Does sci-fi have to be scientifically accurate?

No. See you next month for a client case study.

Alright, there’s a bit more to it. Inaccuracy is often levied as a criticism against bad sci-fi films, but no one cares about Star Wars’ glaring disinterest in real astrophysics. 

‘It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.’

The problem clearly isn’t a story that ignores science, more the tone a film is aiming for. The films we want to discuss fall roughly into three categories.

1. Genuinely good

Obvious example: Interstellar. This film represented a real leap forward in the portrayal of relativity in popular cinema.

‘Every hour we spend on that planet will be… seven years back on earth. That’s relativity folks.’

The script is very careful to demarcate when it is discussing a real scientific concept; such as wormholes or time dilation, and when it is engaging in speculation or introducing a fictional idea to the plot; such as the tesseract space that Cooper encounters inside the black hole.

‘They constructed this 3-dimensional space inside their 5-dimensional reality to help you understand it.’

Other examples are The Martian, Sunshine, or The Expanse.

2. Science-flavoured but hollow

Films that try to use the language and trappings of science but fall flat in the process. Think of Armageddon, The Core, or 2012. For these scripts it’s not obvious that the filmmakers really cared about scientific authenticity in the first place, making it for me the least interesting category.

‘It looks like the neutrinos coming from the sun have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle’.

Unfortunately, misappropriating scientific language as technobabble usually causes a failure in the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

‘You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourself so you don’t take any responsibility for it’

3. Marketed as hard sci-fi, fails badly

When a film presents itself as hard sci-fi, it’s creating an expectation that it will contain plausible scenarios and ideas. A great example is Prometheus, containing scenes where trained astronauts remove their helmets for no reason, and a geologist gets lost in a cave network despite deploying drones to map said cave network. The cream of this cringey crop is Netflix’s Another Life, in which the writers couldn’t be bothered to research how sound is measured,

‘Drop the frequency down to 1 Hertz a second and drop it into infrasound’

the spaceship can’t see round a ‘dark matter cloud’ and a character’s central nervous system falls out (we can’t show footage of that). Personally I find these projects fascinating, because the creatives decided to market them as hard sci-fi, even though it’s a much harder standard to achieve.

One of many silly scenes in Prometheus.

It doesn’t matter if ideas put forward are scientifically accurate, it matters how hard a film works to earn the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Star Wars, Dune or Jurassic Park create emotional investment in stories that contain faster-than-light travel, visions of the future or cloning of dinosaurs because they present these ideas in a way that is consistent and credible within the story.

‘Did your men deactivate the hyperdrive on the Millenium Falcon?’

This, alongside strong characters, themes and plotting; matters so much more than if a film is scientifically accurate. That being said, it’s still good fun to laugh at the scene in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus to an alien mothership with his Apple PowerBook 5300.