Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Sci-Fi Movie Tier List

Which ranking do you disagree with? 🤔

The Thing, Alien, Aliens, Event Horizon, Predator, Sunshine, Abyss, Blade Runner…? Cmon Neil, lots of gold left in those hills.

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

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.

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.

Putting Armageddon and Arrival in the same tier sounds criminal to me!

“Anytime people are fighting each other to look through a telescope, that’s a good day for me”😂 Love it!

"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 👍🏼

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.

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.

I am VERY surprised that the 1971 "Andromeda Strain" isn't on the list. Hard science fiction doesn't get harder than that.

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

Interstellar and Gravity being ranked the equally is unsettling

Putting Arrival on the same tier as Armageddon is WILD.

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.

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.

The force that pulled George Clooney into deep space in Gravity was the script.

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.