Space movies!!
 

I really like space movies, one of my favorites in general being 2001 space odyssy. I just saw Stowaway which was really good...what are your favorite space movies??

•Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
•The Fifth Element
•SpaceBalls

Does Donnie Darko count as a “space” film, due to its explanation of time travel through the book “The Philosophy of Time Travel” by Roberta Sparrow?

If so:
•Donnie Darko

No, I'm talking about movies that take place in outer space.

If you like Stowaway and 2001, you might like this small indie film Europa Report (2013). It's not action packed, it's not CG everywhere, but it felt like a real mission to Europa. It's understated.

Re: Space movies!!
 

I had a "space realism" moment, that is, hard scifi à la Expanse or For All Mankind more than Star Wars, but... yeah, space realism in movies, forget it.

Gravity is irritating if you're used to Kerbal Space Program and Nasa TV EVA broadcasts (basically if you have any knowledge in orbital mechanics), but it still aims at some degree of space realism compared to, uh, Flash Gordon.

Love (or Space/Time) is a bit set in space, but it's mostly an ikea room the director pretends to be a space station.

Marooned is a nice but aged flick about astronauts stranded in orbit. Nicely down to earth (if I may say).

Space Cowboys is just lovely, if you forget in how many ways it makes no sense. The ending is charming, although prosaic reality would have been more crushing (literally).

The Martian is okay, although it's bookended by physical absurdity (the premise is a devastating space tempest, on a planet with barely any atmosphere, and the ending is, well, hollywood space physics).

Interstellar toys with black holes in an interestingly accurate way, but ends up so dumb you'd think it was written by Luc Besson.

The Black Hole is the weirdest thing I've seen, in terms of content mismatch (Disney robots, dark visuals, religious insanity, etc).

Event Horizon is essentially a remake/sequel of The Black Hole, but funnier (in the future, people will travel in experimental space churches).

Apollo 18 is a guilty pleasure. Very guilty very pleasure.

Apollo 13 is certainly the most accurate there is, although they have it easy, just following the events (and, as in The Right Stuff, unfairly caricaturing one character in order to add more relational drama.).

Same could be said about First Man, nicely done too.

And Silent Running is just adorable. A hippie folktale in space with Joan Baez songs.

Still, I don't think any of these match 2001 or Alien. As Citizen Rules said, Europa Report is nice too, though a bit cheap. Still, I see a trend towards more attempts at realism (with Gravity, Interstellar, Stowaway, etc), limited by narrative constraints (have a dramatic plot, insert dumb premise -such as a stowaway- and oversimplify everything to bathtub physics in order to spare yourself some boring exposition). Let's see if future movies will push progressively harder against these constraints...

Re: Space movies!!
 

The reluctant astronaut, Apollo 13, and Alien.


Would Robinson Crusoe on Mars count? It's pretty hokey and it's much more Mars than space, but I love it anyway.

Re: Space movies!!
 

Actually, I was also thinking of Outland. I love Outland. Is Outland set in outer space ? It's set on an asteroid that is set in outer space, but so is Earth. Hm...

Anyway, bottom line : Space movies are expensive because micro-gravity is hard (more or less impossible) to fake. I don't have high hopes for that orbital Tom Cruise project, which strongly reeks of Bezos/Brandon/Musk vanity, but the results may be interesting just for the visual contrast with the movie conventions we're used to.

That's what I was thinking. Alien is set on a space ship, so technically it's "space", but they have all the cheap gimmicks like artificial gravity to get away from the actual experience of being in space. The reluctant astronaut had no gravity (I'm guessing wires), and apollo 13 did the real deal by filming inside of an airplane descending so fast that there really wasn't any gravity.



And yes, I love Outland, but space? Might as well say that Aliens is a space movie.

The Black Hole is a guilty pleasure of mine, and I like a bit more then I should as a result.

Event Horizon is great. There, I said it. It’s spooky, has some decent atmosphere (ha!) and only suffers a little bit towards the end.

It's the gothic ship design, in Event Horizon, that makes me laugh to much. Would make sense in WH40k, with the cathedral mindset of ship building. But imagining NASA engineers planning this out of practicality (yeah wouldn't work without these spikes here) makes me google. Generally speaking, when there's no in-universe explanation or motives for rule-of-cool spectacle-oriented choices, movies tend to lose me (it's an issue with many ghost movies, for instance, where the ghost's motivation, drive and purpose is only to go boo at the spectator).

Speaking of which, Sunshine is also a pretty space movie, with a nonsensical premise (watch Earth's size next to the Sun, and now imagine Earth building a little bomb to affect the Sun), and a second half that kinda just wants to be .

Given that nuclear fission results in Hiroshima, I don’t see how technology surrounding nuclear fusion being able to affect the Sun is particularly outlandish, especially in the realm of science fiction. A battery doesn’t need to be the size of a car to get it started.

Re: Space movies!!
 

Other than the obvious ones:

Cargo (2009)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381940/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_5

Aniara:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7589524/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Oxygen:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6341832/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Silent Running
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

But the sun is nuclear fusion. It's, itself, a giant nuclear fusion, more than a million times bigger than Earth's volume. Even if the whole Earth itself combusted, it would be negligible. So, a bomb, built on it ? Carried on a spaceship ?

To give an idea, Hiroshima was around 10^13 Joules (13 zeros after the 1). The sun produces 4x10^26 Joules per second (that's 26 zeros after the 4, but per second). Even if your car was already made of batteries, it's not a car + one more battery ratio. It's astronomically futile. It's, every second, 2'000'000'000 times more than the biggest H-bomb ever tested.

(So, in fact, the untold script background was supposedly about a specific theoretical particle, a Q-ball, that was draining the sun, and needed to be destroyed for the sun to flourish again. This raises a lot of believability issues on its own, but at least less directly evident than the firecracker premise that the movie implies.)

I get it. The sun is crazy powerful. The problem is that you’re thinking about energetic output like it is at all relative to the size of the entity that creates it. Using fission, a single neutron splits the nucleus of an atom, resulting in a Hiroshima level explosion. Subatomic to city level devastation.

Using a different and theoretical science to create an exponentially larger reaction, especially one nebulous in definition, doesn’t strike me as incredibly unbelievable due to our size or current technological limitations.

I'm speaking of Joules, not of Miles.

Event horizon is great despite their at times B-quality effects.

Re: Space movies!!
 

Don't think anybody yet mentioned Ikarie XB 1 [Voyage to the End of the Universe]

I'd say it's less a matter of effects quality than deliberate stylistic, design choices. A ghost ship that looks all gothic and freaky, in a cool way that makes no sense in-universe (and is funny if you think at it that way).

But it's a very, very endearing movie, and I love its premise (and casting). And I go every two years on a pilgrimage to a museum that displays the huge model they used for the Lewis And Clark spaceship.



Anyway. To resume with the topic :

I haven't seen Ad Astra (2019) or The Passengers (2016) yet, but they are two recent space movies I also look forward to check out.

(Also, I went a bit crazy with that thread, and started a Custom List with almost a hundred space movies. I'll post it once the latest little Custom List bugs will have been ironed out. Bad timing.)

Yeah, I was really pleasantly surprised by Europa Report.

While I didn't love it, I think Ad Astra deserves a mention.

I would also add Moon, High Life, Zathura, Solaris, Prospect (okay it mostly takes place on a planet, but I really dig this one!), and Dark Star.

Okay, here is a list of space movies of all kinds and qualities (really, ranges from First Man to Abbott and Costello Go To Mars because I have no shame).

So, no endorsements. Just a handy list for when we, well, need some space.

https://www.movieforums.com/lists/custom/289

(Still twenty free slots or so, so I'll probably keep completing it with relevant titles found in this thread or elsewhere.)