As much as I hate the movie Interstellar and the magic woo woo it tried to pass off as science, one thing it did get right was the Black Hole visualisation. They generated the visualisation by using detailed, highly accurate models and data to show what a black hole actually looks like, before we’d ever seen one. The movie version isn’t 100% accurate, because they dumbed it down for the movie, but even so it was still very accurate, and they also had the more accurate non movie version as a result, which generated scientific papers of its own!
Edit - Also, not a scientist, just a passionate nerd
Ah, I loved that movie, but yeah. Reality is even cooler, actually!
How about Chernobyl? That movie?
Unfortunately the visualization was the only thing it got right, there was so much other stuff about the black hole and the setting around it that it got wrong that I would not rank Interstellar as a remotely realistic movie. It really bothers me how much of a pass it gets for its huge volume of nonsense just because one or two things looked realistic.
As I said, I didn’t like the movie, and that’s exactly why. It tried to pass itself off on its scientific authenticity. It certainly lured me in with that, and then it sprung an endless stream of hand wavey science fiction woo.
Oh, I wasn’t disagreeing or thinking you were saying otherwise, I just wanted to make clear that it was more than just the woo woo that was unrealistic. The “love is a force that transcends causality” thing was obvious but the actual physics stuff was just as silly for the most part.
For example, if the black hole’s accretion disk was putting out enough light and heat to keep orbiting planets habitable, then trying to fly down to the event horizon would be basically the same as trying to land on the Sun. But the plot needed that to happen so down they went.
Oh, I include all of that in the woo! And the time dilation planet, where the time dilation was more intense than that found on the surface of a neutron star…
It’s all woo!
Apollo 13 and Andy weirs books that got made to movies like the Martian or hail Mary project
Ooh, Apollo 13 is a good pick.
Both the Martian and Hail Mary depend heavily on the “one freebie fantastical element” thing that a lot of science fiction uses to get their plots going. They’re still better than most others, so they might meet the “honorable attempt” criterion, but IMO they shouldn’t be at the top.
A 2003 publication by the Infectious Diseases Society of America noted that The Andromeda Strain is the “most significant, scientifically accurate, and prototypic of all films of this [killer virus] genre … it accurately details the appearance of a deadly agent, its impact, and the efforts at containing it, and, finally, the work-up on its identification and clarification on why certain persons are immune to it.”
Contact apparently leaned heavily towards the “actual science” end of the movie spectrum.
That one was awesome.
Most likely a contemporary film that neither features history, nor science, nor technology. Hollywood rom-coms are good candidates since they tend to be quite shallow.
Gotta go with ‘Contact’ (based on a Carl Sagan book) and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (Kubrick).
‘The Martian’ tried, good film but but made Mars look waaaaay too friendly …
I don’t recall ‘I Robot’ straying too far out of line … but not in the same league …
Proyas ‘Dark City’ likewise, but is more imaginative and artful …
Sunshine, apart from ‘that part’ was pretty accurate. They had Brian Cox as a consultant
The Sound of Music
There’s an old, obscure one that’s a favourite of mine from childhood; Plymouth. It’s a made-for-TV movie and had a pretty low budget, but aside from a quick excuse about everyone having “magnetic boots” so that they didn’t have to simulate lunar gravity all the time they kept everything very well grounded in realism IMO.
Stand by me.
Hear me out. Kid gets hit by train, tossed far from tracks, body is mush. Also, sociological aspects of kids and older teens.
If most correct science fiction is really what you’re asking for, I submit 2010: The Year We Make Contact for science academy consideration.
Accurate for at least as far as for what the available human technology is. Magic alien tech kind of has to be ignored.
I’m no scientist but I thought Gravity was solid science wise?
It was okay. The ISS, Hubble, and Tiangong don’t orbit in the same plane, so the premise is somewhat implausible.
Now it was many years since I saw it, so my memory might be a bit off. It is true that ISS does an orbit in ~90 min, but in order for them to get hit by the debris in that time… They have to remain totally stationary?
And during the EVA there was an invisible force tugging on them and pulling them away?
I believe they’re all in different “altitude” orbits, so you’d need a pretty large amount of delta-V (read: fuel) to get from one to another, far more than the characters would have had available.
Oh didn’t know that
If you partially fall into an area of gravity that accelerates you to the point of traveling some insignificant portion of the speed of light (This maneuver is going to cost us x years), then the centripetal force will tear your craft apart.
Most movies are scientifically accurate. Your average romcom that doesn’t have simulated phone screens is scientifically accurate. Socially accurate? Not so much. Most movies are at least a little bit fantasy. If the science isn’t fantasy — like Star Trek — then something else almost surely is.
But you mean among movies with some science or tech. Okay, steve jobs., the biopic about the Apple cofounder. Pretty sure the science was accurate. Bonus, Steve talks about a NASA mission. Pretty sure that was accurate, too. Historically accurate? The NASA part, yeah. The Jobs/Apple stuff, not so much. People who loved those events say the movie is way off — Jobs was way worse. But the science was 100% there. Oh, except where Jobs tells Lisa how many songs he’s going to put in her pocket. He’s a showman, a businessman, not an engineer. He knows they’re working on the iPod but he has no idea what the capacity will be yet. Otherwise the science was solid.
But if you mean science fiction… well, by definition the science is fictional. That’s what we’re there for. We could look at something like Armageddon. Both that and Deep Impact are the result of a seminar that discussed the possibilities of what could be done if a meteor were to threaten to hit Earth. I personally prefer 君の名は。’s solution better: namely, that there isn’t one. The meteor hits. Destruction ensues. But 君の名は。 (your name., internationally) is not science fiction. It’s romantic fantasy (but not romantasy!). Anyway, Armageddon. The science isn’t proven, but it’s probably good enough. I can’t speak to the viability of landing a lunar lander on a meteor — I feel if it’s big enough, the solution wouldn’t work, and if it’s small enough, you couldn’t land on it — and drilling a nuke down to its core and playing it while Aerosmith play in Mission Control because you have the budget for that… I mean it sure sounds good. (Deep Impact fired the nuke from the surface, but part of the meteor still hit, I think that one’s a little more believable.)
We could look at something like Armageddon.
Isn’t Armageddon so famously full of inaccuracies that NASA uses it to test new recruits to see how many errors they can spot?
I took an astronomy class when I was an undergrad. We had a scene-by-scene breakdown of all the stupid shit in this movie.
That’s just watching the whole film.
Human Centipede
