Photo Credit (Greety Images)

Arrival (2016).

When a dozen of the most mysterious monoliths since 2001: A Space Odyssey drop anchor throughout the world, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are tasked by the military with making contact with the seven-limbed ‘heptapods’ and discovering what they want. Arrival, nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and rated 94% fresh by review-aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, has been described as “a language lesson masquerading as a blockbuster” and a “movie about aliens for people who don’t like movies about aliens.”

October Sky (1999).
Depending on who you asked, Sputnik was either a harbinger of Soviet doom or a worthless science experiment in a little West Virginia coal mining hamlet. For Homer Hickam Jr. and his friends, the first artificial satellite gave them optimism that they could do more than just hold shovels. Between scavenging railroads for rocket parts, launching DIY rockets on sometimes terrifying trajectories, and establishing a pen-pal relationship with legendary rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, Hickam and his band of misfit friends inspired a dying town to look upward to space rather than down at their dwindling coal reserves. Based on the true account of how Hickam came to work for NASA, October Sky is regarded as much for its depiction of Homer’s rise to space fame as it is for the difficult but far from monolithic connection between him and his stubborn coal-miner father. October Sky was nominated for the American Film Institute’s top 100 list of the most inspiring American films released before 2005, and it is still a favorite among space aficionados.

Gravity (2013).
The Kessler Syndrome is given the Hollywood treatment in this low-Earth-orbit thriller starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as Hubble repair astronauts who are stranded in space after a Russian anti-satellite missile test triggers a thrilling but unrealistically quick sequence of orbital debris strikes that cripple the duo’s space shuttle and leave LEO looking like a 20-car pileup. Despite Gravity’s somewhat shaky physics and technological flaws, it manages to get enough details right to become a SpaceNews reader favorite. Critics adored it, which explains why this visually gorgeous drama about isolation, dread, and survival won seven Oscars, the most of any film that year.

Contact (1997).
Astronomers have spent decades searching the heavens for radio transmissions from extraterrestrial civilizations. What happens if they find something? That is the story of Contact, starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer who has been compelled from infancy to search for signals from distant worlds despite warnings from others that she is jeopardizing her promising scientific career. When her search yields an extraterrestrial signal, she is forced into decidedly terrestrial struggles over decoding the message and using it to communicate with whoever or whatever delivered it from the star Vega. The film is based on Carl Sagan’s novel, with Arroway fashioned after real-life SETI astronomer Jill Tarter.

Hidden Figures (2016).
This account of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson’s work at NASA highlights their critical contribution as mathematicians to sending John Glenn to orbit and back safely. These three African American women, along with many of their coworkers, calculated trajectories and other important numbers for the Mercury program in the early 1960s, despite segregation and sexism. Though not as well-known as the astronauts they assisted in reaching orbit, the mathematicians rose to prominence after the film was nominated for an Academy Award. NASA, whose headquarters are now located on Hidden Figures Way, has a software validation center named for Katherine Johnson in West Virginia.

First Man (2019).
Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong in this 2018 biographical drama based on James R. Hansen’s book “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong.” The film, which earned an Academy Award for best visual effects, follows Armstrong from his X-15 spaceplane test flight in 1961 until the end of the Apollo 11 mission.

While focused on Armstrong’s flying career, First Man highlights the astronaut’s sadness following the deaths of his two-year-old daughter Karen, as well as close friends Elliot See and Edward White. First Man also investigates the toll that the inherent danger of the early space program had on the astronauts, their wives, and families.

Interstellar (2014).
This mind-bending, dystopian thriller from Christopher Nolan (Inception, The Dark Knight) stars Matthew McConaughey as an astronaut turned farmer tasked with finding a new home planet for a diminishing population battling to survive global crop failures and bizarre dust storms. Nothing is as it seems in this not-too-distant future, where humanity has crushed our spaceships into plowshares, NASA has gone underground, and children are taught that the Apollo moon landings were staged. Stunning visual effects won an Oscar for this sci-fi epic, which was commended by the famously fussy Neil de Grasse Tyson for its scientifically valid depiction of wormhole transit, black holes, and relativity.

The Right Stuff (1983).
This 1983 historical drama, based on Tom Wolfe’s book of the same name, compares the adventures of Chuck Yeager and other test pilots flying rocket-powered planes over the California desert in relative obscurity to the national stardom of the Project Mercury astronauts. The Right Stuff depicts the arduous medical and physical exams that the Mercury Seven underwent in order to qualify for spaceflight, as well as the hazards they encountered in the early days of space exploration.

Some Mercury Seven astronauts criticized the film for historical inaccuracies, although it was hailed by film reviewers who couldn’t explain its poor box office performance. The Right Stuff was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It received four Academy Awards for sound, original soundtrack, sound effects editing, and film editing.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
2001 is an enormous, although occasionally enigmatic, drama that took director Stanley Kubrick years to finish. A Space Odyssey begins with the origins of humanity in Africa and ends with a “starchild.”. It is best known for being set in the near future, with rotating space stations visited by Pan Am space shuttles, a moon base, and a voyage to Jupiter, as well as a mysterious black monolith and a deadly computer. According to Michael Benson’s excellent book Space Odyssey, Kubrick originally intended for the monolith to be clear, but the eventual Plexiglass design had a greenish hue. Kubrick opted to make the monolith black when a designer suggested it. Although some components of the film appear dated now, such as the Pan Am shuttles, it remains a cinematic masterpiece more than a half century after its release.
The Martian (2015).
Waking up separated from everyone you know and having to grow potatoes in your own dung to survive would be a miserable day on Earth, let alone Mars. In The Martian, NASA astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is left behind on the Red Planet by his team of scientists due to a severe dust storm. Based on Andy Weir’s bestselling book of the same name, Watney decides to “science the sh*t” out of his circumstances, both literally and metaphorically, in order to survive in an abandoned outpost until rescued. The Martian, recognized for its riveting storyline and attention to getting its scientific elements (mostly) right, was nominated for seven Oscars and named one of the American Film Institute’s top ten films of 2015.

Apollo 13 (1995).
“Houston, we have a problem.” That’s not exactly what Jim Lovell said after an explosion rocked his Apollo 13 spacecraft on its way to the moon in 1970 (“Houston, we’ve had a problem,” he actually said), but the version spoken by Lovell (Tom Hanks) in the film became an instant catchphrase that lives on in the public consciousness to this day. (Similarly, the term “Failure is not an option” was created for the film and is still popular today; however, flight director Gene Kranz liked it so much that he used it as the title of his autobiography several years later.) Aside from the dialogue inaccuracies, Apollo 13 closely follows the true events of that mission as Lovell, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) fight to return their crippled spacecraft to Earth with the help and ingenuity of the Mission Control team led by Kranz (Ed Harris, who also played John Glenn in The Right Stuff). The dramatic tale demonstrated that, while Apollo 11 accomplished its goal of landing humans on the moon, the rescue of Apollo 13 may have been NASA’s best hour, as Kranz claims in the film.