Ever since Georges Méliès imagined that trip to the moon, space has held a certain fascination for filmmakers. In the early decades of cinema, you could imagine almost anything was up there as science brought the stars closer to our understanding, verisimilitude became a goal, culminating in the ultra-realism of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity.
With Cuarón’s IMAX 3D stunner opening this week after a lively TIFF premiere, we thought we’d take a look at five films that paved its way. And, no, we didn’t include Capricorn One, because (spoiler, I guess?) the characters never get off the ground.
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick’s majestic inquiry into humanity’s cosmic purpose reflects its creator’s fascination with research and minutiae. Kubrick worked with scientists, designers and futurists to extrapolate where the space programs of the time would take us by 2001. Virtually none of it came to pass, but the physics are as realistic as possible – from the revolving corridors and velcro flooring on that Pan-Am shuttle to Dave Bowman’s outwitting HAL 9000 by risking his own life, blowing himself back into Discovery’s airlock without a helmet. Even the star gate is theoretically possible… though Kubrick didn’t know that at the time.
2. Apollo 13 (1995) Ron Howard’s nail-biting recreation of the disastrous 1970 moon mission was so exacting that the space sequences were actually filmed in zero gravity. The cast and filmmakers built a set inside NASA’s “vomit comet,” a plane that flies in a parabolic arc to create 25 seconds of weightlessness. Getting that material required hours of flight time and copious anti-nauseants, and even the strongest stomachs felt the pressure. The shot where Bill Paxton burps up his astronaut ice cream is 100 per cent authentic.
3. Marooned (1969) Five months before the launch of Apollo 13, Hollywood produced a movie about NASA’s efforts to save a trio of astronauts stranded in space. Director John Sturges (The Great Escape) tried to tell the then-unimaginable story as realistically as possible, building replicas of NASA command centres (as Howard would do a quarter-century later for his Apollo 13 movie) and space capsules. The visual effects won an Oscar. (It’s frequently confused with Robert Altman’s Countdown, a mostly Earthbound space race drama starring James Caan that was released in 1968.)
4. Silent Running (1972) Having spent years as the photographic effects supervisor on 2001, Douglas Trumbull had a pretty good idea of what space travel would look and sound like. He applied that knowledge to his first directorial effort, a thriller about a botanist (Bruce Dern) who commandeers a spaceship containing Earth’s last surviving forests. Four decades later, the movie’s eco-activist angles have dated terribly (thanks largely to the decision to put Joan Baez on the soundtrack), but Trumbull’s vision of space as a beautiful, hostile frontier feels as real as they come.
5. Alien (1979) And speaking of beauty and hostility… obviously, the world of Ridley Scott’s deep space horror movie is entirely invented. But the depiction of space travel as just another blue-collar occupation for the crew of the USCSS Nostromo – who bitch about profit-sharing and generally get on each other’s nerves even after the eponymous xenomorph enters their lives – contradicts everything the movies had taught us about reaching for the stars being a collaborative, good-natured effort. It’s the smartest thing about a brilliant movie, because it makes the characters instantly relatable, even though they live on a spaceship in the future. They’re sore, they’re cranky and they didn’t sign on for any of this shit: they’re exactly like us.
Extra Credit: For All Mankind (1989)
Constructed entirely from footage of actual Apollo missions – much of it shot by the astronauts themselves – Al Reinert’s amazing documentary recreates a manned space flight in 80 exquisite minutes, backed by a gorgeous Brian Eno score. Because it’s non-fiction, it doesn’t quite belong on this list … but if you’ve never seen it, consider it essential viewing, especially post-Gravity.
