this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
135 points (86.9% liked)
Science Fiction
13571 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to /c/ScienceFiction
December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
We are a community for discussing all things Science Fiction. We want this to be a place for members to discuss and share everything they love about Science Fiction, whether that be books, movies, TV shows and more. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Put (Spoilers) in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers.
- Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not just angular momentum. She flew hundreds of miles and drastically changed orbit in an MMU. And when George Clooney died there was nothing pulling him away from the space station. The movie is called gravity, but they weren't following the basic rules of how things work when there's no gravity.
It would be like someone hopping on a child's scooter and chasing down a bullet train three states away, or having a character randomly able to fly. If you're going to break the basic rules of how the universe works, you have to provide an explanation. If the explanation is magic, you have to have things that are magic and non-magic, and a system of how magic works. This is as much hard science fiction as the Fast and Furious movies.
I don't even care about the ghost, people hallucinate.
My only nit pick about the Martian is that there isn't enough atmosphere on Mars to cause the kinds of winds they show. Still a solid movie though.
All of that including Clooney's motion ( which I was specifically thinking of) falls under angular momentum. It was a subtle joke.
Is there any movie that would be hard scifi?
Moon maybe?
Silent Running shows Saturns Rings as dense micro asteroids when it's sparse enough to fly though like Cassini did.
How does Clooney's motion fall under angular momentum? The ISS wasn't spinning. So everything is angular momentum if you include things that aren't spinning relative to each other.
Orbital mechanics aside, following Newton's laws of motion is kind of a basic requirement for any movie that's not fantasy.
He's orbiting the earth
That's the joke about anything in orbit.
So what movie is hard scifi?
Primer, Robocop, Children of Men, Moon, District 9
Watching someone time travel by climbing inside a superconductor ring is hard scifi (Cern is giant superconductor rings and no time travel) but watching an object in space move in a way that it shouldn't isn't hard scifi?
Magical anti gravity in District 9 is hard scifi? But an alternative earth future (There is/was no Space Shuttle Endeavor. The Shuttle and ISS never coexisted. The MMU was retired in the 1980's.) with a long range MMU and Hubble in a different orbit isn't?
Edit:
Just looked at Robocop. It is filled with Hollywood physics. Man gets shot and gets thrown backwards 5 feet.
Oh and everything inside the base in Moon is Earth gravity.
Correct.