I’d definitely include The Dam Busters. Pretty much 2 hours of mechanical problem solving.
Another one, sort of similar to October Sky, is a recent film called Spare Parts. It’s about a team from a mostly Latino high school in Phoenix who compete in a robotics competition against several well-funded college teams. Note that I have not seen the movie, but I did read the Wired magazine article on which it’s based.
I have always thought Tron was pretty accurate in it’s computer science and engineering, within it’s kind of poetic abstraction, and accepting the total inaccuracies where they were critical and necessary to making the story happen.
My dad was an engineer. He liked crappy westerns and big musicals (My Fair Lady was a particular favorite).
The Martian pissed this engineer off. Also pissed this military veteran off.
Yeah, OK, they had a fun time playing with biology - I can’t speak to that. But the wind? WAGing the trajectories? Suit pressure as a thruster via an uncontrolled tear?! Commanding officer going from Strong, Capable, and Professional to unprofessional grand-standing idiot (finale scene)…?! There’s a lot more, but my blood pressure’s starting to rise to thruster-levels…
On the other hand, Castaway gets high marks. Tom Hanks basically boot-strapping his brain, and using found objects, thinks his way out of his predicament. The fact that there was a dangerous and fraught learning curve, that there wer screw ups and failures - that it took years to get off the island, all lend it credibility.
My father was a computer engineer but I don’t remember him liking anything specifically related to that field. He like war movies dealing with airplanes (his eyesight prevented him from joining the Army Air Corps) such as “12 O’Clock High”, “Command Decision” and “Dawn Patrol” plus “Bridge on the River Kwai” (he would always quote Jack Hawkins trying to recruit William Holden into joining his commando outfit). Plus various films by Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks and Ingmar Bergman. He laughed when I told him about the SCTV skit where Count Floyd gets a copy of “Hour of the Wolf”, thinking it’s a horror film and during the commercials finally saying it was terrible.
I love The Martian in both the book and movie form but the premise pisses me off as well. There are storms on Mars but the air pressure is hardly anything in Earth terms. You can’t have the equivalent of a hurricane that kills someone like it is Hurricane Katrina roaring through To be fair, even the author admits that but I doubt he expected anyone to pay that much attention to it when he wrote it. The improvised space suit thruster is dumb too.
However, I forgive it because most of the rest of the book (and movie) is fairly diligent about details. It just needs a little touch-up work. I hate most soft science fiction so much that I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to something that at least tries to create something more realistic. There is a lot of room for improvement but at least it is a first step. Hopefully, the success of The Martian will convince Hollywood to create more realistic movies in general and knowledgeable people to write the scripts for them.
Das Boot and The Sand Pebbles anyone?
Definitely DAS Boot!
My favorite film is Casablanca. Not sure what being an engineer has to do with it.
“Dam Busters” 1955
“The China Syndrome” 1979
On a lighter note, Madagascar with the plane crashes and rebuilding. Also, Chicken Run; the plane and the mechanical processing plant.
“Whistle down the wind”.
I don’t know about other engineers, but this engineer likes unresolved problems. I’m not terrribly interested in resolved problems. Also, I’m a bit truthfull and literal ((Like Dilbert): I’m caught by misundertandings, but I’m appalled at dissimilation, which reduces my enhoyment of many childrens films and chick flicks.
Wow! :eek: I saw this when it first came out (I must have been in fourth or fifth grade), and thought I was the only person on the planet who remembers it!
My older brother had a “thing” for Hayley Mills (and, truth be told, so did I :o ).
The Edge - another survival tale
The Imitation Game
I’m an engineer by innate determination and psychological bent, though I never got an official degree. I’ve spent my entire life focused on solving problems by applying my logical mind to adjusting the mechanics of everything I can control, and that’s the essence of engineering.
I also very much love* No Highway In The Sky* as well, however I don’t think it’s an “engineer as hero” picture. James Stewart’s character is decidedly NOT an engineer, he is more a theoretical physicist, specializing in properties of metal under stress. In fact if anything, his LACK of engineering skill is part of what drives the film, since it takes him the entire movie to realize that temperature plays a mechanical part in how stress affects metal.
Lots of post world war two science fiction films were essentially “engineering to the rescue” films. Too many to list. How realistic each one may have been isn’t the point, as far as I’m concerned, what I enjoy is when a story respects and recognizes that thinking logically is usually the wisest choice, especially when heroic bluster and emotional acting out isn’t praised at all.
I like The Martian in many ways, because in addition to having a strong respect for mechanical engineering, I have an equally strong respect for political, cultural and emotional engineering. People who engineer emotions (as in recognizing the part they play in events, and dispassionately including them in their mechanical calculations) have to be every bit as brilliant and insightful and experienced as mechanical engineers need to be. And in The Martian, mechanical and political and emotional “engineering” were all recognized and handled equally well. Lots of producers in the past, have fallen back on mindless bombast or emotional outbursts to explain pivotal choices made by the characters, and in the Martian, that wasn’t the case. There was plenty of emotion to be sure, but every choice made was still reasoned out.
The cylinders were oxygen and hydrogen (in the book), and having the cylinders without the torch rig wouldn’t do much good.
I think it’s the sudden change in character of the mission Commander that hacked me off the worst. They had done so VERY well with her, then some pissant in Hollywood decides we need an ‘emotional moment’ from an ‘empowered woman’ and so they shit all over her character AND the power and dignity she’d brought to the role. A truly empowered woman would’ve stuck to her duty - and allowed her crew to do theirs. If they needed a ‘drama’ moment, they could have done something like cut to tears in her eyes as her crew reels the castaway in. Or about a hundred other posssiblities.
I don’t know bio for shit, so all of that was kinda low-impact on me, though yes, the problem-solving, and the sheer number of potentially lethal problems and small failures were really excellent - then they kept adding in the terrestrial-level wind to be the bad guy, when there were so many other ways to add drama.
I think (aside from the lobotomy they gave the commander), it’s the fact that they got so much right that tells me they could’ve gotten it all right. So why didn’t they?