It’s the 50th anniversary of Jaws, so we watched it again. I pointed out to my wife the shots with the meteor streaks (towards the end of the film, after the rowdy song). Doing a two-minute Google search gives links doubting they were authentic (the sky is too bright, the motion doesn’t match the bouncing of the camera, etc.); I’m pretty sure it’s been discussed here as well. Steven Spielberg has other other films with meteors in them as well, such as Close Encounters, something that he enjoyed as a boy.
That got me thinking about other movies with “real” astronomical events, such as constellations, meteors, comets, and eclipses; perhaps auroras too. But I don’t want movies that are space or SciFi related, so no Interstellar or Armageddon or Contact or DC/MU films. I’m interested in movies that show or comment (or ignore!) something in the (night) sky, but aren’t the major reason for the story.
What are some others besides Jaws? For example, Dolores Claiborne has a solar eclipse as part of the happenings in the background of the film, but it’s not about the eclipse. Likewise Apollo 13 has people looking at the moon, but the movie isn’t so much about the moon as it about rescuing people.
I have another one in mind that I won’t name yet. Let’s see what you can think of.
I seem to remember that Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed out errors in the night sky in James Cameron’s Titanic movie and that Cameron subsequently corrected them.
The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has Donatello and Michelangelo watching the moon through the sewer grate. (“Nice night.” “Mhmm. Pizza dude’s got thirty seconds.”)
In Franco Zeffereli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1976), the three “Wise Men” (Zoroastrian astrologers) are shown discussing the Star of Bethlehem in terms of the conjunctions of Mars,Jupiter, and Saturn in 7–6 BC.
La Fin du Monde (The End of the World, 1931) – A comet is a-coming to destroy Earth, but the focus is on how humanity reacts: panic, desperation, orgies.
King Solomon’s Mines (1937) and its remakes feature the classic bit where the heroes are saved from execution by a convenient eclipse (reused in Apocalypto).
Valley of the Dragons (1961) - Two late-nineteenth century jabronis are fighting a duel when a comet brushing past Earth sweeps them up to the Moon where they discover a prehistoric civilization, a goofy-looking giant spider and a Playboy Playmate taking a swim. Incredibly, one of the jabronis makes gunpowder from available minerals several years before Kirk did the same thing fighting the Gorn on ST: TOS. Jules Verne’s original story was later reworked as On the Comet (1970), which, unfortunately, was not one of director Karel Zeman’s better films.
I was looking for movies that had something astronomical, but not about that thing (no doomsday comets). Thank you anyway.
For a movie with an “incidental” comet, I was thinking along the lines of Roxanne: Daryl Hannah is researching a comet, and the comet appears at the end, but the movie isn’t really about the comet.
There have to be others with an incidental comet or eclipse, etc. Isn’t there a movie about a sailor crossing the equator and perhaps seeing the Southern Cross for the first time? Or is that just the song?