Neil deGrasse Tyson may not be a film critic. But if you watch the video above from his Youtube channel StarTalk Plus, you’ll see that — to use one of his own favorite locutions — he loves him a good science fiction movie. Given his professional credentials as an astrophysicist and his high public profile as a science communicator, it will hardly come as a surprise that he displays a certain sensitivity to cinematic departures from scientific fact. His personal low watermark on that rubric is the 1979 Disney production The Black Hole, which moves him to declare, “I don’t think they had a physicist in sight of any scene that was scripted, prepared, and filmed for this movie.”
As for Tyson’s “single favorite movie of all time,” that would be The Matrix, despite how the humans-as-batteries concept central to its plot violates the laws of thermodynamics. (Over time, that particular choice has been revealed as a typical example of meddling by studio executives, who thought audiences wouldn’t understand the original script’s concept of humans being used for decentralized computing.) The Matrix receives an S, Tyson’s highest grade, which beats out even the A he grants to Ridley Scott’s The Martian, from 2015, “the most scientifically accurate film I have ever witnessed” — except for the dust storm that strands its protagonist on Mars, whose low air density means we would feel even its highest winds as “a gentle breeze.”
You might expect Tyson to poke these sorts of holes in every sci-fi movie he sees, no matter how obviously schlocky. And indeed he does, though not without also showing a healthy respect for the fun of filmgoing. Even Michael Bay’s notoriously preposterous Armageddon, whose oil-drillers-defeat-an-asteroid conceit was mocked on set by star Ben Affleck, receives a gentleman’s C. While it “violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made,” Tyson explains (noting it’s since been outdone by Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall), “I don’t care that it violated the law of physics, because it didn’t care.” For a more scientifically respectable alternative, consider Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, the lesser-known of 1998’s two Hollywood asteroid-disaster spectacles.
If you’re thinking of holding a Tyson-approved sci-fi film festival at home, you’ll also want to include The Quiet Earth, The Terminator, Back to the Future, Contact, and Gravity, not to mention the nineteen-fifties classics The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob. But whatever else you screen, the experience would be incomplete without 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s joint vision of man in space. “Am I on LSD, or is the movie on LSD?” he asks. “One of us is on LSD for the last twenty minutes of the film.” But “what matters is how much influence this film had on everything — on everything — and how much attention they gave to detail.” If you’ve ever seen 2001 before, go into it with an open mind — and bear in it the fact that, as Tyson underscores, it was all made a year before we reached the moon.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
