Movies from the Space Age

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the space age, with the launch of Sputnik 1 on this day in 1957. Since NASA is adrift (at least in terms of manned space exploration) and Russia is still recovering from financial collapse by selling Soyuz seats to tourists, it's time to think about how the space age has been depicted on film for the past 50 years, the only place that still retains some vision. So, here are a few notable landmarks in that peculiar genre of cinema that attempts to portray a reasonably realistic vision of the exploration of space.

1. Destination Moon (1950). I know, it's before the space age started for "real", but it's a great example of what we thought space travel would be like before it was ever done. By 1950, the theory was in place (things like weightlessness, etc.) and the mythic astronaut archetypes were already entrenched. It's interesting to see how much they got "right", and how much they didn't.

2. Forbidden Planet (1956). The first attempt to translate the headiness of "hard" science fiction into film is still an entertaining, if overly plotted and "talky" movie. The special effects haven't dated nearly as much as they deserve to, and it's pretty clear that this was the template from which Star Trek was struck. Realistic? Not really. But it was movies like this that the people who went to the moon were watching.

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Arthur C. Clarke often said that he and Stanley Kubrick were setting out to make the "proverbial good science fiction movie", since neither had seen a film that matched the intelligence and verisimilitude of the sci fi they had read. 2001 succeeds on a number of levels (it's probably one of the most-analyzed films in history), but it's notable today for at least making the attempt to get the physics of space travel correct. So, astronauts don't walk around unless they're in a centrifuge (or wearing velcro-shoes, which somehow never caught on), and their spacewalks are slow, careful and tedious, just like in real life. One thing it didn't get right was the topography of the moon. The prevailing image was one of tall, craggy peaks, and in reality the moon's landscape is much more smooth. It's the kind of thing that we didn't find out until we went there, and remember, when this film was produced, we hadn't even orbited it yet.

4. Silent Running (1972). Doug Trumbull had worked on the special effects for 2001, so it was natural that his first film as a director became an effects extravaganza. The film is ultimately much more "dated" than 2001, since it grapples with the topical issue of deforestation and unwisely incorporates a contemporary musical score with songs by Joan Baez. The science, however, has been done worse. As in 2001, the spacecraft don't zip through space like Buck Rogers, but instead move in predetermined orbits and take a long time to communicate with earth. The notion of giant, domed gardens in space is something that may yet come to pass in reality, and it certainly created the kind of geodesic template for the kinds of ships seen in Battlestar Galactica and the abortive 80s series Earth Star Voyager.

5. The Andromeda Strain (1971). Trumbull also helmed the cutting-edge effects for this Robert Wise sci-fi film, an adaptation of Michael Crichton's scientifically rigorous novel about a virulent organism brought to earth on a returning space probe. The premise of the film was realistic enough for NASA to require returning lunar astronauts (at least on the first few landings) to undergo two weeks of quarantine upon their return to earth. As a film, it plays like the scientific procedural the novel succeeds in being, which doesn't always make for compelling cinema, but having Crichton on board certainly guaranteed that the science was plausible. Today it's most memorable as a fascinating example of late-60s space-age thinking.

6. Alien (1979). For all its success, Ridley Scott's first sci-fi film is simply a skillfully made, high-budget monster movie, but its space-age styling (courtesy of technology-nut designer Ron Cobb) is more realistic than it needed to be. For example, the Sulacco's cathedral-esque spires illustrate the obvious point that a spacecraft has no need to be sleek in a vacuum (for an obvious influence, look at the Alliance cruisers in Joss Wheedon's Firefly), and landing on a planet is not as easy as simply pointing the ship "down" and hitting the gas. The way the alien is ultimately disposed of, making use of pressure differential and vacuum, is remarkably realistic (artificial gravity notwithstanding) and indicative of, by then, decades of experience in human spaceflight.

7. 2010 (1984). Its politics have not aged as well as its effects (to be fair - no one could have predicted that the cold war would be over in 5 years), but 2010 carries on the tradition of its predecessor in the use of centrifuges for gravity (still the only plausible way of creating it in space), realistic flight times (using hibernation) and slow, careful spacewalks. The scenery of Jupiter and its moons is also taken straight from the images returned by Voyagers 1 and 2, making it the most accurate portrayal of a solar planetary system not yet visited by humans on record.

8. Apollo 13 (1995). Probably the most accurate space flight film ever made, Ron Howard took the unprecedented step of shooting zero-g scenes in zero-g. There are serious proposals on the table today to set up a movie studio in orbit which, if it comes to pass, might make it possible to shoot the rest of the Apollo program with similar accuracy. The film also makes extensive use of CG (then a new technology) and copies the space-to-ground radio transmissions verbatim. What other film has an action scene that hinges on someone's ability to do long division?

9. Mission to Mars (2000). Those of us with some vague memory of high school biology will be taken completely out of the film by the atrocious molecular biology the film's climax hinges upon, but the filmmakers seem to have spent their consultant budget on the physics, as the orbital ballet that happens early in the film is as accurate as anything set to film. Mars entered our consciousness in the early 2000s as the next logical step for space exploration, but we probably won't be going there for a while, due to political shortsightedness, but this film and Red Planet are true products of our culture's burgeoning interest in it.

10. Space Cowboys (2000). Again produced with the cooperation of NASA, Clint Eastwood's science fiction attempt is more or less plausible (although in reality, only one senior citizen is likely to be allowed to fly to space at a time). The uncomfortable relationship between the US and Russian space programs is at the core of the film's narrative conflict, something that fairly accurately reflects the current state of manned space exploration. Space Cowboys also brings things full circle in a way, by re-visiting the roots of the space program, and illustrating how much things have changed.

Of course, you should all see the Right Stuff, but oddly, that movie is more about the culture of American heroism than it really is about technology. There are loads of screamingly bad technical gaffes in it, but that doesn't stop it from being an interesting bit of film.

So, after 50 years, space travel has become both more and less exciting for us. Let's hope in another 50 years we'll have made some real progress in the exploration of our world, instead of, as we are now, hunkering down in a cave and bitching about who gets the most meat.