10 Sci-Fi Movies That Got The Science Right
Deep Impact, terrifyingly, could actually happen.
Movies have always offered something of an escape for the audience regardless of genre, and this is one of the main reasons people like watching them. When it comes to science-fiction, that escape often needs to be grounded, at least a little bit, in reality.
The genre is all about science, so when you add to that the word "fiction,"it can go in one of two directions. It can either be as closely knitted to real science as possible, or it can be completely ridiculous, making no sense whatsoever.
Most movies toe the line between the two, but some films are made in such a way that they could arguably strip the word "fiction" from the genre entirely. These movies, however, are considerably rare. Granted, all sci-fi tends to have a little adjustment where the facts are concerned, but some have little to none.
Those are truly the rarest form of science fiction, but when you have a team working to make a movie as realistic as possible, what they produce is often more true to life than typically seen in 'realistic' genres. These ten films may have fudged the numbers a tad, but for the most part, they got the science absolutely bang on.
10. Gravity (2013)
Gravity is one of the most accurate science-fiction films that managed to get the physics of zero gravity and orbital mechanics just right. Granted, the movie isn't so much science-fiction as it is science-based fiction, as the events in the film technically could happen... for the most part.
The setting for Gravity is the real world — or, more accurately, the orbit of the real world. Whenever a character is set on a freefall, the direction and speed of movement are depicted in exactly the right way. Other elements seen in the movie that mirrored reality set it apart from others in the genre.
Fireballs in space are perfectly spherical, which is how they were shown in Gravity. Additionally, smaller details like the falling book pages not falling back into place and the need to execute a clockwise spin to counteract an anticlockwise rotation are straight out of Netwon's 1st Law of Motion.
There was some artistic license taken with some elements in the movie that do establish it on the side of fiction. The altitude of the Hubble space telescope isn't the same as the International Space Station. Still, if they were, the interactions seen in the movie would have been science-accurate.