Oops, re-reading the OP, I see Contact was in there.
Outland? Come on–the science was all wrong, and the script was a bad rip-off of High Noon.
Zardoz “executed very poorly?” Philistine!
Heh, yeah right. I thought one of the primary rules of hard/real science fiction is that the technology be feasible (or something like that). Star Trek just, basically, takes a “magic wand” and adds the word “quantum” to it.
When you’re talking about science fiction, as opposed to science fiction, do you mean that the science part has to be central, and the plot and characters secondary? If so, I think we would be hard pressed to find a genuine example (Hollywood being what it is). Or do you simply mean an sf movie where the science is believable and well explained?
My favorites and all of the best ones have already been mentioned, so I’ll push the boundaries of the category.
Tron
Sleeper (Woody Allen)
Good science fiction is generally characterized by having at most one patently impossible plot device or situation. Particuarly if the adjective “hard” is included, although that often tends to imply that plot devices and situations dominate over characterization, but that’s certainly not universal.
So fluff like Buckeroo Bonzai need not apply.
Besides the allowed excess impossibility, there’s also a small mixed bag of generally accepted suspensions of reality, if you will, within the field, the most common being faster than light travel in nearly all stories that involve space travel. This is simply because if you held to reality, the time diliation effects would play hell with almost any plot line. [Space travel per se does not imply “Space Opera” by a long way. Some of the best hard science fiction involves space] Psyhic powers and time travel can also qualify as hard science fiction if those are the only impossibilites used - which makes The Dead Zone and Time After Time qualify.
This is not to imply that just because you have zero or one impossible things in your story, you’re writing science fiction, never mind good science fiction. Nor does it mean a whole slew of impossibilities is of necessity a bad story - it just means you’re writing fantasy, not sf.
There was an exceptionally good science fiction film out of New Zealand “The Quiet Earth”.
I suppose what I mean is a movie where science is either a major theme of the story (as in “The Andromeda Strain” where no psuedu-scientific gobblydegook springs up, just real scientists struggling with an extraterrestrial lifeform) or where the science is at least plausible given the knowledge of today (meaning no transporters, artificial gravity, time travel). Basically, any movie which couldn’t be easily transferred to another genre with minimal changes (such as the haunted house story of “Alien”, the western of “Outland” as mentioned earlier in the forum, the fantasy of “Star Wars”, etc). Not that I don’t enjoy those films (except Outland), just that I don’t really consider them science fiction.