Movies with impeccable science/logic in them...

In my follow-up to the first thread, “movies with Factual Scientific errors in them”, I would like to hear about movies with near-brilliant scientific explanations/details or very good physics (etc.) in them.

Someone in the first thread said that Babylon 5 had some excellent physics in it regarding the manouvering of fighter aircraft in space.

I was wondering if there are movies that actually do bother to get details right, and ensure that thier plots are watertight (as opposed to the usual Hollywood garbage).

So, begin your list my friends. How many movies actually bother to get realistic effects and logical plot details correct?

Well, I think as mostly agreed upon in your prior thread, 2001: A Space Odyssey is pretty damn close. Also, I would think Contact did a decent job as well.

Actually, someone already took a cue from your first thread:
Amazing things they got RIGHT.

It’s pretty short, though. I’d like to see more in this new thread.

I second 2001: ASO and Contact. They prove that real science can be as thrilling and moving as the fake stuff in Star Trek and Star Wars. Beyond these two, I can’t think of any sci-fi movie Hollywierd got right.

2010, the sequel? Besides the whole aliens thing, of course.

Apollo 13 got damn near everything right. In the commentary track with Jim Lovell and his wife, about the only thing he complains about is a jet showing a contrail at too low an altitude. And there are a few events that are altered or compressed for narrative purposes, but all the technical stuff was scrupulously done. (And some things that might seem like dramatic inventions are true. E.g., they had the longest “blackout period” during reentry of any of the Apollo missions – four long minutes.)

Now that I review the thread, I see that we’re talking about science fiction movies, not a docudrama like Apollo 13. Sorry 'bout that.

There were some movies in the 50’s, like Destination Moon and Conquest of Space, that did a pretty good job using space science as it existed then (though with a lot of things that seem silly now).

How dare you :wink:

Anyways, it may have been a slightly more accurate film, scientifically relative to other efforts, but as I recall it made several huge errors. It’s been some years since I’ve seen it, and as I have no intent on subjecting myself to it again, hopefully someone can back up what I’m saying. Anyways, as I recall, the movie had sound in space. Number 2, as I also recall, didn’t every ship have artificial gravity without any reasonable explanation as to why?

Also, though not a scientific error, this one just bugged the hell out of me. Why did that, after having lovingly re-created the sets from the first film, have to add a “Hal-9000” title to every one of Hal’s eyes? That wasn’t there in the original! Damn you 2010!

I’m sure there are many other errors I’ve missed, but I’m unable to recall them as I seemed to have blocked a majority of that movie out of my mind.

Actually, 2001 and 2010 both showed that they did not have artificial gravity. Remember the scenes of either Poole or Bowman jogging around the rotating ring inside Discovery? And Tsiolkovsky also had a rotating section that provided artificial gravity. There’s a scene where they stop the rotation in order to dock Tsiolkovsky with Discovery prior to the burn to get them back to Earth.

Admittedly, they didn’t show the characters in zero-gee much, but presumably they either used Velcro slippers (as seen in 2001 on the Pan-Am shuttle en route to the space station) or kept one hand on handholds at all times to maintain their orientations relative to the desk and each other.

Well, perhaps I forgot that they did have an explanation. Oh well, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad movie. And sound in space, come on, you can’t tell me I remembered that incorrectly :wink:

I liked “2010” quite a lot.

It’s not a movie (yet), but Firefly had the most accurate science I’ve seen yet in a science fiction program. No sound in space, realistic depictions of being out in space suits (a villian is killed simply by unhooking his magnetic boots from a ship and letting him drift away, helpless), etc. The one thing they got wrong (putting a gun in a spacesuit so it would have air to fire) was a result of their actually trying to get it right - a technical advisor let them down when they asked what they needed to do to get a gun to fire in space.

Another big detail they covered which you never see in other SF shows - ever notice how when the Enterprise meets up with another ship, it always seems to be in the same plane, and they are never rotating with respect to each other? In Firefly, that doesn’t always happen. Often a ship will appear and the Firefly will have to match rotation, or turn 90 degrees to meet it, or whatever.

Some people do it seems, relative though to 2001? I have no qualms if even so, I just don’t know how anyone could put those two in the same league (not that they’d be wrong for doing so…)

While the science in Contact was okay, it was all the other crap (the Palmer Joss character, the anti-science terrorist, Tom Skerritt’s obvious sliminess, that eye-rollingly dopey climax, and the idiotic congressional hearing scene afterward) that made the movie tedious. They could have done away with the all the manufactured conflict and romantic stuff and still had a good film.

2010 was sort-of okay, but there simply isn’t enough mass in Jupiter to make a stable star, even if you could squish the planet down enough for spontaneous fusion to begin. As soon as you had sufficient density, the heat and pressure of the fusion reaction would make that planet rapidly expand again, bringing the chain reaction to a halt. The post-squish planet would be smaller than the original(more of the mass would be concentrated in the core) but it wouldn’t be a star. I suppose if you kept crushing Jupiter and letting it rebound, you’d eventualy get a chunk of iron about 200 times the volume of Earth (I may have misplaced an exponent somewhere along the way) which is pretty impressive but it ain’t no star. Even if you assume the monolith material was some ultra-dense (yet stable)substance and you could compress Jupiter to the volume of Earth, you wouldn’t get more than a short-lived flare, let alone a self-sustaining star.

Do post-apocalyptic films like The Road Warrior and The Blood of Heroes count?

Certainly, “2010” isn’t in the same league as “2001,” but it’s a nice way to spend an evening.

One thing I really like about “2010” is that the explanation for why HAL went crazy is a good one. It doesn’t make you say, “I waited all these years to find out … and THIS is why!!! What the fuck!!!” And since a big reason to even bother making “2010” was to answer this question, it had better deliver on this point.

Plus, Roy Scheider is cool.

While I hate to pass up a chance to catch one of Star Trek’s many blunders, I don’t think this is one of 'em. C’mon… they have sensors that can spot a ship coming from lightyears away. For them, it’s not a special thing to just rotate the ship to match orientation.

True, though there was one odd episode of NextGen (“The Most Toys”) where a dangerous substance had to be transported ship-to-ship via shuttle, and the ships were nose-to-nose, forcing the shuttle pilot (Data, in this case) to make two unnecessary 180-degree turns. Had the ships been back to back, he could have flown a straighter, simpler and presumably safer direct path.

Interestingly, one of the few times space was treated as truly three-dimensional was the climactic ‘submarine fight’ sequence from the end of the second movie, and even then, Spock had to remind Kirk.

Yes, but why would they? Especially in a combat situation, it seems that always approaching each other on the same plane would vastly limit your tactical options.

I had always assumed those magic monoliths had done more than squish the planet. Teleported in additional mass perhaps…

Because the Federation prefers aesthetic prettiness over utilitarian efficiency. I mean, look how poorly their ships are designed.

I’m just saying that, for them, in the future, the fuel used up to make that sort of reorientation is a trifle, so they have no qualms about using it.

Now if only they’re equip their chairs with seatbelts, and re-invent circuit breakers for their keyboards…