Top 10 Five Star Luxury Prisons

The opening of this disaster flick is a little silly: an earth-killing comet is discovered by a backyard telescope before professional astronomers. Still, for the most part, the film’s science is sound. Unfortunately, it was lost in the 1998 shuffle thanks to the success of another film about a deadly celestial body, “Armageddon.” While “Armageddon” is generally considered to be scientifically absurd, “Deep Impact” is well-regarded by scientists. Unlike the Michael Bay classic, “Deep Impact” addresses the struggles of microgravity in space. Most importantly, the film ends with a piece of the comet landing in the Atlantic Ocean, causing a massive tsunami. Scientists were very impressed by the visual effects and the realistic portrayal of how a tsunami that size would work.

If you set the core concept of clairvoyants aside, Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” is surprisingly accurate. Spielberg consulted experts to accurately portray tech like retinal scanners and motion tracking software. But it also predicted several types of technology we see in action today. It shows driverless cars, a technology currently working out technological kinks. It also presaged the advent of voice-activated smart homes. On the darker end of science, Spielberg’s sci-fi classic foresaw the influence of technology on the state’s ability to surveil its citizens. Corporations get in on the action too with personalized ads. In real life, smartphones, cameras, and social media give governments, private individuals, and companies the ability to obtain all kinds of personal information.

Besides showcasing the incredible talent of Sam Rockwell, this 2009 sci-fi flick is a scientific masterpiece. Rockwell plays an astronaut in a lunar habitat, mining helium-3. While we currently don’t have technology to utilize helium as a primary energy source, it does exist in large quantities on the moon. On Earth, we are suffering from helium scarcity, so it is conceivable that, were a major use for helium beyond balloons discovered, we would need to mine it from the moon. The technology featured in the movie is incredibly realistic. Moreover, its depiction of the long-term effects of isolation hits differently on the back end of COVID lockdowns.

Neuropsychologists were quite impressed with the metaphors contained within Pixar’s “Inside Out.” Their major gripe with the film is its use of ‘core memories,’ a concept taken from computer science and not brain science. Still, the film depicts a simplistic but accurate picture of how memories and emotions interact. Emotions can have significant effects on the way memories encode and affect future behavior. In truth, every time a memory is recalled, it is slightly changed. In the film, Sadness changes Riley’s memories, which they laud as a great example of how emotions impact the retrieval of memories. Emotional significance is a great indicator of whether a memory will be stored in our long-term memory centers, and can color the memory in the future.

The 2011 Steven Soderbergh movie “Contagion” found a second life in 2020 during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctors, epidemiologists, and the general public began to appreciate the parallels between the film and the real-life consequences of the virus. At the time of its release, scientists compared it to Ebola, SARS, and the Spanish Flu. While some inaccuracies remained to compress for time and story, it’s largely accurate. The origin, a mutated bat virus, is similar to COVID’s likely origin. Tracking the virus through contact tracing became commonplace during COVID. Its discussion of infection rates was informed by epidemiologists and, again, reflected by our collective COVID experience.

Carl Sagan was modern America’s first celebrity scientist, and his involvement in the adaptation of his novel, “Contact” helped with the film’s scientific accuracy. The movie centers on a SETI scientist who makes contact with aliens. She decodes their messages and discovers blueprints for a device to take her to them. Many astronomers laud the film for its fidelity to SETI’s methodology and ethos. Like the real-life SETI, contact is made through radio transmission. The physics too are accurate insofar as the level of knowledge available at the time. It’s so accurate, in fact, that a normal audience member could easily get lost in the sauce of scientific jargon. In many ways, “Contact” is a love letter to astronomy and physics.

“WALL-E,” besides being a poignant story about loneliness, love, and friendship, is a surprisingly prescient movie when it comes to science and technology. It takes our current issues with pollution, ravenous industry, and capitalism and projects them far into the future. The earth of “WALL-E” has been abandoned by humanity, who took to space to find a future. The filmmakers consulted biologist James Hicks about the rigors of space on the human body over generations. He took studies on microgravity on human bones and muscle and used math to calculate that over generations. The result is the corpulent, technologically-reliant humans of the film.

Stanley Kubrick’s collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke on “2001: A Space Odyssey” resulted in one of the most beloved films of all time. It’s also one of the most scientifically accurate films ever made. Unlike most space fiction made before or since, space in “2001” is completely silent. The ship’s design was based on scientific principles, as is the depiction of microgravity. It’s a wonder to think that it was actually released the year before humans walked on the moon. In the middle of the space race, the movie portrays astronauts as rigorously trained men of science rather than swashbuckling heroes. Moreover, it tackled the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence decades before we’ve been forced to tackle that dilemma in real life.

Complaints about the loud score aside, Chris Nolan’s “Interstellar” is arguably the most visually stunning film of his career. The space travel scenes were directly influenced by Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the movie’s science advisor. “Interstellar” has been praised by astrophysicists for its brilliant portrayal of a black hole. It includes gravitational lensing, or the bending of light inside and around it. While the time dilation seems fanciful, it’s based on our modern understanding of relativity. It also tackles the vulnerability of the global food supply: a disease called ‘the blight’ has infected food crops around the world, leading to widespread famine. The spread of GMO monoculture crops leaves us all vulnerable to similar issues in the future.

“The Martian” is the story of Astronaut Mark Watney, a botanist stranded alone on Mars. He faces the incredible real-life dangers of Mars exploration. It’s a dead, frozen planet with no atmosphere to speak of and no liquid water. The film also acknowledges the most pragmatic difficulty of Mars exploration: our current technologies would make a Mars-bound journey six to seven months long. In truth, the film is full of actual NASA technology like the habitats and water reclamation. Watney saves himself by growing potatoes on Mars, an experiment replicated by NASA. The most remarkable thing about “The Martian” is that, despite hyperfocusing on realistic science, it tells such a vivid and compelling story.