From Interstellar To The Terminator: The Most Scientifically Accurate Sci-Fi Movies Ever

Interstellar (2014) takes place in the not-too-distant future, where climate conditions have created a dire scarcity of food. The human race is facing inevitable extinction unless a group of explorers can travel through a wormhole and find a planet that is fit for human survival. Director Christopher Nolan worked alongside Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist, to make sure that the science in the movie was as precise as possible. That's not to say that every single plot point was 100% accurate, especially because a lot of what takes place in the film is considered "Speculative-Albeit-Imaginable Science."

Nolan and Thorne worked alongside the film's visual effects studio Double Negative to create the film's depiction of a black hole called Gargantua. It is considered the most realistic look at a black hole ever seen in the movies. In fact, it's been reported that the film's black hole led to an actual scientific discovery.

Thorne did later publish a report stating that Gargantua could have been depicted even more realistically and that it didn't lead to a scientific revelation. However, we do have to remember that it is a Hollywood movie. No one is (hopefully) going to use the film as a blueprint to travel through an actual black hole.

Ron Howard's 1995 movie is based on the true story of the 13th Apollo mission to the moon. The narrative centers on the ill-fated 1970 flight of three astronauts who experience life-threatening complications after an oxygen tank explodes onboard the spacecraft. Howard and the actors wanted to not only get the historical facts as accurate as possible but also the science of space travel.

All the zero-gravity scenes are not only scientifically accurate, but they are also real. Howard convinced NASA to let the production film in its reduced-gravity aircraft called the Vomit Comet. Ken Mattingly (the man played by Gary Sinise in the film who was bumped from the mission because he had the measles) admits that there are a few differences between the film and what really happened.

For example, in the film, it does seem like the crew and NASA are just making up possible miracle scenarios to get the astronauts home. Mattingly notes that in actuality, NASA had already worked out several possible faulty scenarios and the procedures on how to try and fix them. However, Mattingly concedes that Hollywood movies work off of creating drama, and it's obviously a much more interesting story if the conflict onboard the Apollo appears totally chaotic.

One thing that the Oscar-winning film did get wrong just also happens to be the movie's tagline. After the oxygen tank explodes in the movie, astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) reports to NASA, "Houston, we have a problem," when, in fact, the actual line was "Houston, we've had a problem here." Considering that the movie gets all the physics of space correct, it's probably okay that a couple words were changed.

If a filmmaker is going to go about adapting a work by Carl Sagan (an expert in extraterrestrial research), it better be as scientifically accurate as possible. In the 1997 film Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, Jodi Foster stars as an astronomer who finds evidence of intelligent alien life. Luckily, the director was up for the painstaking challenge of making Contact the kind of movie that even scientists could learn from.

That's not to say that it's a perfect film from a science standpoint, but it gets a lot of the science correct. Almost the entire narrative is based on physics or estimated current theories. Both in the film and in real life, there is a program called SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) that does just what the names says and searches for intelligent life outside of the planet Earth.

Many astronomers also think that if humans were able to communicate with alien life forms and achieve contact it would be just like in the movie, where Foster's character uses radio signals. This is because radio signals travel at the speed of light, and other planets are so far away.

The language in the film is also accurate. In fact, it's so accurate that a lot of the terminology between characters is totally incomprehensible to the average person. So while astronomers may be knowingly nodding their head when the scientists in the film talk about "pi times hydrogen," the rest of us just need to trust that the characters are using actual mathematical equations. Don't worry, they really are.

Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) gets stranded alone on Mars following a massive storm. In order to survive, Watney has to figure out how to contact NASA and grow food on a planet with soil that does not contain the same nutrient-rich material found on Earth. Thankfully, Watney is also a botanist. He knows how to "science the sh*t" out of what he has and build a farm using soil fertilized with human waste and water made by removing hydrogen from rocket fuel.

Many scientists thought Ridley Scott's 2015 movie was one of the most realistic sci-fi films ever made. It was perceived by many spectators to be so accurate that they actually thought it was based on a true story. Much of the agriculture science is correct and most scientists think that the movie's imagery of Mars is spot on.

Perhaps the hardest part of the movie was getting NASA right. Astronaut Clayton Anderson talked about how The Martian nailed its depiction of NASA:

Rather for me, the highlight was the film’s refreshing and inspiring depiction of NASA. I’m not talking about physical depictions mind you (the Vertical Assembly Building does not reside at the Johnson Space Center) but instead the film’s sense of an ever-present drive on the part of NASA employees to pull together to win the day, even in the midst of seemingly insurmountable odds. Just as I witnessed so often throughout my own 30-year NASA career, a team of ordinary, caring people with little regard to their personal needs put in just a little bit extra, to do something extraordinary.

In Fritz Lang's 1929 German silent film, a scientist blasts off to the moon in search of gold. Woman in the Moon is often cited as the first science fiction film. It is also the first time the blast-off countdown from 10 to 1 is used on celluloid. It's the same countdown that NASA would eventually use for all their launches. 

It would be 40 years before the human race would actually get to the moon, which makes Lang's film even more impressive. Film scholars and military officials have lauded the film for its amazing accuracy. The scientists that served as advisers to the movie understood the basics of rocket travel and gravity. Lang consulted with German rocket expert Hermann Oberth to construct the film's rocket, which impressively gets the escape velocity that is needed to free itself from the Earth's orbit correct. When the rocket does finally land on the moon, its crew correctly experiences zero gravity.

In James Cameron's original 1984 movie, a cyborg is sent from the future in order to assassinate a woman whose unborn son will ultimately lead the human race in a war against the machines. Since time travel doesn't really exist (and let's face it, probably never will despite the thousands of movies and books on the subject), scientists look at the concept from a logistics standpoint.

Dave Goldberg, a physicist from Drexel University says of The Terminator:

I've long said that (the actual device and the whole traveling nude thing aside) the original Terminator handles time travel better than any other movie I've ever seen. The entire thing is a completely self-consistent time loop, from John Conner's parentage and survivalist training, to the picture of Sarah Conner that finds its way to Kyle Reese. No grandfather paradoxes at all, but there are information paradoxes.