15 Greatest Hard Science Fiction Movies Of All Time
Sci-fi classics like Ex Machina that really make you think...
Most science fiction movies aren't concerned with scientific accuracy. No one on the set of Star Wars questioned the viability of the lightsaber (although the less said about General Leia's Mary Poppins moment in The Last Jedi, the better), and audiences were quite happy to suspend disbelief when the Transformers - arriving from earth from a distant planet - spoke with a variety of stereotypical American accents.
But sometimes it's nice to switch your brain on rather than off when watching a movie, and when the mood calls for it there are some excellent hard science fiction films out there which take the genre far more seriously than the average blockbuster. Sometimes this accuracy relates to the technology depicted, taking the familiar science fiction world of spaceships and robots and grounding it in real world feasibility.
Other hard sci-fi movies opt for a different approach, preferring instead to focus on more complex philosophical and metaphysical questions which the future might bring, and how new technological developments could affect society, culture and our conception of consciousness.
Strap on your thinking caps and get ready to explore the complex yet riveting world of hard science fiction cinema.
15. Robot And Frank
Director Jake Schreier and writer Christopher Ford crafted one of the most understated - and underrated - science fiction movies in recent memory with Robot And Frank. Frank Langella stars as a retired thief Frank Weld, who is given a robot care assistant and decides to put his newfound companion to good use and revive his career as a cat burglar.
Set in a very near future which is thoroughly recognizable, it's a film which is slight and whimsical on the surface but carries with it a melancholic undercurrent, reflecting on the nature of ageing in a world where technology threatens to dehumanize how we care for the elderly.
Robot And Frank isn't concerned with unpacking the morality of artificial intelligence and how robots might pose a threat to the existence of humanity. But its exploration of Frank's slow slide into dementia and how this challenges the robot's programming is a far more unique approach to the material than is generally produced in Hollywood.