Science fiction in film tends to lean more into fiction and may not always be factually rooted in science. But when a film bases its storytelling or concepts on actual scientific theories both novices and experts can appreciate it.
For our astronomy contributor Jean Creighton, there are a few sci-fi films that stick out. She joins Lake Effect’s Audrey Nowakowski to share why.
Contact (1997)
Creighton says her favorite aspect of Robert Zemeckis' Contact is its sense of realism in depicting how an astronomer might go about discovering and communicating with extra-terrestrial life.
"In so many sci-fi movies, we just start talking to aliens — like boom, we speak the same language and it's English of course, or whatever. And you think, 'Well, it's not gonna be that way, is it?'"
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
With 2001, Creighton says she's most impressed by Stanley Kubrick's realistic depiction of space travel and relative accuracy in predicting the aesthetic of 21st century technology.
"I'm sure that to some extent people got inspiration from [the film] and said, 'OK, let's make ur computers look this way, you know,'" she says. "And also simple things like, in 1968, he's already got people on zoom calls — something that at that point was just simply science fiction."
Avatar (2009)
For Creighton, it's the ecological themes in James Cameron's Avatar that stand out. In real life, she says that cues from plants can signal incoming droughts or the spread of disease.
"I loved the depiction of life, and the concept that a whole planet communicates through living creatures, that their network is within trees," she says. "I love that idea that there are ways that nature can warn us and, and we know that to some extent this happens."
Interstellar (2014)
Finally, Creighton says she's impressed by Interstellar's depiction of black holes — helped along by the expertise of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne, who Christopher Nolan enlisted as a scientific consultant for the film.
"The physics is understood, at least to some extent," she says. "I love that they went for, 'Let's pay some money to get real supercomputers to show us what it would look like if I got very close to a super massive black hole.'"
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