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Science Fiction Movie Preview [Video]

Get your sci-fi fix with these upcoming films

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


From tense horror-thrillers to blockbuster sci-fi romance, the next year of theatrical releases boasts several films featuring science or STEM-related themes. Here’s a preview of six, which bear much nerdy promise for science-loving viewers.

Perhaps the most noticeable absence from the list is a sweeping Hollywood biopic of a scientist. Films such as A Beautiful Mind, The Theory of Everything and The Man Who Knew Infinity, which explored the lives of mathematicians and physicists—have previously received both critical and commercial acclaim—but somehow, haven’t seemed to attract big Hollywood budgets for 2017. Notably, an Albert Einstein biopic was announced in 2011, but sadly, it hasn't appeared.

Until the day when we see Einstein or other previously unexplored science luminaries on the silver screen (the 1994 romantic comedy IQ doesn't count), check out these compelling sci-fi films in the fall/winter movie going season.


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Arrival

Release: November 11, 2016

Written by: Eric Heisserer

Directed: Denis Villeneuve (“Sicario”, “Blade Runner 2”)

Linguists - it’s your time to shine! In the science fiction drama Arrival, a mysterious spacecraft touches down across the globe, and an elite team, led by expert linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is brought together to investigate.

The film, which is based on the short story, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, also stars Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, Avengers) as a theoretical physicist/mathematician as part of the assembled elite team. Renner’s mathematician character makes no secret of his disdain of the ‘softer’ discipline of linguistics. As mankind teeters on the verge of global war, Banks and the team race against time to decipher their spoken languages and find answers.

While sci-fi films often use science as a tool for the audience to explore the film’s key themes  (biology is used in the Alien franchise, theoretical physics in Interstellar, astrobiology in Avatar, and artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey), Arrival heralds the first blockbuster sci-fi film to have linguistics play the hero. It explores the idea that language itself may be more important to cognition than anyone thought. Packed with tense, heady pauses against a backdrop of global war, the film still makes time to explore linguistic science concepts, including linguistic relativity, which states that the structure of any particular language influences the speakers cognition.

The Girl With All the Gifts

Release: 2016, Date TBC

Written by: M. R. Carey

Directed: Colm McCarthy

This is a Zombie movie with brains. The Girl With All the Gifts is British film with all the traits of a post-apocalyptic zombie movie: a disease spread by infection, a civilization that breaks down, and characters learning to adapt to their new, regressed world.. The film stars Glenn Close as a scientist battling a mysterious yet highly fatal fungal infection that has wiped out most of the global population and turned them into zombie-type creatures. Humankind's only hope is a small group of hybrid children who crave human flesh but retain the ability to think and feel, and so Close’s character, Dr. Caroline Caldwell, subjects them to cruel experiments. The film is based on the novel by the same name, written by British writer M.R. Carey.

Incarnate

Release: December 2, 2016

Written by: Ronnie Christensen

Directed: Brad Peyton

A modern-day scientist (played by Aaron Eckhart) possesses the ability to enter the subconscious minds of the mentally ill and cure them. However, he meets his greatest challenge when he tries to help an 11 year old boy, who this time seems truly possessed by a demon. From the producers of Paranormal Activity and The Purge, Incarnate is very much a horror film—but the twist is that the traditional kind of exorcism doesn’t work—the only match for this entity is the scientific mind and cutting edge medicine.

The Circle

Trailer: Not released yet

Release: 2016, Date TBC

Written by: James Ponsoldt

Directed: James Ponsoldt

The Circle is an American tech-world drama-thriller starring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, John Boyega and Bill Paxton. The film follows young female college graduate, Mae Holland (Watson), as she gets an opening position in “The Circle,” a powerful technology company.

While few details of the film’s plot have been made public yet (the trailer has not yet been released) – the film is based off the 2013 book by the same name, written by bestselling author (and founder of the literary journal McSweeney’s), Dave Eggers.

In the book, Mae allows the company to spy on her and eventually her parents (this is conducted by wearable camera, a process called ‘going transparent’) in exchange for moving up the corporate ladder. Eventually, as the company becomes more cult than corporation, and Mae comes to believe that privacy is equivalent to stealing—and secrets are just a form of lying.

Passengers

Release: December 21, 2016

Written by: Jon Spaihts

Directed: Morten Tyldum

This sci-fi romance stars Hollywood heavy hitters Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt as two passengers aboard a spaceship on a 120 year voyage from Earth to a colony planet. The pair awake early from cryogenic sleep to discover their ship and the lives of some 5000 on board are in serious danger. With it’s $120 million budget, Passengers (from the excellent Norwegian director of The Imitation Game, Morten Tyldum), has big Box Office hopes resting on it.

Replicas

Trailer: Not released yet

Release: 2017, Date TBC

Written by: Chad St. John

Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Replicas is a sci-fi thriller starring Keanu Reeves as a daring synthetic biologist, Will Foster, who becomes obsessed with resurrecting his family after their fatal car accident. While the field of synthetic biology is still emerging as a scientific discipline; the artificial design and engineering of biological components has been made possible by technologies such as CRISPR. However, the portrayal of synthetic biology has existed in fiction for decades, in films and TV shows such as James Cameron’s Dark Angel, Old Man’s War, and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park franchise. It will be interesting to see Reeves’s character, Foster, explore the ethics and challenges of this emerging technology.

Jayde Lovell is a STEM communicator for the New York Hall of Science, a resident science host for The Young Turks, and a STEM 'muse' for AOL's Cambio platform. Lovell holds a degree in neuroscience and is the host of her own YouTube channel, 'Did Someone Say Science'. She has produced videos for organizations such as the American Institute of Physics and Rolls Royce Engineering, and she has been featured in EducationWeek, Fortune, Men's Health and Mashable. Lovell is currently in development for her pilot TV script 'SEC's' (a teen drama centered around the lives of student engineers), for which she received funding from The MacGyver Foundation.

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