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Comment by fabiensanglard | Hacker News Reader

A movie that inspired me to keep on going for many years.

Agreed, one of those rare sci-fi films that does it all without green screens or rubber suits, an actual story that you care about, and want to see the ending.

Importantly, it’s one of the rarest sci fi films where there’s no “supernatural” element whatsoever- no force, no Q, no monolith. Just man against nature. Only three movies I know doing this are gattaca, Martian and the moon.

I’d add Gravity and Ad Astra to that list.

I would say Ad Astra is filled to the brim with fantastic and implausible elements. The visual design is very realistic, and this contrast adds to the movie's sense of disconnect (which is great it you like it, and a movie killer if you don't).

If we are talking at implausibility, Gravity is filled to the brim with it. It does a very lousy presentation of orbital mechanic: you don't point at a general direction of space station which is 70km away, give an impulse away from it and slowly drift to it. It is not how it works!

On top of this implausibility, the criteria in the parent post was ‘there’s no “supernatural” element whatsoever,’ which given the heroic ghost of Kowalski‘s role in saving the protagonist (as a “hallucination”), should also rule it out. Never mind that the film was essentially disorienting scenes and Sandra Bullock repeatedly shouting into the cameras

Hallucinations aren’t supernatural. Kowalski wasn’t a ghost. This was evident in the movie.

The Martian’s bad physics and chemistry should also rule it out from the list based on your criteria. Which would be sad, because despite that, it’s a great movie and book.

Book chemistry and physics (other than dust storm) looks rather plausible, what didn't you like there? Movie added some ridiculous stuff when flying with punctured space suit, that was pathetic.

Why not? What's inaccurate about it?

Objects in space in adjacent orbits around aren't floating in space, they are falling on Earth at a great speed. If you apply an impulse in the way as shown in the movie, you'll expand or shrink the orbit excentricity and you will likely start moving up or down rapidly relative to your target, instead of closing in. This way to get to your target you'll need to burn an insane amount of fuel and do orbit corrections every second. The right way is to make one impulse to change your orbit in such a way that your new orbit will intersect the orbit of your target (and that you both will be there at the same time), and the direction of such impulse might be far from obvious. More likely one impulse will result in a very long transit orbit, so a better course would be two or more orbital corrections.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks!

So is The Martian. The physics in the movie and book are absolutely magical: windstorms powerful enough to impale people but not enough air pressure to require a top to the spacecraft. Toxic, perchlorate soil growing potatoes… Both the book and movie are wonderful, but have huge gaps of implausibility.

Ad Astra is "story" wrapped around visual effects to allow Brad Pitt be used as lead actor. And there could be so much to it: The emotional controls, done by I assume AI? Great plot for a dystopian society. A rogue scientist at the edge of explored space posing a big threat? The Heart of Darkness is great, regardless of version. Various powers battling of the few rocks in what is otherwise an empty solar system? The Expense shows us how great that can be.

All of that in one film? Not so much. And then there a the logic holes bigger than a smaller galaxy. Earth is facing severe energy issues, up to the point a habdfull of dudes are fighting over three luna rovers? Could be fun, ubtil one realizes that there is apparebtly enough energy to be had to kill civilisation by energy waves created somewhere around Saturn... Then Brad is sent on a secret missions, and instead of flying on a military vessel to the lunar station, he takes acivilian flight wearing uniform. Only to land travle across the moon. The inly reason for that seems to be show some fancy lunar battle scene... I could go on...

Space Cowboys so, that would fit. As would Alien and Aliens, everything after Prometeus... If I want Eric Daenicken, I go read one of his books.

While not a movie, I think that’s what made the original BBC[1] run of Black Mirror so eery. Everything was plausible, just a completely predictable extrapolation of current technology.

[1] not 100% it was BBC now that I think about it. Some British channel or another

Channel 4. I prefer these older episodes too.

It's man against man, not man against nature.

I’d argue it’s man against nature in its rawest form. Many sci fi films try to use this as a plot point (“I know the math, punch it” in Iron man for example), but GATTACA handles it head on - the protagonist battling what’s supposedly his nature given limitations is what I would consider the main if not only quality that makes man “not natural” more so than even any artificial intelligence we may create tomorrow.

He's not battling his natural limitations. He's battling the genetic-discrimination-based oppression imposed by society: the police who will use force to stop him from doing the things of which he is naturally capable.

The hurdles aren't natural, they are human-made constructs.

I think it's at least strongly implied in the movie that he has to work much harder than (for example) his genetically superior brother to achieve the same level of performance. So maybe you're both right.

From the point of view of the Space Agency even though his ‘spot’ performance meets the grade he’s still an unacceptable risk as an astronaut - he might die during a mission potentially harming others - and if so all the resources spent on that mission and training would have been wasted.

In a sense it’s the external political struggle of whether a society allocates resources to everyone to maximise their personal potential, or focuses resources on a subset of talented individuals likely to give the best overall return.

He's outperforming his genetically superior brother on every metric that matters to that particular society.

Silent Running (1972) is another one in the "man against nature" theme, and has no supernatural element. This movie is kind of a classic but tends to be forgotten, maybe because it's quite old.

I adore that movie! Doesn’t get enough love.

well, actually it was pretty common in the past, probably due to budget and/or technological issues

I would add to the list

- Logan's run

- The Andromeda Strain

- The Black Hole

- Stalker

- Escape from New York

- Mad Max series

and many others

It is man against machine. If we fully understand how genes work, would you trust some private company to create a trustworthy social credit score based on any potential situation, even situations that are obviously not in the data set?

The story was about people blindly trusting a machine to say "valid". The police force didn't want to figure out the crime, they just wanted to find the one without the "valid". The setting that was presented was some sort of communist utopia where the economic calculation problem has been solved through a gene scanner and central computer control.

AFAIk the ‘invalid’ was just unregistered, Vincent wasn’t just intentionally shedding someone else’s DNA he kept his own from being registered- it would have been a much shorter movie if it was.

No, there’s at least one scene in the movie where the DNA scanner does identify Vincent, so he is registered in the system.

If you mean the photo I figured that was a recreation based on the ability to predict attributes from DNA like facial structure, hair, and myopia. Myopia was listed as a known characteristic in the ‘invalid’ image. It didn’t give his name and his own brother had to work to find his identity. They go looking for the him amongst the vagrant unregistered population where it’s pointed out that they’re looking for someone smart so he’s probably not going to be there.

It could be assumed that all genetically engineered people are registered so ‘invalid’ would imply not-genetically engineered.

Modern identification based on DNA is far easier in real life as he would still share many genetic variants with his brother.

Equilibrium is another.

saw Ex Machina recently. can also highly recommend.

Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.

And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.

Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...

But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.

The Terminator/Terminator 2, Gravity, Rocketeer, Wall•E, Swamp Thing, Star Trek, 28 Days Later, Back to the Future, Mad Max…

There really is no shortage.

Well, depends if the commenter meant anything that is something we currently not only can't do, but are fairly sure isn't possible.

Terminator, BTTF: time travel. Star Trek: depends on the episode (e.g. Q, or the Daud, or time travel).

Gravity is arguably contemporary.

But yeah, like I said there's a whole category called hard scifi, so no shortage. I just took the ones off the top of my head that definitely were not supernatural.

> Truman Show

Which, as you probably know, was also written by Andrew Niccol.

I don’t understand why modern day astronauts don’t wear three piece suits.

If you're the Fabien Sanglard we all know, that's very interesting to hear; it's a personal favourite of mine too. Thanks much for your amazing breakdowns, and I'm glad you kept going <3

You can keep going if you don't hold anything for the swim back

Cool! I saw this link and your books came to mind as another example of how material like this is vital for seeing (amongst other things) how creative endeavours cope with ‘the other 90 percent’ of projects.

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