I haven’t seen it, but I suspect the 1935 film Transatlantic Tunnel would qualify, as well
I’m not sure there even was a DVD. I see there are some episodes on Youtube, cut into ten-minute chunks.
About the only flaw I can remember was that the gravity on the moon (their eventual base) looked the same as on Earth. But that’s a forgivable issue, given the budget and state of special effects of the time. Space stations did spin for gravity, but in situations where that wasn’t possible in the real world (like in a small spaceship), the show tried hard to make it look like things were in microgravity.
The greatest, most-qualifying hard science fiction movie would be Apollo 13, if it weren’t based on a true story.
I’ll also add The Space Explorers, which fired my interest in science fiction back in 1958. It’s main plot involved a boy trying to find his father, who was missing somewhere in the solar system. It was as much science lecture as fiction; if they went to Mars, you’d get an explanation as to what Mars was like according to the knowledge of the time.
It also used stock footage from a Nazi science fiction film and a Communist one.
I remember rather liking Outland at the time. What was Ellison’s problem with it?
So the actual distance traveled by the traveler is not 4.3 light years?
His essay is a masterpiece of snark that I would not want to ruin by giving and probably misquoting pieces from. It was published in an out-of-print collection of essays from Omni magazine (it might have first appeared in Omni). It might be in Watching or another collection of his work.
A few others:
Fahrenheit 451, possibly
Charly, based on Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon
Project Moonbase – low-budget Heinlein that, unfortunately, doesn’t reflect all that well on Heinlein. But it has some good stuff I it.
On the Beach (and other post-apocalyptic films, like Five and The World, the Flesh, and the Devil)
Lord of the Flies, arguably.
THX 1138
the Terminal Man – I’m not generally a fan of Crichton’s, but this one and the Andromeda Strain (already mentioned) are probably his best. This one’s been pretty much forgotten, though.
Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon/Frau im Mond, despite the fact that it has people walking on the moon without space suits (!). The scenes of the Rocket and its takeoff are astoundingly good – Hermann Oberth was advisor for the film, which features the first “count down” in history (although Jules Verne had given us a “count up” in From the Earth to the Moon).
Funnily enough, I was about to write a post giving Outland as an example of a movie in which the science is reasonably okay, but that doesn’t feel like hard sci-fi to me. I think for something to be hard sci fi it’s the science must not only be plausible, it must matter. The implications of how advanced or speculative science might change things in non-trivial ways must be integral to the story. It’s not sufficient that somebody just dies in a more spectacular way when the cop shoots the robber in space. It you set something against a space or nominally futuristic backdrop when it could just as easily be set in Victorian England or the Wild West without changing the story one iota, I don’t think it’s hard sci fi.
The “actual distance” depends on your frame of reference. Alpha Centauri appears closer if you are traveling towards it at high speed.
Btw the “Avatar” universe is supposed to be the same as the “Alien” universe, right?
A few other possibilities:
1984 two versions, but only the John Hurt one is really good and faithful (and was actually filmed in London in 1984!)
Brave New World – three versions, I think, but I’d only recommend the one with Leonard Nimoy, which makes the future society seem believable.
Bicentennial Man – for all its faults, this movie feels the most like an actual Asimov movie. It requires a belief in incredible advances in electronics, robotics, and bioengineering, but it doesn’t have FTL, teleportation, aliens, or time travel.
I enjoyed “Outland”. I never saw the Ellison piece about the science.
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I had a big debate with a friend about whether (conventional) shotguns would be able to fire in a vacuum (I conceded this was possible, but still have doubts - is there enough oxygen within a sealed shell to allow a burn ?).
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One big flaw that I recall was that they fell into the common trap of: breathable atmosphere = (normal, earth-like) gravity, “just outside” = no or less gravity.
According to the Alien Anthology Wikia, it’s been established (and confirmed by Ridley Scott) that Blade Runner takes place in the same universe as the Alien films, but it doesn’t list Avatar as being part of it.
(It also lists “Soldier,” a 1998 Kurt Russell film that I’ve never heard of before.)
Yes, because the propellant in the shell contains its own oxidizer; it doesn’t have to suck air down the barrel to go Bang.
It’s a common misconception. In an episode of Firefly, Jane fired Vera in a vacuum by encasing it inside an inflated spacesuit and firing through the faceplate. In the commentary, Whedon said they had asked an expert and been steered wrong.
First of all I totally share your sentiments about both those movies, and both demonstrate the same kind of solid commitment by their creative teams to real science, Contact benefiting from the collaboration between executive producer Lynda Obst and Carl Sagan (who, in turn, had consulted Kip Thorne on his original novel), and Interstellar again between Obst, Kip Thorne, and of course Christopher Nolan.
However Thorne would strongly disagree that Interstellar involves FTL travel, and indeed that was a major point of contention between him and Nolan, who wanted the concept as one of the movie’s plot points, and it was an issue on which Thorne states in his book that he would not back down, resulting in an impasse with Nolan that lasted several weeks, and on which Nolan eventually backed down. The scientific indulgence that the film permits itself is the wormhole, and Thorne is at pains to point out that, however unlikely this may be, the idea of traversible wormholes was shown as far back as 1916 (by Ludwig Flamm) to follow from Einstein’s equations of general relativity, and later independently discovered by Einstein himself and Nathan Rosen (hence, “Einstein-Rosen” bridge). He alludes to further work by himself and his mentor John Wheeler, and posits wormholes that could be held open if threaded by exotic matter (matter with negative mass), which can exist according to the laws of quantum physics. So Thorne appears to regard this as in the category of speculation and educated guesses based on derivations from real science, unlike FTL which from everything we know is impossible.
In a word, yes, because “fantastic” is OK as long as you can show – as Kip Thorne wrote an entire book to do – that there is a plausible path there from known science, as noted above. In the early planning for Interstellar, when Steven Spielberg was still on board as the intended director, Thorne had suggested and got accepted the two guiding principles that (1) nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, and (2) speculations, wild as they may be, about ill-understood physical laws (like those that might govern wormholes) will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some respectable scientists regard as possible.
Some of the scientific background work was impressive. At one point the Spielberg team convened an all-day workshop at Caltech that involved fourteen scientists to help them get the science right: astrobiologists, planetary scientists, theoretical physicists, cosmologists, psychologists, and a space-policy expert. When Christopher Nolan came on board as the project’s new director, the scientific rigor, if anything, increased even further.
I’m not sure that I’d regard this particular plot point as a particularly major stumbling block, or that it’s in itself an actual “science” issue. With regard to the actual science of what was supposed to be happening to earth, once more Caltech expertise was recruited. The production team met with four Caltech biologists including David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate with a broad perspective on all of biology. They came up with a whole series of possible if unlikely catastrophic scenarios, including mass crop failures and failures of the hydrological system, lethal pathogens, viruses, and toxins, perhaps due to runaway climate change or unintended side effects of trying to mitigate it.
In the balance between “specialist” blights that can be very lethal but only attack a very specific species, and generalist blights that have broader but typically less lethal effects, the scenario they settled on was a generalist blight that had evolved to high lethality, combined with which the conditions were also reducing the earth’s oxygen supply to critical levels.
One might assume that it’s always easier to fix and terraform the planet that you’re on than to travel to another one, but it does depends on the circumstances and the resources and time you have available. Maybe that’s why the film’s scenario also posits an earth where science and education has fallen by the wayside. In such an environment, it might be a lot more feasible to focus all your efforts on a single technological feat like interplanetary migration especially if you already have some of the necessary infrastructure, rather than the much more diverse problem domain afflicting the planet. And don’t forget that the problem is considerably facilitated (to say the least!) by the convenient wormhole apparently placed nearby by an advanced civilization. As Thorne says, this is terra extremely incognita. But is it “hard” science fiction in the sense of hypotheses derivable from real, plausible science? They’ve made great and noble efforts to make it so.
I’ve just started a book on the 100 greatest science fiction movies, and Woman on the Moon is in it. I’ve not seen it, but now I’d like to.
Outland is set on a mining station on Io, which makes it seem like science fiction. But if you think about it a little it’s all about a local marshal trying to enforce the law with no one to help him, so there doesn’t seem to be any science driving the plot. Think about it a little more and you’ll remember that the original crime is that the head of the mining operation is giving drugs to the miners to enhance their performance, with the unfortunate side effect that some of them go crazy after too much of it. I think that puts it back in the science fiction category.
Not only filmed in 1984, but at least one scene was filmed on the very day that it took place in the novel.
I disagree with item 2 of the OP as being a defining indicator of hard/soft science fiction (especially in TV) simply because the production challenges and cost of showing differing levels of gravity would make the show prohibitively expensive.
I’m sure this has been noted (I only read the OP, so far), but it is a requirement which will make 99% of space-based sci-fi (with the possible sole exception of Gravity) fall out of the “hard” category.
I don’t understand your objection, wolfpup. Wormholes are FTL, and are subject to all of the same complications as any other method of FTL travel. They’re more plausible than just “step on the gas and accelerate until your speed exceeds c”, but only in incidental details, and they’re not any more plausible than (say) the Alcubierre drive.
DesertDog, I’ve never much minded that scene from Firefly. Yes, a gun will fire just fine in a vacuum, but the show never contradicts that. All we know is that Jayne and Mal both think that Vera will have problems in a vacuum, and that’s perfectly plausible: Neither of them are exactly known as intellectuals.
They handled it in 2001 and 2010, via depicting “gravity” as only being available in the spinning sections of the ships. But, yes, I do imagine that it becomes a not-insignificant hurdle for filming, which is probably why it gets handwaved away so often.
This has always bothered me. Low and zero gravity can be filmed, and can be done so without expensive effects work – especially now that we can digitally composite images and create images with CGI. A lot can be done with how the shot is staged and set up and by having the actor move as if in low G. Heck, Destination Moon did it with wire work, Operation Moonbase did it with camera tricks, mainly. 2001 did it with wire work and rotating sets. There’s no reason it couldn’t be done more.
And I want to see them treat low gravity – as on the Moon and Mars – properly, too. Not even 2001 tried to show lunar gravity properly. I don’t any Mars movie that ever did (aside, ironically, from the definitely non-hard-sf [John Carter)
You can actually do a pretty good job of simulating low gravity just by slowing down your film by a factor of sqrt(g_planet/g_earth). This won’t let your actors make twenty-foot leaps or anything, but if they’re walking around in the cramped quarters of a moon base, they’re probably not trying to do that, anyway.