’s a fun watch the first time but it’s too shallow for subsequent views.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      Gravity is not bad IMHO, but it lost its hard sci fi cred ::: spoiler with the Sixth Sense shenanigans ::: .

    • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • kalkulat@lemmy.world
    21·
    11 months ago

    Hard to define ‘hard’, a few more I liked: (no ranking)

    • The Time Machine (both the Pal and the Wells films; quite different)

    • Dark City (1998, Pryas)

    • Forbidden Planet (1956, Wilcox)

    • The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Wise)

    • Fifth Element (hilarious, Besson, 1997)

    • Alien (Scott, 1979)

    • 13th Floor (Rusnak, 1999)

    • Stargate (1994, Emerich)

    • Steamboy (2004, Otomo)

    Movies made from famed series I’d REALLY LIKE to see:

    • Ringworld (Niven, a crime noone’s DARED to try).

    • Some setting of Riverworld. (Farmer)

    • ANY of Neal Stephenson’s SF books, esp. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Anathem.

    (Not even the BBC? I mean, who expected Doctor Who to get THIS far?!)

  • thoro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    19·
    11 months ago

    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.

    All good movies on the list, though.

    • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      7·
      11 months ago

      2001 is so hard to watch. I’ve started so many times but keep getting distracted. Interstellar, while not perfect, kept my interest better.

      • Agent641@lemmy.world
        5·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
      81·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        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

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 months ago

          To clarify: Yes, you’re absolutely correct that Blade Runner was genre defining. However, my reference was regarding the list itself…referencing the other films it’s like it was chosen because “of course” it has to be chosen, not because the list creator actually tried to define the quality of the rest of the list to match the impact had on filmmaking or the genre like Blade Runner did.

          • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            11 months ago

            You’re not wrong there, plenty of the choices seem like what a casual person who doesn’t even really seek out Sci Fi would think of as “genre defining.”

            I mean really, arrival? It’s basically just Slaughterhouse 5’s Tralfamadorians but without the existential non-meaning attached. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it’s just another good enough film from the last decade.

    • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
      3·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, very disappointing, was looking for more hard sci-fi stuff.

      Edit: Because nobody listed it, Stowaway was good and reasonably hard sci-fi.

      • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        11 months ago

        Hard to find a general public that’ll justify the expenditure. Books on the other hand…

  • RagnarokOnline@programming.dev
    9·
    11 months ago

    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?”

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • mrnarwall@lemmy.world
      16·
      11 months ago

      Okay, your comment is at the top, so here is my take on the list:

      There is a lot of overlap on this list and other “best (whatever) scifi” that pop up every so often. Yes Blade Runner was iconic and influential, but I already knew that.

      • 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) | Good start. great visuals. lacks some context in the ending that are half explained in interviews and such. Personally, I like the book’s take on it more.
      • Interstellar (2014) | A Nolan film. Also great visuals. This is one of the first movies I saw that somewhat accurately portrays what black holes are supposed to look like. It has a bunch of scenes where space or relativity or physics, etc, things are explained to experts that should already know what is being said. It works to get that info the viewer, but I found it a bit jarring
      • Gattaca (1997) | Anything produced by Danny DeVito (yes that one) gets my money. This is a big “What If” movie where the question is “In a world where most everyone can select the genetic makeup for their children, how does someone born naturally fit in and live?”.
      • Solaris (1972) | Never seen it, but I’ve heard good things. I tried to watch the remake with George Clooney, but I couldnt get in to it.
      • Ex Machina (2015) | Great movie on the idea of an actual concept call the “Turing test”. I will point out there are some trigger warnings
      • Coherence (2013) | never seen it. I added it to my list
      • Sunshine (2007) | I couldnt get in to this one. It may be because I just wasnt in the mood for some hard space scifi (They are trying to re-start the sun, how cool does that sounds?), or it could be because of the content. I’ve heard of a lot of people liking it, so check it out if it sounds interesting to you.
      • Primer (2004) | This is a great take on how suddenly having the ability to time travel might affect someone. There are some nested time line stuff that could be hard to follow, but overall great
      • Stalker (1979) | Haven’t seen. it sounds intriguing though
      • Gravity (2013) | This is science fiction in the sense that this story is fictional and takes place in space. Without being a nasa expert, everything seems to be within today’s level of technology. You could think of it as a disaster movie, but set in space. Overall fun, but in a different way than some of the other movies on this list
      • THX 1138 (1971) | I hated this movie. I find it derivative of Ayn Rand’s Anthem, or Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451. Those books, plus THX 1138 feature a protagonist who is a cog in their own dystopia who breaks free and goes on a massive escape, eventually finding that the world is not as destroyed as they were told to believe. I felt like it suffered from all the same criticisms that George Lucas was given during the original star wars trilogy, but without anyone to refine his idea into something more unique or appealing.
      • Ad Astra (2019) | Great visuals, boring story about a man who cant move on from his deadbeat dad
      • Contact (1997) | Carl Sagan’s story about humanity being contacted by an alien race and given further instructions. It does an interesting exploration of science vs faith when confronted by aliens
      • The Martian (2015) | Silly space action where a botanist figures out how survive on Mars and contact Nasa who have no idea that he is alive
      • Blade Runner (1982) | Humans have created manufactured clone robot people. they dont like being slaves by default and revolt. Now they are hunted to extinction. Harrison Ford is the type of officer assigned with tracking down some on Earth. Amazing visuals, weird narrative. There are like, 5 different cuts of this movie and I dont find any of them particularly good. I like the sequel more.
      • voluble@lemmy.world
        5·
        11 months ago

        Sounds like you’re interested in sci-fi movies with a deeper philosophical story to tell. For that reason, definitely watch Tarkovsky’s Solaris. From what I understand, it bears literally no resemblance to the ‘remake’.

        I know Stalker often gets put in the sci-fi category, but I’m not sure it will satisfy someone setting out with typical expectations of the genre. It’s a great film though, and the dream sequences are peerless in film history.

        Tarkovsky’s films very much run against the grain of Western cinema - they are often experimentally slow, to offer an extended exploration of a philosophical or aesthetic idea. They’re extremely strange and unique movies. I would say, essential viewing, when you have the time and mindset to be taken on a journey that at times will feel painful. Though, I think that’s Tarkovsky’s intent to some degree.

        • mrnarwall@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 months ago

          I do! In fact, I personally try to watch as many sci-fi movies in January as I can. I try not to discriminate, and give everything a chance that’s vaguely sci-fi. I’ll add Solaris to my list for sure

      • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        You are the hero we deserve. Take my upvote! Gattaca was pretty cool, and Solaris is now indeed on my list.

  • ISuckAtGaemz@lemm.ee
    5·
    11 months ago

    Sweet, I added Solaris and Stalker to my list of movies to watch. Still need to see Primer at some point too.