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.

Getting the science right goes for the camera too: here’s why you’d need to shoot at 20,000K near Beta Centauri.

‘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. Even frame rate plays a part: see why 24 frames per second still looks like cinema, and why The Hobbit at 48 didn’t.

‘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.

Real cameras have their own quirks with physics, too. Here are three things your eyes can’t see that cameras can.

Frequently asked questions

Does sci-fi have to be scientifically accurate?

No. What matters is how hard a film works to earn the audience’s suspension of disbelief, by keeping its ideas consistent and credible within the story.

What is hard sci-fi?

Science fiction that presents itself as scientifically plausible. That creates an expectation of believable scenarios and ideas, which is a much harder standard to meet.

Which sci-fi films get the science right?

Interstellar is the obvious example, with its careful portrayal of relativity. The Martian, Sunshine and The Expanse are others.

What is suspension of disbelief?

The audience’s willingness to accept a story’s world and rules, so they can invest in it emotionally, even when it includes things that couldn’t really happen.

Why does technobabble ruin a film?

Misusing scientific language usually breaks the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Think of Armageddon, The Core or 2012.

Why does Star Wars get away with bad science?

Because it presents its ideas consistently and credibly within its own world, alongside strong characters, themes and plotting.

Want a film that keeps your audience believing? Book a free call with our team, or see our corporate video production work.