(Credits: Far Out / NASA)
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, NASA has been an almost omnipresent entity in many prominent American sci-fi movies. Even in productions from other parts of the world, space exploration has often been associated with the important projects that have been conducted by the US federal agency. The well-known government body has become an integral part of popular culture, involved in iconic cinematic representations as well as countless conspiracy theories.
Due to the speculative nature of the sci-fi genre, filmmakers often take a lot of creative liberties to ensure that the final spectacle is appealing to audiences. However, in a list curated by NASA scientists, some of the worst culprits of the aforementioned tendency were called out. Ranging from the widely criticised apocalyptic thriller 2012 to Michael Bay’s Armageddon, the scientists pointed out how hilarious these unrealistic depictions were.
Simultaneously, they released a list of the greatest additions to the genre according to the viability of their central ideas as well as the accuracy of the underlying principles. The most famous entry included in their selection is Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, the blockbuster that started a highly successful franchise. While it has delighted fans all over the world, lauding it for its scientific accuracy is an entirely different matter.
Jack Horner, a scientific advisor on Jurassic Park, admitted the inaccuracies himself: “My job was to make sure the dinosaurs looked as accurate as they could, based on the science that we had. And we already knew that velociraptor and some of those kinds of little theropod dinosaurs were feathered. And we also knew that they could have been very colourful, and Steven, really, he didn’t think Technicolor dinosaurs would be very scary.”
The NASA scientists also cited Fritz Lang’s efforts, including Metropolis, which has become an ominous, dystopian sociopolitical prediction for our contemporary society. Lang once said: “I became interested in the German human being, and I wanted to make some films about the romantic German human being in Destiny, or the German after the First World War it was the Dr. Mabuse films, or the German of the legend it was the Nibelungs, or the German of the future it was Metropolis and Woman in the Moon.”
Another interesting addition to the list is Christian Nyby’s 1951 creature horror flick, The Thing from Another World. It famously inspired John Carpenter’s magnum opus, the 1982 masterpiece The Thing, which tapped into the paranoia and political climate of the Cold War through the story of an extraterrestrial monster that had the power to assimilate and imitate any living organism.
While explaining the origins of the source material, Carpenter said: “It came from a short story called Who Goes There, actually a novella, so we went back to the novella. This whole imitative business was never covered in Hawks’ movie, so we just struck out on our own. This was the early ’80s, ’82, so I made it very dark but somewhat… I thought, at the time, realistic, as opposed to a… Hawks’ film which was very idealised.”
Check out the full list below.
NASA names the greatest sci-fi movies:
- Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)
- Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997)
- Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)
- Woman In the Moon (Fritz Lang, 1929)
- The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951)
- Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
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Laura Adams is a tech enthusiast residing in the UK. Her articles cover the latest technological innovations, from AI to consumer gadgets, providing readers with a glimpse into the future of technology.
