By Rebecca Pahle | Lists | May 28, 2015 |
By Rebecca Pahle | Lists | May 28, 2015 |
What I liked about Tomorrowland: Its pro-science message, which is an oddly infrequent thing to find in a genre powered by the collective force of geekiness. It’s all “Why must we play God?” and “Some doors mankind wasn’t meant to open!” What I didn’t like about Tomorrowland: Just about everything else, including that weird romantic-ish vibe between George Clooney’s character and a little kid. But that’s none of my business.
But, happily, there are some unabashedly science-loving genre movies—ones that present exploration and ingenuity and technological advancements as good things instead of inevitable precursors to a worldwide dystopian hellscape—that are actually worth your time to watch.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Contact (1997)
Pacific Rim (2013)
“Build giant robots to fight them?”
“BRILLIANT!… But wait. Won’t that prove to be an act of supreme arrogance over nature? Will the giant robots we, in our hubris, created not turn on us, resulting in an even greater catastrophe than what the interdimensional monsters would have yielded?”
“Fuck no. They’ll punch things.”
Europa Report (2013)
The Machine (2013)
Interstellar (2014)
Bonus entry:
The Martian (2015)
No, this movie isn’t out yet, and no, I haven’t build a time machine. But the book on which this upcoming Ridley Scott movie is based, by Andy Weir, is pro-science out the wazzoo. In it, a astronaut (played in the movie by Matt Damon) is stranded on Mars after a mission gone wrong, and he has to use every drop of his know-how to stay alive until he can (hopefully) be rescued. It’s an amazing book and an amazing cast (Matt Damon, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover… Kristen Wiig? Yeah, OK.), so I’m cautiously hopeful, even if Scott’s track record hasn’t exactly been great lately.
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