Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Sci-Fi Movie Tier List
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- Опубликовано: 7 май 2024
- How do some of the most revered sci-fi classics hold up against Neil's judgement? You think you know how Neil will rank movies like Interstellar? Armageddon? Think again.
Neil deGrasse Tyson takes us through a catalog of some of the most important sci-fi films of the last century, ranks them against each other. Who will end up on the top of the pile? There's only one way to find out...
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0:00 - Introduction
0:09 - The Black Hole
0:58 - The Matrix
2:27 - The Martian
4:09 - The Blob
5:55 - Contact
6:48 - Interstellar
9:19 - Gravity
12:54 - Back to the Future
14:39 - A Quiet Earth
16:48 - Arrival
19:44 - The Europa Report
21:10 - Armageddon
22:20 - Close Encounters of The Third Kind
24:54 - Deep Impact
26:02 - The Day the Earth Stood Still
26:55 - Independence Day
28:58 - The Terminator
32:03 - 2001: A Space Odyssey
33:25 - Closing Notes
Which ranking do you disagree with? 🤔
Interstellar
I agree very much with all of it, great analysis :D
I disagree about Gravity though. It's Zero-G, not Zero-Gravity. Gravity keeps them in orbit, so it's a very fitting name.
I'd have swapped your ranking of Back to the Future 2 and 3.
The only difference I have is the "blob" . I'd put it a grade higher. I'd prefer a grade+ but you didn't offer that option lol😊
Mars Attacks! Ack Ack! Ack Ack Ack!
The Thing, Alien, Aliens, Event Horizon, Predator, Sunshine, Abyss, Blade Runner…? Cmon Neil, lots of gold left in those hills.
Hope he'll do another one.
yup, he should make part 2 video
He is not a movie buff. Its a blessing when we get neil to comment on a sci fi movie in general. His top movies is based on what he seen. Not the entire world. And I can respect that. I dont hold Neil to a movie critic standard. We hold him to a science standard. So lets respect his movies even though they might not be the best . A lot of people down played gravity cause of neil but Gravity was a good movie. He was just focused on the scrience,
He can’t review all movies. You missed a lot of good ones too
He probably hasn't seen all of them lol
The original Matrix script had the humans being used for cloud computing; it got changed to batteries because the executives thought audiences wouldn’t understand the concept. The directors even explained exactly Neil’s point, but the execs got it their way
It’s a shame because people use cloud computing all the time now.
@@samanthac.349 Exactly. Ahead of their time, those two
I'd go so far as to say that the AIs realized that our human "wetware" was capable of solving problems the AI couldn't. That the AI was limited to being deterministic, where the humans had that creative spark that the machines could never have. Since they couldn't find that on their own, they enslaved humanity an mined it from them.
Each time Zion was destroyed and the Matrix was remade, it was because humans found a way out that the machines couldn't anticipate, so the machines learned from it secondhand and built a better prison for the next cycle.
The battery analogy works for the mass audience of the time and is very easy to understand for the average moviegoer.
Yup! This is another example of studio executives underestimating the intelligence of their audience.
Didn't know about that. But yeah makes more sense and would be even more mind-blowing back in 1999
As a former cryptographer and current linguist, I disagree with Arrival needing a cryptographer. A cryptographer deciphers code, but there's much more fine nuance to a language than there is to a code. There are a lot of linguistical concepts conveyed in that film that go beyond the science of cryptography.
Thank you! Exactly what I was thinking.
Yeah, it seems Neil really didn't get Arrival. The film (and the short story it's based on) explains very clearly why they need a linguist. And I'm pretty sure Jeremy Renner's character was supposed to be an astrophysicist, not a generic physicist, but he was there just as scientific support for the linguist. They were trying to communicate, not dissect and analyze their bodies, which is where they would have called a biologist. On top of that, there were more than two people, they were constantly web conferencing with other scientists from around the world, but those scenes were downplayed because it would just be scientist exchanging and comparing data.
Also, the hypothesis that the aliens would be dumb enough not to realize they had to write their symbols from the perspective of the humans on the other side of the glass is too silly to even entertain.
It would not matter one iota if the slien language were written mirrored, flipped, or upside down.
For me Arrival was one of the best movies due to the strong sense of wonder it generates. You can feel that this is "real" the danger, the unknown. The Seriousness. I love that.
Agreed. Such a poor take by Neil.
Arrival, to me, is great not because of the sci-fi aspect of it. It's great because of the idea that learning a different language is like learning a different way of thinking and changing the way you think can greatly change your perception of the world.
Putting Armageddon and Arrival in the same tier sounds criminal to me!
Armageddon and independence day can't be more than F
@@praticastransculturais You can't be more than F
Armageddon above Close Encounters?!!!
I don't think he's interested in linguistics!
completely agree Armageddon is a F-
Arrival comment: They had hundreds or thousands of people involved with alien communication at dozens of sites around the world. We only follow the linguist and physicist. They also had mathematicians and biologists consulting. In the short story, there were hundreds of sites and it implied there were thousands of people involved.
Yeah putting arrival at the c-tier was a bad look. It was almost like he didn't pay that much of attention to the movie to see just how detailed and specific they were with their science
Also... as a security specialist with an affinity for cryptography. I'd prefer to use a linguist over a cryptanalyst. Most cryptanalysis deals with uncovering hidden human writing of the major, current, human, written languages. A linguist looks at a multitude of forms of communication. I think they would first have some grasp on how the language works. Afterwards, maybe a cryptanalist could figure the rest out fast, but they'd have no place to start.
Spot on! …I was literally going to say the same exact thing! Also, interpretation was that they had tried everything with no progress so they were at the stage where they were throwing anything they could think of - thus the linguist.
I skipped to the end of this video because I'm not a huge NGT fan - when I saw Arrival was C-tier I was glad I didn't watch the whole thing. Arrival is a masterpiece. Full stop
Placing Arrival in the C-tier is a crime.
"Arrival" - Neil, did you get a description from TV Guide or something? They had enormous teams in a dozen countries. The tagline is "Why are they here?" My friend, you need to listen to the good folks here.
Great to have The Quiet Earth mentioned - one of the faves growing up 👍🏼
Putting Arrival on the same tier as Armageddon is WILD.
Yep. I very much respect Neil deGrasse Tyson but he absolutely missed the whole meaning and message, the whole point, of the movie. Wild to me, given he appears to be someone who pays attention to the tiniest of details (very much like me). For me Arrival is one of the best movies of the decade, not just sci-fi movies.
Armageddon was less up its own ass.
@@flaggerify God forbid a movie having depth and something to say
Agreed. Armageddon should have been S tier.
@@flaggerify My favorite part is when Aerosmith made that song and in the MV, Steven Tyler's daughter was the pin-up girl. Because that's definitely not up any ass. (This is supposed to be as ironic as your post)
“Anytime people are fighting each other to look through a telescope, that’s a good day for me”😂 Love it!
At 30:34
@Mauro Biglino & The 5Th Kind & Adam 1414 channels
Some of your criticisms are spot on - e.g., the supposedly intractable blight in Interstellar, the human power sources in The Matrix (yeah, that one was pretty dumb), the impossibility of a strong wind on Mars, Armageddon’s live-action cartoon of physics-defying stunts (glad to see someone call out that silliness), etc., etc.
But some of your critiques are head scratchers. For example:
Back to the Future hoverboards? Those were not only cool, they absolutely _did_ have an advantage over skateboards: the ability to move smoothly over terrain that would confound any skateboard. Duh!
Arrival. So, with Interstellar, you take exception to the failure of science to find a solution for crop failure (fair enough), but you don’t think an alien race capable of interstellar travel would be cognizant of the need to write from the humans' perspective, and perfectly capable of doing so? And how did you conclude that the alien symbols weren't simply reversible?? Next!
The Blob? Seriously?? You’re gonna award creativity points to a monster movie whose monster clearly _lacks_ creativity?
Independence Day. To call out this movie for its failure to credit to H.G. Wells is a stretch. But even if you see fit to draw an analogy between a computer virus that destroys an alien mothership, and whatever pathogen may have killed the aliens in “War of the Worlds” (I don't), the ending of Independence Day still deserves high marks for its originality. What's more, most art, including cinema, is at least partly derivative, and short of an obvious movie remake or book adaptation, no one is expected to credit the inspiration(s) for their work.
Agreed.
My criticism of Independence Day was the farmer dad died. In my remake he'd be walking across the desert with Goldblum and Smith telling us that he ejected 0.5s before impact.
@@BryTee I like it. 👍🏻
The Blob was from the 50s. It was a great movie and a great alien monster.
@@mikeottersole Yes, and terrifying! I mean, after I saw it, I had a recurring nightmare where I was attacked by giant silicone implants. Scary stuff!
@@BertRussell4711 Watch Killer Clowns from Outer Space. Maybe that will scare you. It's pretty funny. Camp. And if you saw the Blob at eight years old like I did, it would make an impression. No CGI.
13:45 Hoverboards don't have wheels, which hit bumps and cracks in the pavement and send you flying when the board with wheels suddenly STOPS. Sometimes Neil seems so stupid.
Also the lack of friction increases speed and allows you to traverse uneven terrain.
@@dariocarzola8978 Kind of like a... hovercraft. :)
...sometimes?
skill issue
Matrix originally had the human brains act as processors, not batteries. Executives didn't understand it, so it was changed.
In my headcanon (and after watching The Second Renaissance many, many times), the machines did it as a courtesy to their makers. They couldn't keep fighting, but also didn't want to commit genocide.
What I don't understand about what Niel is saying about thermodynamics is; then why are there Carnivores? Like isn't it because it's easier to let the herbivore do the work of digesting the food and then u just eat the herbivore? So they doing similar to us?
@@nx2120 Except the machines were designed and don't have to run with whatever random system evolution came up with.
Photovoltaic cells and batteries are much more efficient and vastly simpler to design and maintain than the matrix and it's human bio batteries. 😁
@@nx2120 Carnivores exist because there's an ecological niche for them to exist in.
'only 12 Watts per hour per brain' would've sufficed, but sunlight being blocked is nice tho.
Interstellar and Gravity being ranked the equally is unsettling
Impossible!!
EXACTLY! 😡 Neil!
They were both good movies. Also, I disagree about how accurate Interstellar is, mainly the Black Hole part of the movie. It also really bothered me that they thought going through a Wormhole is easier than fixing the food situation on Earth. It was also a stupid idea to go to the planet with extreme gravity. I thought a lot of the movie didn't make common sense.
Also the time it took for Matthew to enter the black hole the earth would have ended before he could play ghost in the 4 dimension due to time dilation
I thought the same
So the last 20 minutes of 2001 on LSD--I read that book when I was 6. I understood it until they get to the last part. I was freaking out and couldn't stop reading at the kitchen table. Suddenly I heard a slight scraping noise. A pot lid was very slowly inching along the counter. I totally freaked out, threw the book in the air and cried out for my Mommy. My very rational dad believed me and looked at the problem. He put a bunch of dish soap on the counter top--it moved across the film. He explained that the counter to our older house was uneven and the pot lid was sliding slowly over it. My 6 year old self was relieved.
I'm sorry to freak you out (again) but, assuming your pot lid was metal, unless you counter wasn't at a +20* angle (or something like that) and maybe some tiny earthquake, something else moved the lid :))))))
It might be possible if the lid was plastic, put on some oily surface, otherwise his own weight would keep it still even with a whole book lifting one side of the counter.
Or maybe I'm wrong :)
Now we need a part 2 where you rank all the commenters' movies they think you missed! I will say.....The Fifth Element and Stargate
Two excellent movies. Neil will not like Stargate though because of the wormhole thing
Sorry, Neil, but you are just wrong about Arrival.
Denis Villeneuve lulls us into thinking that we’re watching another Hollywood first contact movie, and it gradually morphs into a deeply philosophical film about parental love, time and communication.
Couldn't agree more
Totally agree. Also the point about writing being flipped is very weird. Obviously the alien was writing is for someone to read, not for themselves to read. If that's something the aliens use to communicate between each other (and we're led to believe that they do), then surely they are able to take that into account.
Yeah he lost me when he ranked this masterpiece at C.
Absolutely - hear, Hear! Unfortunately, I found Neil's entire presentation to be surprisingly coarse... Quite disappointing - I expected a far more thoughtful effort.
It sucked. I fell asleep halfway through and after I looked up the meaning it was even worse than I expected. 👎🏼
John Carpenter's The Thing should get an honorable mention for it's alien depiction and the tension between a small group of scientists when it gets loose.
Exactly that first one was wew scary until this day lol
Honorable mention?? F*** that!
That should have gotten A+
The thing is not about science and space aliens but PARANOIA!!!
@@reyrayo2502 The Blob got top billing in Neil's list, not a whole lot different.
the thing is more horror then sci fi. The Thins is on every horror list but on 90% sci fi list not. why? Because 90% is horror, only 10% sci fi
I am VERY surprised that the 1971 "Andromeda Strain" isn't on the list. Hard science fiction doesn't get harder than that.
About linguists, Stargate SG-1 had a linguist as a main character for most of its 10 yr run.
Honestly District 9 deserves an honorable mention. Such an interesting take on aliens that got stranded on earth and want to leave, but are forced by humans to stay in alien slums so we can learn from their technology.
Dude that movie is sooo good. I also love Chappie
The concept is quite fresh, I agree, but the movie bored me so much that I can't even remember half of it, and I watched it twice (second time precisely because I couldn't remember anything about it)...
District 9 is one of my favorite modern movies. I thought it was so good.
That's not the reason they were forced to stay on Earth.
They were forced to stay on Earth because humans didn't understand their technology enough to help them repair their ship to enable them to leave (to be fair, neither did most of the ones who survived whatever disease it was that wiped out most of their scientist and engineer class fellow aliens. It was mostly the blue collar class aliens who survived it.)
The fact of humans trying to learn their technology after the fact was a by-product of this forced situation and not the primary reason they were trapped here.
The humans were not trapping them here.
They didn't know how to get them or help them to leave and short of killing them all, there was nothing else to do with them.
Was originally a halo movie..
The force that pulled George Clooney into deep space in Gravity was the script.
As Tina Fey pointed out at an award show, George Clooney would rather drift away to his death in space than to date a woman his own age.
The Force is strong with this so-called silver fox, lol.
this is the only movie neil missunderstand, well most people do... Everything in that movie in space never really happened. it was all in her head. the movie was really about the diferent stages of grieving. first hint, she is a doctor..
CHA-CHING! all about the benjamins
@@pse2020 So that's where Returnal got the plot from?
Dr. Tyson, I am surprised you placed 'Close Encounters' at D. That one should be either S or A.
One of my favorite movies ever.
Little known fact: the Matrix is essentially based on a book written over 110 years ago, called The Machine Stops. E.M. Forster somehow envisioned a distant future with impeccable acuity. In fact, it felt so painfully accurate during COVID lockdowns that it was difficult to read.
The Matrix was influenced by too many works to cite properly.
@@thejanitor3337 that's true and the themes the movie tackles have commonly appeared throughout the philosophy even dating as far back as ancient Greece. you can say the matrix and the real world is kinda like the allegory of the cave.
In The Terminator, it's explained that the machines only had fragmentary records about Sarah Connor. They just knew that she would be living in L.A. in 1984, but not what she looked like or an address. Going after her parents presumably was never an option, they wouldn't know where to look.
Apparently in the latest version they just kept sending terminators back after them every year. I used to imagine that after they break the time loop, in the far future some time cop finds out about this anomaly and investigates, starting it again and giving the machines time travel.
Even so. Then it would have just been Sara Conner's mom instead of Sarah Conner. Same movie different time period.
The machine kills because that's all it was programmed to do. I liked later lore about why the T1k in T2 made mistakes and why Skynet stopped making them.
Yea. Writers and studios were grasping for content.
Also to argue against Neil if you go too far back to kill Sarah’s parents you also risk significantly changing the timeline (butterfly effect)
You know if the Terminator was never sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor then Kyle Reece would’ve never been sent back to protect her, and they never would have conceived John Connor, and skynet would have won, but then if the Terminator was never sent back then cyberdyne systems wouldn’t find the destroyed Terminator in the factory, and would never develop the inhibitor chip that births skynet so it’s a never ending paradox of itself.
About the Terminator. Skynet didn't know which Sarah Connor to target because records of pre war times were mostly destroyed, hence this method
Damn good point sir. Fits well and works within the Terminator universe. Neil is a very intelligent and knowledgeable man, but nobody's perfect, and he definitely missed the ball a bit with his quibble about this movie.
Was looking for this comment. It didn't even know which Sarah Connor it was after which is why it went after all of them.
In the first script it said that the Terminator was ripping away the flesh on the leg of the first killed Sarah Connor, because it knew she had a metal piece in her leg due to the injuries from the explosion at the end.
@@w359borg Exactly, and if it had gone after the "parents of Sarah Connor," it would have had to kill twice as many people!
@@duncankennedy4080 Missed that and also a bit of engineering about skateboard wheels or even wheels 🤣
In interstellar the reason for leaving earth was that dust storms have become common and people were dying out of cancer caused by dust.
And if it was an incurable blight, there would be a high risk of carrying it to the new world.
Little dissapointed you didn't include "the man from earth (2007)" into that list. I thought it was pretty well done and very different from your typical science movie, since it was spoken science , the whole movie they were talking about the world unfolding through time... Very very well done movie.
Agreed a fantastic movie, but philosophical discussion is not SciFi.
Excellent movie, but yeah, not really sci-fi.
This needs a part two. So many more movies to go through.
Agreed! What about Spaceballs? 😂
For sure. Love his takes and would love his take on Moon (2009).
With such simplistic approaches? Nah, im fine with only part one!
Part 1 would need serious revising before I would care.
Agree
“Am I on LSD? Or is the movie on LSD? One of us is on LSD for the last 20 mins of the film.” 😂😂😂
both if you do it right
It made me feel like I was on LSD before I knew what LSD was!
I noticed something curious about my LSD experience...
a blank wall became a fascinating canvas for the imagination whereas
a 'psychedelic' poster was practically inert.
The bigger pronlem is "20 minutes" - my gripe with 2001 is its run time ... way too long. Not just this scene but most of the movie is too stretched out. Instead of 2h20m it could've been 1h20m.
I far prefer "2010", its sequel.
@@BryTee When the film was being made space travel was still science fiction, televisions and telephones were entirely separate devices, people still read 500 page books for entertainment and most minds were able to focus on one topic for many hours at a stretch.
I saw the movie in 1968 on a rainy weekday afternoon sitting in the sweet spot in a near deserted theater on a rare, curved, ultra wide screen with six channel surround sound.
If you watched it on a cell phone then I understand your complaint about its length.
The part about the hover board..yes it works like wheels do UNTIL you hit a rock with a wheel and break your teeth 😂
Never saw the movie but s hoverboard staying a set height over any approaching surface would 'rock'!!... Sense a 1ft object coming and gradually adjust height... Make sure I get one.
On The Matrix, another HUGE plot hole: Why do you even need the matrix. IF you can use humans as batteries (screw thermodynamics), just lobotomize them. An elaborate simulation is in no way needed to harness their thermal output. They should have stuck with cloud computing, would have made so much more sense.
it's a movie, not a documentary. for instance, morpheus saying it's all for a battery and then showing the battery. that's cool. in 1999, cloud computing will just sound like a fancy computer term. it won't have the impact the imagery of a battery will have.
Can we give a shout out to Bill Paxton? The only man who has been killed by a terminator, a predator, and an alien.
Is that true , shit man wow
@@paulnolan4971 yep. Gets killed by a T-800 in Terminator (1984) in the clip NDT showed. Then he gets killed by a Xenomorph in Aliens (1986) and finally he is killed by a Yautja on the train in Predator 2 (1990).
Respect!
Not to mention been turned into a toad.
Not true. Lance Henricksen was also killed by a terminator, a predator and an alien.
@@les4767 but was he killed by an Avenger too? Bill Paxton was.
I would have like to have seen "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) on this list.
Good addition! Using the scientific method to figure out what made the old man and the infant the same and the testing of a number of hypotheses created the suspense.
totally agree...Neil,why wasn't it in your list?
@@cwbybear4665It was said elsewhere, Neil only picked the movies he's seen and he's not a film buff!
I agree: Andromeda Strain was a fine and subtle film!
another sci-fi i loved was one called "phase IV" where ants became sentient the scene where the ants picked up their dead to honour the fallen i found chilling and moving
Or Capricorn One. What a movie.
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He said there would be no reason to build a hover board because it's no better than a regular one, but I think he's wrong. Maglev trains are faster than regular ones because there's no friction to slow the trains down, so I think a hover board would have the same advantage over a regular skateboard.
Annihilation is one of my favorite sci-fi films. The scene towards the very end with that faceless creature gives me goosebumps every time.
I think he's essentially pandering to hard sci fi here, Annihilation is cosmic horror. Though, I'm shocked Gattica isn't on here, or Garland's other film Ex Machina.
It didn't even occur to me that Annihilation is a sci-fi. It's quite ambiguous in that regard. It could easily fall into the horror genre instead.
A really good alien invasion trilogy.
Armageddon: well now let’s be fair - the Fast and the Furious movies violate the MOST laws of physics per minute.
Family defies physics
@@drfeelgordo Defiles?
you have not seen "starflight one" then? makes armageddon look like a documentary
I love how he talks about The Matrix 3 and says "that's when it's time to move on to other things", and didn't even mention Matrix Resurrections... which, to be fair, I actually almost completely blocked from my memory as well.
I saw "The Quiet Earth" when it came out and loved it. Kudos for giving it an A!
I, too, would have liked to see where you rank GATTACA. The missions to explore Titan, all of the vehicles being electric, and the social ramifications of an entire class of genetically engineered humanity all combined for a very thoughtful movie.
Gattaca…another crazy boring movie like 2001. Not a bad movie but I like my sci-fi to have space stuff and not just talk about space stuff. IMO
@@robertfalcon60832001 is widely regarded as one of the greatest pieces of filmmaking ever. you just have a short attention span
Just the idea of having even the remotest of chances to smash Uma Thurman makes me like gattaga.
Oh, yeah. That's one I've been looking to see if Neil had seen and commented on!
The premise is that the main character can't pursue his dream to go to space (Saturn) because he's had a heart condition that was inherited (also people discriminate against his kind "in-valids"). I suppose it would be like how some teenagers playing sports find out they have an unusual heart condition when something happens. I guess they can't fix that or give him a transplant? The guy who sells him his identity (and genetic material) is confined to a wheelchair from an injury. So the former's strength of will, ability and duplicity gets him a position on the mission, if he's not found out. It doesn't say whether he's capable of surviving the launch and the trip to Saturn, but that's what people debate. I imagine in space his heart problem wouldn't be that deleterious, if he can make it.
Combining a space mission with the dystopia of ranking everyone by genetics and constantly testing them is what seemed off about that movie. I can't imagine any society like that being curious enough to explore other planets and moons, because what would they do if they found life on Titan - judge it by their own standards and "in-valid" it if it's deemed inferior?
Funny thing about the weakness in the matrx is they originally wanted to make it so the machines use us for the computing power of the brain but the studio thought most people wouldn't understand so they had them change the script.
Wouldn't really make it better, right? The movie had a ton of plotholes. For example: Apparently the inner core of the Earth was still warm (Dozer says son in the first movie when he talks about why Zion is located there) and the machines have the ability to drill. It would be way (WAY!) easier to just drill a tunnel to the core and use geothermal energy to power all the stuff and shut down the Matrix.
@@Llyd_ApDictanah, geothermal energy would still need a lot of work to carry that energy from deep in the earth, many km to the surface. Nuclear energy would still be readily available
@@Llyd_ApDicta Remember, "There is no spoon". The machine world with Zion is still a layer of The Matrix. The Architect's reset it several times. It's why Neo can 'see' despite being blinded. The scenario is all part of the plan to root out Smith, which is the real threat to the system.
They should’ve just enslaved bunch of bovines that would provide greater energy, yet wouldn’t have the same mental capacity to escape the matrix. Would’ve made more sense.
But they probably didn’t want to create a barnyard-based sci-fi caper 😂
@@DonLee1980 What are you talking about?
"geothermal energy would still need a lot of work to carry that energy from deep in the earth" - No. Some piping and a medium that can transport heat. Water for example. And you can even use the drill hole for the piping.
"Nuclear energy would still be readily available" - First of all, geothermal energy technically is a form of nuclear energy and secondly if you are under the impression, that the enrichment of fissile materials to a purity level that let them be used as fuel in a controlled nuclear reaction is somehow easier to achieve than some pipes and, say, a Sterling engine you really need to read a book or two.
Thank you for sharing your opinions on these movies as well as technical findings/faults - very interesting!
If you ever consider doing something similar with episodic media, I would submit The Expanse, Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica for your review. I’d be very interested to hear your analysis and opinion!
I saw quiet earth!!! Amazing, glad you mentioned it
I was sad to see that the original 'The Andromeda Strain' from 1971 was not here. A truly great sci-fi movie that takes it slow.
Good point.
One of my favorite movies. Although the look of the film is a bit dated today (especially the computer graphics) but the story/conspiracy is A+.
I think it hold up well despite the technology of the era. Remember the scientists in Fantastic Voyage used slide rules.
As a teen that movie blew my mind LOL excellent
Yes, for science sake I'd give it a "B".
Independence Day deserves a special mention because for 20 years I thought "this is SO unrealistic - how would he possibly be able to make a computer virus to run on alien computers!?", only to suddenly discover that there is an ingenious backstory for that which suddenly makes me love the realism: supposedly in a deleted scene it's explained that modern computers were themselves reverse engineered from computers found in that crashed alien spaceship they had at Area 51.
Fun fact: Roswell had it's UFO crash in 1947 the same year the transistor was "invented" ;-)
The history of the development of computing was well documented and widely taught - so this sub-plot would not have passed the smell test. It was the right editorial decision to cut it
@@philipb2134 I think the idea was that the shadowy hand of DARPA would be secretly behind some of the big leaps - so maybe they “accidentally” left some code lying around in Bill Gates’ garage or something.
@@philipb2134 lol this is such a silly thing to say. The smell test? Can you prove right now that alien tech wasn't reverse engineered to create modern components of computers and thousands of other things? People absolutely would have accepted it, and it would have stopped a huge amount of of the flak the movie got for that weird plot hole that its removal left us with.
@@KakavashaForever the development of software platforms is well documented. This development was evolutive . We can track the various releases through time of f WinDOS iterations, or updates to Fortran, or Cobol, or ADA, and so on. What's silly is to demand that someone prove a negative. Is it possible that some alien society has some secret facility to spoon-feed software companies and make sure that thousands upon thousands never gave up the secret, and that this advanced space faring species was stupid enough to train humans on the software architecture which was coded in symbols used by humans? It is not absolutely impossible but astronomically unlikely.
Moon, The Andromeda Strain (1971), Silent Running, Dark Star, The Man From Earth, Red Planet, Event Horizon, Cloverfield, so many more.
The Quiet Earth was one of my favourite films - I saw it in the early hours about twenty/twenty-five years ago and loved it. I never saw it anywhere else and no-one I spoke to had heard of it (pre-internet era). So glad it's getting recognised!
The twist in Interstellar is that it was NEVER possible for them to move all inhabitants of earth… that’s the TWIST lol
Right. They all died horribly. That’s the other other movie.
I've always thought they should make Interstellar 2, where the reality is that plan B worked, and the plan B humans are the ones that solved the problem of gravity. Everyone on Earth from the first movie dies, but once the humans that survived via plan B find out that their ancestors died to save them, they want to use their time knowledge to save them. They then create the tesseract in the black hole in the past, resulting in the first movie.
Not only would it be a great movie, it would explain the plot hole from the first.
@@ImagineBaggins simple answer is there is no "us" from the future that create the worm hole or tesseract. We heard Cooper say it but there no evident, he could just "wrong". more accept answer is another advance spicies that save us. And thus no paradox
@@ImagineBaggins It would lose some of the essence of the first. Which for most of the time followed known physics. A sequel would be 100% speculative.
The other problem with biologists is that the school system stopped promoting science and instead focused on the labor side of farming.
Fun bit of trivia - the first ever song sung with a computer generated voice was "Daisy Bell," done with an IBM computer in the early 60's, and that is the song HAL ends up singing at the very end as he is shut down.
And H A L are the three letters preceding I B M
@@xneapolisx that just blowed my mind haha
The song is subtitled "Bicycle Built for Two" which is pretty funny in the situation (at least I think it is). Whether the ship is a bicycle built for the two astronauts, or that HAL and Dave are the "two" it's an ironic representation of our relationship to technology. Maybe not but I still enjoy it. Plus now I'm terrified fo tandem bikes.
My favourite portrayal of aliens in fiction have got to be the Hanar from the Mass Effect games. They completely shatter the standard bipedal, humanlike conception of aliens we often see represented in media and seem the most evolutionarily plausible. And they happen to be extremely polite and friendly all while communicating through bioluminescence, which is a bonus!
In Arrival, the idea they might be drawing it backwards because they see it from their perspective might indeed be true, but does it matter? If we interpret the signs backwards or from the correct perspective wouldn't matter, because we don't know the signs anyways. It would be like reading a book where all the letters are backwards, but hayyyy, they still form the words we need to read.
@29:50
In the movie it was stated that "most the records were lost in the war. Skynet knew almost nothing about Connor's mother... her full name, where she lived. They just knew the city."
thats why t1 looked it up in phone book
Also he mentioned the sequels to The Matrix, and Back To The Future, but Terminator 2 didn't get a mention!? Arguably one of the best sci-fi films ever made
Skynet didn't know anything about Sarah Connor, other than her name and her location in 1984. They wouldn't be able to find her parents before she was born.
They could go back to 1984, and infiltrate the IRS to find out the not only the personal data on sara Conor but the entire resistance.
Yep, the reason why the Terminator went after 3 different Sarah Connor's. Neil's argument doesn't hold up if you know the movie.
exactly. and Genysis breaks this rule with its alternate timeline.
Maybe he didn't watch it 🤔
@@Punisher6791 No one cares about Genesys.
Part 2 please. And add these movies: Dark City, The Arrival (1996), District 9, Oblivion, Starship Troopers and Passengers.
"This isn't Gravity" killed me 😂😂😂
As a disabled engineer, I thoroughly appreciated the disabled accessibility of the alien flying saucers comment! Kudos!
In terminator the machines couldn't send Arnold earlier in time since all they had was the name. That is why the terminator looks for every Sara Connor in the phone book. Just saying.
Oh yeah...forgot about that part.
Was now saying this, there were no records on the Connors since everything was destroyed in the war. So the machines couldn't do what Degrass is saying would have been easier
This. Plus I'm pretty sure that the meta reason they had the "go back naked" rule has less to do with them wanting to show off Arnold and more to do with them wanting no high-tech weapons ruining the plot. Although I'm sure showing off Arnold was a bonus for them.
I came looking for this comment because it's exactly what I was gonna' say. They had this point covered. NDG's point about the hair and nails is a good one, though - if hair and nails are exempt, then you could pretty much wrap anything you want to bring back in time in leather and it would go through just fine.
@@colinhiggs70though that raises thr question of "Couldn't they have smuggled a small plasma gun or a bomb you-know-where?"
OMG you covered The Quiet Earth! It's my favorite sci-fi movie ever. The cinematography and score alone are very worthwhile.
The Gravity scene he speaks about, I always had the impression they were spinning/rotating around the station but I went back to check, they aren’t.
I love how Arrival is about the effect of language in the way we think / perceive the world (including time)
I hate how it means the aliens knew the china crisis was coming before they even landed and just decided to let it happen anyway.
Those Aliens are dicks...
H. G. Wells The time machine and Forbidden Planet. Two of the best ever.
Yeah!
agree....
Forbidden Plant has a lot of old fashioned attitudes, but it had pretty freaky special effects and an original monster
Forbidden Planet was for me a great Science Fiction story, but also a very scary invisible monster movie. Love the concept of the Krell. Using their minds to create matter but like human beings, they are genetically predisposed to violence and base emotions. Everything is a double edged sword. AI might be our Krell moment.
Also love Fifth Element.
Forbiden Planet was essentially the prototype for Star Trek.
"Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Fantasy Movie Tier List" ~ Passes away from an aneurism before finishing the list.
I thoroughly enjoyed your entertaining comments and the overall discussion of the movies on your list. I would recommend you watch, review, and rate "The Forbidden Planet" - Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in the 23rd Century.
'Her bangs always know which way down was' - nearly spat out my coffee laughing!
Honourable mentions:
The Abyss, Moon, Cocoon, Blade Runner, Dune
5 times no.
@@nedludd7622 dune is goated
On the point about The Matrix, I would argue that while the human battery concept is thermodynamically inefficient, it may be the most resource efficient option available. The questions that need to be answered are: 1) whether there is an energy source that can be directly consumed, and 2) whether the exploitation of that energy source can meet the energy requirement. If the answer is not yes to both, an intermediary is necessary. In that case, the humans are technically not acting as batteries, but as transformers. However, you're then running into a similar issue as with the original cloud computing concept, where the average person isn't likely to understand it as easily as if you just told them the people were batteries.
Contact doesn't get enough love. Glad to see it mentioned
Neil, maybe this will affect your opinion of Arrival. The movie was an extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that learning another language affects, or in this case, completely changes how you perceive the world. That’s why the protagonist is seemingly able to truly see time as circular once she figured out their language.
And secondly, it’s a movie!
It ripped off Slaughterhouse 5.
As a fan of both linguistics and astro-science I love Arrival, but strong linguistic relativity - where a language can expand or limit a speaker's ability to understand the world - is generally not widely accepted as a real phenomenon, especially in such a strong expression as portrayed in the movie. I think in the context of Arrival this can be kinda hand-waved with the "alien science" justification, but it was a bit of a suspension of disbelief sticking point for me.
but that hypothesis is nonsense. i get the stretch of the concept, but when the whole movie is about that, that is like interstellar except instead of cooper going through a wormhole, he imagined it in his basement meditating the whole thing (along with saying that love was the reason he could meditate that hard). it is not even remotely realistic someone can time travel with language alone with no physical intervention needed. if the language included a new dimension that the aliens were able to teach her to see, it would have been better. but as the movie stands, it does not show this at all. maybe you can say it's implied, but at some level is it just an idea without execution.
a movie close in terms of being more of an idea and not much meat is annihilation. there is a huge leap from the concept of mutation to a godlike or ideal form of being. but at least it showed something more of a transition into the idea. the coolest part of arrival was the creation of the language, which seemed like it took a lot of computer expertise to create. but in the end it still wasnt interesting enough to support a leap into circular time. i think technically even the language failed, as it ended up only being a couple of words. I don't know if they were able to make a language that fit the idea. the whole movie is about this linguistic concept but they also barely analyze the language, as neil mentions. as interstellar reaches the dead end of scientific explanation, he can say it's because of love, the movie is still mostly about the science. arrival seems to rely heavily on the imaginary fruits of understanding the alien language, but we get neither... it's just, adams having an implied deeper conversation with the aliens, end of movie.
for example, it could have been cooler if they required some multidimensional analysis so that they can at least map what they think the aliens are saying. as it stands, they took the 2d watercolor ring language completely at face value, but somehow adams got superpowers from it with her mind.
@@quazillionaireDoes this mean theory or reality, Chinese perceive the world differently than Americans or anyone else who doesn’t speak Chinese (and everyone else perception of the world is different to Chinese perception)? If this is the case, why? Refer me to reading material ps, a link or something - I find this quite interesting.
Those lists needs to be 2d graphs. One axis for physical accuracy one for entertaining value.
Heh, you just reminded me of that X/Y axis scene in Dead Poet's Society.
That would have been so much better. Great idea. Some of the most entertaining movies have the worst physics accuracy.
Fantastic idea!!!
Oooooo!
I always ranked Sci-Fi movies into two major categories, Science Fiction, and Science possibility. When you look at movies like 2001, The Martian, or Interstellar, you are talking about movies that aren't just a story, but a lesson. You learned a lot of science from some of those films. The straight-up sci-fi movies are fun for action and explosions, and you just have to kind of turn the science brain off.
Wow. Arrival has been top of S Tier for me since I saw it the first time and keeps creating distance every time I see it. Any movie that attempts to solve the issues we have in our world, I’m a sucker for. Then I had kids and now it’s even more relevant. Incredible.
Agreed. Best modern sci-fi in the last two decades maybe. Didn’t bother me that a linguist was also an expert in cryptography. The gift of non linear time perception is amazing.
I was thinking the same thing. He was too harsh with Arrival.
Agreed!!! Arrival should have been higher on the list!
I ranked it about 3/5 when I first watched it. Started off strong but at some point they threw all the delicacies of the script into the trash to move the film along. Then it lost me.
His rankings are way off lol
The Martian is one of the scariest movies I have ever seen, the very thought of running out of ketchup terrifies me….
But u have vicadin!!!!
Patrick Mahomes, is that you?
Definitely gonna have to make a Part 2. Especially if someone ever makes Seveneves (PLEASE!!!)
That ‘Interstellar’ with the accuracy of its physics and the BRILLIANCE of its plot is not an S-class is an indictment of NdT’s movie-grading credentials.
What is the actual reasoning of the placements?
Its not movie quality because interstellar was beaten by quite earth
Its not realism because Armageddon is classed as C
Is it a mix of the two? Doesn’t seem like it but i could be wrong?
Is it personal preference? This makes the most sense but I think he’s missing why people wanted his opinion in the first place… WHY DOES THIS ANNOY ME SO MUCH
Fun fact: In the Matrix, humans weren't going to be batteries but instead used as computer processors. However, producers thought that this concept at the time wouldn't be understood by the general audience so went simple dimple with the battery concept. The fact that Neo was an exceptional hacker within the matrix adds an extra level of intrigue in that his processing power could break the system.
I read this the 3rd in this comment section, now I am convinced 😄
The problem you talked about Sarah Connor is actually answered in the movie.Kyle Resse said that most of the information lost after the nuclear war.Skynet only knew the mother name and the city nothing else was there in their closet.So they don't possess the previous ancestor's name or anything.That's why they target Sarah Connor for termination.
All of them in the phonebook, 3 or 4 if I remember right.
I took a class in high school called Fantasy and Science Fiction. She stressed that aliens (inhabitants of their home planet)would probably not be humanoid. They would be shaped, formed and have intellect that fit their environment. IE The Blob.
The original plan for the matrix was that the machines were using the human brains as a huge data processing center like computer chips in a cloud system. The Wachowskis thought it was a too hard to understand for most people so they changed. This is why it doesn't make sense to have them as batteries.
Must disagree on the linguist / cryptographer issue. A cryptographer's (crypto analyst actually in this case) job is to reveal the message that was sent in a coded or encrypted form.
But that relies heavily of our understanding of the language properties and structure of the expected real message (plain text) - that we are trying to reveal.
For example - when trying to decipher an encrypted English text you rely on the fact that statistically 13% of the letters of a text in this language are 'e'.
Since it's an alien language - we have no idea what would the real message will look like and if it is coded at all.
A linguist on the other hand will have a better chance of understanding key words, verbs and nouns, references and gestures, and eventually build a dictionary.
19:08 Yes, Neil needs to rewatch... A
True..
Except he was suggesting the cryptographer would replace the physicist, not the linguist.
No need for cryptographer at all. Their language isn't encrypted, it's just a foreign language.
Also Neil must have missed they had a team of people working in their tent, and other teams were working on this around the world.
@@chrischampagne9469 No, he was actually wanting to replace the physicist with an astrobiologist and the linguist with a cryptographer.
A hoverboard won't trip on a crack in the sidewalk causing you to tumble over into concussion land.
Yeah, I don't think Neil has ever ridden a skateboard on uneven ground!
I got the impression hoverboards worked similar to maglev (even though there's no magnets in the pavement) - so yeah there was still proximity to the ground, like a mag-lev train, and with the same advantages
Yeah the bit about a hoverboard being pointless is a big WTF.
Also, I got the impression too when I saw BTTF2 as a kid that hoverboards didn't work over water, but I think the flaw was that you can't thrust with your foot over water. The hovering clearly worked. It was just a little confusingly filmed.
But what if something came between the board and the ground, interfering with the hovering and causing you to fall over and eat shit regardless?
Exactly this. Give us hoverboards that you may ride on the ground, grass and rough surfaces where regular skates are a bumpy nightmare
Martian, I totally agree is increaibly accurate the only thing I picked up on was the transfer windows between planets.
There are specific phase angles between planets to do a hohmann tranfer. It's probability of returning from mars and being able to flyby earth and go back to mars isn't that great.
Burning back to earth would put you on Orbit A
Earth would likly interfere with this orbit putting you on on orbital B trjectory if you passed to close - you'd need a huge correction burn get to where mars now is as you're not in a close trjectory or transfer window. Simpely put you wouldn't have enough ΔV. Even if earth gravity didn't interrupt Orbit A - you would go back to where Mars was - but not where mars is as it's moved around the sun at a different orbital period to yourself as the ship has reduced it's aphelion so it can intercept with eath.
But still an absolutly god tier movie. In my but humble opinion.
I would love to here your thoughts and ranking of softer science fiction movies, like the various Star Trek movies. Also things like Blade Runner, and TV shows would be an interesting ranking as well, things like The Expanse, Babylon 5, or Doctor Who.
Love it but you didn't even look at my number one, The Andromeda strain. Having lived thro contagion with COVID just made it better for me.
Agree, great book & movie. One of my favorites.
@@chrishebert5672 I just hope people read the book or watch the film!
thank god for covid huh
Andromeda Strain is almost hard sci-fi, and *exceptionally* well thought out (by Michael Crichton) and executed. Like the _Mass Effect_ game series, Andromeda Strain contains only *one* plot element that is not current reality. While in Mass Effect that is the titular physical _Mass Effect_ of one chemical element, in Andromeda Strain it is extraterrestrial life. I prefer such kind of sci-fi because it allows for very strong audience immersion. the more a story revolves around the concept "this could maybe in the future happen", the better I can immerse myself.
7:40 That funky robot in _Interstellar_ was named TARS.
The robot that Matt Damon had that performed no actions at all and that exploded was named KIPP.
There were two of those robots with McC and the crew; KIPP and TARS. Matt Damon's robot was unnamed (or at least we never got to hear of it, as it had such a minimal appearance in the story).
@@noneofyourbeeswax01 no, those were TARS and CASE. KIPP was indeed dismantled and then exploded in the face of Romilly. You can read it's called KIPP, it's written on it.
@@noneofyourbeeswax01 Its name is on the front of it, "KIPP", in the same location TARS's name appears on it.
@@ZeroOskul There's never in the movie a robot refererd to as KIPP, it's always either TARS or CASE.
@@flybeep1661 see: *Interstellar - Kipp*
Listen to what TARS says at 58 seconds.
Well, about sci-fi movies we should add Alien, Aliens, The Forbidden Planet, The Abyss, Moon, The Thing, Blade Runner, Robocop, Ghost In The Shell (original 1995 anime), and Dark City
Great video -so entertaining! I have one question - Star Wars?
What about the film, Forbidden Planet, and it's respect paid to physics. I admired the way that they dealt with the deceleration from near lightspeed to a full stop to land on the planet, Altair. The crew was stored as energy, due to heir bodies not being able to survive the forces of deceleration. Brilliant.
I was thinking on forbidden planet as well. It's influenced by Asimov's I robot. Too bad that we didn't learn any lesson from those movies and books now that we are exploring AI.
Forbidden Planet will always be tops for me, in terms of it's innovative electronic score. There's nothing else like it, in any movie I ever saw. And being a fan of synthesizers, and synthesizer music, I have never heard anything that creative since. Making it a rather unique experience. In at least one case, they were said to have been recording an electronic circuit that failed, that's some hard core electronic music...record until the circuit dies.
The Blackhole has so much nostalgia for me. I can completely understand why Neil wouldn't like it, but for little kid me it was exciting and emotionally impactful.
Yeah that film was a wall breaker.
Maximilian haunted my dreams for a good awhile.
Neil’s ranking was on scientific accuracy more than storytelling. And the story is just a retelling of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
I saw Black Hole in theater as a kid and remember liking it quite a bit.
I rewatched it last year and was highly disappointed by it. As a 10 year old, it was suspenseful but on rewatch, I have no idea what I saw in it.
There are other movies I watched in a movie theater as a kid and still love. For example Sound of Music, Bad News Bears, Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn, Rocky 3 and Poltergeist.
@@frommatorav1 Yeah I have not rewatched it since my childhood viewing.
The robot in interstellar was named TARS. KIP was the broken one that went with Matt Damon's character on his original trip.
Super fun watch! Has Neil done this for TV shows? Would love to see him talk about The Expanse...
I must say, I'd put "Arrival" at the top of the list. The film explores one of the greatest mysteries of physics and consciousness: how we experience time, and in the process, raises the question of our choices if we experienced time in a way that isn't strictly linear. It is beautiful and poetic in showing us that even if we escape time, we cannot escape the nature of our human condition.
Absolutely at least among dramatic serious alien movies it's the best ever. Like almost no violence is necessary, an entire language is conceived of... And I think it's probably the best score in a movie in a long time.
Beautifully put.
Having interstellar and gravity in the same row should be a felony
I was going to leave the same comment, but you did it first
Absolutely
Interstellar is overrated
@@Gingnose No, it isn't. Inception is.
Gravity over rated
Neil, I love your videos. How about a follow-up video on this topic including e.g. The Thing, Alien, Blade Runner, the first Star Wars-trilogy, etc. ? 🙂
2001 A Space Odyssey isn't just one of the best sci fi films of all time, it's one of the greatest cinematic achievements to date regardless of genre. Coming up on 60 years old and the film holds up just as well today - I make sure to watch it every few years and it's always a mind-blowing experience.
2001 Spoiler alert 🚨 The ending when I saw it, I couldn’t understand until someone a decade ago, explained that the rooms were designed by something that had never been on earth. Knew nothing about earths history and left the character in these rooms as we on earth. When we will generate a plausible living quarters for animals, like in our zoos that is nowhere close to their actual habitat. So we can observe them. THAT WAS GENIUS!!
@@bertdashurt5202 Your ending is more confusing than the film's
@@supertouring22 this is the ending of the film though. That's what it's intended to be.
Hands down the most overrated movie of all time. Visually, it is a masterpiece; the special effects were amazing at that time. But I'm sorry, Arthur C. Clarke was a terrible writer. He had no idea how to craft a plot and his characters and dialogue were flat. Every book/story he wrote started off with a good idea but ultimately ended in ridiculous nonsense. This movie is the most perfect representation of pretentious nonsense and the fact that there are so many fans that, to the end of the world say, "you just don't understand it," only serves to prove the point even more.
@@Cromulant so your whole thing sums up to you laying this blanket of your opinion with “you’re pretentious if you disagree with me”. That’s the definable epitome of pretentiousness. Thanks for the laugh.
Arrival and Armageddon on the same tier is absolutely criminal 😩
Thank you for this review, that was really interesting to hear your point of view on some of the great sci-fi movies.
If I had to review, I would definitely add more movies like: Blade Runner, Ex-Machina, Moon, Westworld and The Man From Earth.
Curious what Neil's opinion of the film Contact, based on The Carl Sagan book?
The Expanse! Not a movie but a series, but is so damn good, it almost feels like a documentary from the future.
Similarly the three body problem...
@@Montragon29 enjoyed the books, haven't taken a stab at the show yet
@@entropiceffect yeah the books were more robust, the show is still great but they had to make some adapting to more western audiences. Still I am curious as to how they will tackle the time frame in the show Vs the books.
Sadly another victim of studio draining until nothing was left, not even a decent ending. It sucked, especially compared to the books.
I watched it because of the recommendation from _The Critical Drinker._ I am *so* glad that I did. The Expanse is the best sci-fi series since 50 years.