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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He’s orbiting the earth
That’s the joke about anything in orbit.
So what movie is hard scifi?
Primer, Robocop, Children of Men, Moon, District 9
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.
Correct.