Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists the Best and Worst Sci-Fi Movies: The Blob, Back to the Future, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Arthur C. Clarke Cre­ates a List of His 12 Favorite Sci­ence-Fic­tion Movies (1984)

How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cin­e­ma For­ev­er (1902)

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

Under­stand­ing Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Dis­trib­uted to High Schools in the 1970s

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

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.