Solaris

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One of the most popular and long-running science-fiction franchises is also oft-cited by scientists, from JPL astrophysicists to NASA astronauts, as an inspiration for their chosen fields. This fourth installment in the Star Trek filmic universe finds key players from the original series—William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, and George Takei—reprising their iconic roles. On planet Earth in the year 1986, the crew recruits a humpback whale to communicate with a malevolent alien probe. Directed by Leonard Nimoy, who was given even more creative input than on his previous The Search for Spock, the film received Oscar nominations for Donald Peterman’s cinematography, as well as for its sound, sound effects editing, and Leonard Rosenman’s unconventional score.

Written and directed by Philip Kaufman, this historical drama is based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 novel of the same name. The 1957 Soviet Sputnik launch prompts urgency for the US government to develop a space program, leading it to hastily recruit seven astronauts, aka Mercury 7, with the goal of becoming the first humans to orbit Earth. Kaufman manages to address every major factor of change in the seemingly placid 1950s, from the social to the political to the cultural, in a single, category-defying film. His scientific saga won Oscars for Original Score, Sound Effects Editing, Film Editing, and Sound, and netted four more nominations, including for Best Picture and Sam Shepard’s supporting performance as the record-breaking mid-century pilot Chuck Yeager.

In Claire Denis’s sci-fi thriller, death row inmates are taken to outer space on a dangerous mission taking them dangerously close to a black hole. The film starts with Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his infant daughter inside the ship, a space seemingly too big and hollow for just the two of them. Flashbacks offer dark revelations of what’s taken place there. Eerily calm and enigmatic, the ambience of the ship reflects an undertone of doom—an unknown, vast energy pulling the two survivors into the looming force of the singularity.

Eight astronauts aboard a spaceship, Icarus II, must save a freezing planet Earth by reigniting the dying sun. Capa (Cillian Murphy), a physicist, oversees an explosive device that can reignite the sun, and handles matters calmly despite unforeseen disasters. Set almost exclusively in or around the ship, the film makes excellent use of claustrophobia to increase the suspense billowing in the atmosphere.

Ron Howard directed this tense retelling of the third NASA mission to the moon, where a series of system failures led to three astronauts nearly being marooned in space. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton star as the imperiled astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise, with Oscar-nominated support provided by Ed Harris as NASA flight director Gene Kranz and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Lovell. The nominated visual effects team of Robert Legato, Michael Kanfer, Leslie Ekker, and Matt Sweeney recreated the astronauts’ mission with scrupulous visual realism, and the film received a total of nine nominations including Best Picture, winning for its film editing and sound.

Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 sci-fi feature, based on Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel of the same name, stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Arroway, an atheist scientist dedicated to the discovery of extraterrestrial life through radio signals from outer space. Her budding romance with influential Christian writer Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) is halted by their opposing values and perceptions of existential truth. Contact is a thoughtful contemplation on belief, examining how religion and science can coexist rather than contradict.

Christopher Nolan directed and wrote (with his brother Jonathan) this epic, time- and universe-spanning adventure about a team of astronauts’ desperate attempt to find a new home for humankind as environmental crises doom the Earth. Developed with theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Kip Thorne, an expert in black hole cosmology and time travel research, Interstellar benefits from the detail and authenticity layered with Nolan’s signature striking visual language. Filmed in a mixture of 35mm and 70mm, the film received five nominations at the 87th Academy Awards and took home an Oscar for Visual Effects.