THE MOST REALISTIC SPACE MOVIES
Put away your warp drives and get out of here with your midi-chlorians, because we’re running down our list of the top five most realistic space movies. Hollywood doesn’t have a great reputation when it comes to scientific accuracy, but that’s okay. A movie’s primary function should be to entertain by telling a gripping story, not to be a big-screen textbook. Of course, when science is ignored to such a degree that a film becomes laughably unbelievable, then it becomes a problem. To list those movies would likely fill the entire magazine, as pulp-fiction spaceships zip from one galaxy to another in the space of a day and lasers shoot glowing bullet-like projectiles at suspiciously humanoid aliens. Let’s celebrate the films that get it right and the movies that manage to spin a good yarn without abandoning scientific reality. Here are our top five realistic space movies.
DEEP IMPACT
RELEASED: 1998 DIRECTOR: Mimi Leder CAST: Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni and Elijah Wood
Disaster movies rarely trouble themselves with scientific accuracy, correctly assuming most audiences want to see that attractive all-star cast surviving fireballs by the skin of their teeth. That makes’s level of authentic detail all the more impressive. While it definitely stretches the truth in pursuit of spectacular effects sequences, unlike its rival asteroid flick, Michael Bay’s bombastic , is a far more sober and realistic depiction of what an extinction-level event would look like.
