30 Best Movies About Scientists

30 Best Movies About Scientists

We unquestionably live in a time where films are frequently based on real-life major events that have affected history, whether directly adapted or discreetly inspired by them. Of course, there are films on the other end of the quality range that, while based on true events, lack authenticity or veracity. Biographical or biopic films allow audiences to enter into the lives of people who altered the world as we know it by using genuine historical figures, their experiences, and notable accomplishments. The biopic about real-life scientists is a popular type. Scientist biopics are a must-watch so as to understand how genius minds work. As a result, here is a ranking of the top movies based on real-life scientists.

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1. Hidden Figures

Bill Ingalls, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed and written by Theodore Melfi and Allison Schroeder. It is partially inspired by Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same name about three female African-American mathematicians Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) who worked at NASA during the Space Race. Hidden Figures is a must-watch since it depicts the difficulties that black women at NASA encountered prior to the Civil Rights Act.

2. A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind directed by Ron Howard is a 2001 American biographical drama film. The screenplay was written by Akiva Goldsman and was inspired by Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 biography of mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. The story begins with Nash’s days at Princeton University as a smart but asocial mathematics graduate student. Nash’s life becomes a nightmare as he accepts secret work in cryptography.

3. Creation

Ryan Coleman, photography.ryancoleman.ca, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Creation is a 2009 British biographical drama film about Charles Darwin’s relationship with his wife Emma and his memories of their eldest daughter Annie while writing On the Origin of Species. The plot revolves around Charles and Emma’s marriage who are polar opposites. Nature, according to Charles, created itself over millions of years. Emma, on the other hand, believes in God. Her husband’s opinions produce conflict and conflict in their marriage. Darwin is ill because he feels there is no God and is afraid that if he publishes the book, he would “kill God.” Charles decides to finish the book, even converting his wife to evolution.

4. The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game is a 2014 American historical drama film written and directed by Morten Tyldum, based on Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. The film alternates between the team of code breakers’ determination to crack the Enigma code, young Alan Turing, and the events that followed the war and devastated his life. It’s devastating at times, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting as Alan Turing is superb.

5. The Man Who Knew Infinity

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The Man Who Knew Infinity is a 2015 British biographical drama film based on Robert Kanigel’s 1991 book of the same name on the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The narrative of this young Indian with a remarkable talent for mathematics who becomes a researcher at Cambridge Trinity College is fascinating in and of itself. The acting is fantastic, with Jeremy Irons giving one of his best performances as a professor and mentor.

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6. The Theory of Everything

The Theory of Everything is a biographical romantic drama film directed by James Marsh that was released in 2014. It is set at the University of Cambridge and tells the story of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. Anthony McCarten adapted it from Jane Hawking’s 2007 memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, which talks about her relationship with her ex-husband Stephen Hawking. The film is based on her novel about their lives and depicts much of the love and persistence required to care for and love someone who is experiencing tremendous physical difficulties over time. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones play Stephen and Jane during their relationship and life together in outstanding and touching performances.

7. Gorillas in the Mist

Gorillas in the Mist is a 1988 American biographical drama film directed by Michael Apted and written by Anna Hamilton Phelan and Tab Murphy. The film is based on Dian Fossey’s work and an article by Harold T. P. Hayes. Naturalist Dian Fossey is played by Sigourney Weaver, and photographer Bob Campbell is played by Bryan Brown. It depicts the story of Dian Fossey, who journeyed to Africa to study the dwindling mountain gorilla population and later struggled to save them.

8. Awakenings

Boris van Hoytema from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Awakenings is a 1990 American drama film directed by Penny Marshall. Steven Zaillian wrote the screenplay, which is based on Oliver Sacks’ 1973 memoir Awakenings. It portrays the narrative of Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams), a neurologist modeled after Sacks, who discovers the beneficial effects of the medication L-DOPA in 1969. He gives it to catatonic patients who survived the 1917-1928 encephalitis lethargica outbreak. Leonard Lowe (Robert de Niro) and the other patients are reawakened after decades and must adjust to a new life in a new era.

9. Never Cry Wolf

Never Cry Wolf is a 1983 American drama film directed by Carroll Ballard. The film is based on Farley Mowat’s 1963 autobiography of the same name and stars Charles Martin Smith as a government biologist dispatched into the wilderness to research the caribou population, which is thought to be declining due to wolves, despite the fact that no one has ever witnessed a wolf kill a caribou. While Never Cry Wolf is not a factual story, it did have an impact on society’s attitude toward wolves.

10. The Story of Louis Pasteur

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The Story of Louis Pasteur is a 1936 American black-and-white biographical film directed by William Dieterle and produced by Henry Blanke. It stars Josephine Hutchinson, Anita Louise, Donald Woods, and Paul Muni as the renowned scientist who developed major advances in microbiology, which revolutionized agriculture and medicine. Pierre Collings, Sheridan Gibney, and Edward Chodorov wrote the screenplay for the film, which portrays a highly fictionalized account of Pasteur’s life. The Story of Louis Pasteur encourages people to change their minds. Pasteur does not humiliate his opponents rather when he prevails, they concede that they were mistaken. It also looks at thinking in the face of uncertainty and Copenhagen ethics.

11. The Martian

The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, is a 2015 science fiction film. Drew Goddard developed the script from Andy Weir’s 2011 novel The Martian. The film recounts an astronaut’s lone fight to survive on Mars after being abandoned as well as NASA’s efforts to rescue him and return him to Earth. Because everything that occurs is so realistic and (mainly) supported by true science, the film runs like a highlight reel of some of the most astonishing things the human race is capable of. We truly can send humans through 140 million miles of space to Mars and survive there.

12. The Social Network

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The Social Network is a 2010 American biographical drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. It depicts the creation of the social networking website Facebook. Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield plays Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake plays Sean Parker, Armie Hammer plays Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Max Minghella plays Divya Narendra. The Social Network is well worth rewatching over a decade later for its stark warning about the ghastly bros behind the tech boom and the egos that their creations are built on. There are many alarm bell moments, from the clinical way he betrays his best friend to his lack of concern over amassing his classmates’ data, but the most telling line comes from his girlfriend Erica Albright in the scene where their relationship ends.

13. Contact

Contact is a 1997 American science fiction drama film directed by Robert Zemeckis. Zemeckis noted that he intended the film’s message to be that science and religion can coexist rather than be opposing camps, as evidenced by the pairing of scientist Arroway and religious Joss, as well as his acceptance that the “journey” did occur. In the film, an alien intelligence transmits an image of three pages of encrypted symbols. Each page’s corners are clearly marked. It is also evident that the three corners are meant to be joined in some way to form a single image. Scientists are stumped in their attempts to connect the pages.

14. The Man Who Invented Christmas

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The Man Who Invented Christmas is a 2017 biographical comedy-drama film directed by Bharat Nalluri and written by Susan Coyne about the inventor of Christmas. The combined Canadian and Irish production, based on Les Standiford’s 2008 book of the same name about Charles Dickens, stars Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, and Jonathan Pryce, and follows Dickens (Stevens) as he conceives and creates his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. This is a fun, well-acted biographical drama about what inspired A Christmas Carol and how the classic novella impacted the mood of the season. Stevens plays Dickens convincingly, capturing the holiday’s atmosphere of selflessness and generosity.

15. The Fly

David Cronenberg directed and co-wrote the 1986 American science fiction horror film The Fly. The Fly is loosely based on George Langelaan’s 1957 short tale of the same name and the 1958 film of the same name. It follows the story of an eccentric scientist who slowly transforms into a fly-hybrid creature after one of his experiments goes awry. Howard Shore composed the score, and Chris Walas and makeup artist Stephan Dupuis created the makeup effects.

16. The Fifth Element

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The Fifth Element is a 1997 English-language French science fiction action film directed and co-written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm, Milla Jovovich, and Chris Tucker star in it. The film’s principal plot is around the survival of planet Earth, which falls to Korben Dallas (Willis), a taxicab driver and former special forces major, after a young woman (Jovovich) falls into his cab. Dallas joins forces with her to rescue four mystical stones critical to Earth’s defense against an oncoming onslaught by a wicked cosmic entity.

17. The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain is a 1971 American science fiction thriller film produced and directed by Robert Wise. The film, based on Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel of the same name and adapted by Nelson Gidding, stars Arthur Hill, James Olson, Kate Reid, and David Wayne as scientists investigating a dangerous extraterrestrial organism as they begin work at a secret, five-story, underground bacterial research lab in Nevada as part of “Project Wildfire.” Their mission is to discover and eliminate a deadly virus brought back from the upper atmosphere by a Scoop satellite that crashed in the Arizona desert.

18. The Right Stuff

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The Right Stuff is a 1983 American epic historical drama film that Philip Kaufman wrote, produced, and directed. It is based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 novel of the same name. Wolfe stated that the book was inspired by his curiosity about why astronauts accepted the risk of space flight. He describes the immense dangers that test pilots were already facing, as well as the mental and physical characteristics that their occupations demanded and reinforced.

19. The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a British scientific fantasy drama film directed by Nicolas Roeg and adapted by Paul Mayersberg that was released in 1976. The film is based on Walter Tevis’ 1963 novel of the same name and follows an alien (Thomas Jerome Newton) who crash lands on Earth in search of a way to convey water to his planet, which is suffering from a severe drought but finds himself at the mercy of human vices and corruption. It stars David Bowie, Candy Clark, Buck Henry, and Rip Torn. It was produced by Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings.

20. The Abyss

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The Abyss is a 1989 American science fiction film directed by James Cameron and written by him. It stars Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. When an American submarine sinks in the Caribbean, a US search and recovery team collaborates with an oil platform crew to recover the craft, racing against Soviet boats. They come across something surprising deep in the water.

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21. Agora

Agora is an English-language Spanish historical 2009 drama film directed by Alejandro Amenábar and written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil. The biopic stars Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, a late 4th-century Roman Egyptian mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer who studies the inadequacies of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it. In the midst of religious strife and social turbulence, Hypatia fights to preserve ancient antiquity knowledge.

22. Madame Curie

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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced the 1943 biographical film, Madame Curie. Mervyn LeRoy directed the picture, which Sidney Franklin produced, based on a screenplay by Paul Osborn, Paul H. Rameau, and Aldous Huxley, which was adapted from Madame Curie’s biography. The film follows Polish-French physicist Marie Curie as she begins to share a laboratory with her future husband, Pierre Curie, in 1890s Paris.

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23. Inherit the Wind

Inherit the Wind is a 1960 American film based on Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1955 play of the same name. The film was inspired by the real-life Scopes ‘Monkey Trial‘, which occurred in Dayton, Tennessee in July 1925. John T. Scopes, a schoolteacher, was the accused. His crime: presenting Darwin’s theory of evolution to his students. Clarence Darrow, an agnostic and infamous defense attorney, defended Scopes (he secured life imprisonment for death penalty convicts Leopold and Leob in one of the most well-known murder cases in twentieth-century America).

24. Einstein’s Big Idea

This 2005 documentary looks at the history of scientific discoveries that led to Albert Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 and its consequences in the development of nuclear energy which includes Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic fields, Antoine Lavoisier’s discovery that mass never vanishes, and Emilie du Chatelet’s demonstration that Newton’s computation of a falling object’s velocity was erroneous. All of this came together with Einstein’s now-famous equation by 1905, the miraculous year in which the publication of Einstein’s four physics publications revolutionized over 200 years of scientific principles. Following that, Lise Meisner’s research on uranium led her to the conclusion that splitting an atom would unleash a substantial amount of energy.

25. Kinsey

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Bill Condon wrote and directed the 2004 American biographical drama film Kinsey which details Alfred Charles Kinsey’s (Liam Neeson’s) life as a pioneer in the field of sexology. One of the earliest known attempts to scientifically analyze and investigate human sexual behavior was his 1948 article, Sexual Behavior.

26. The Road to Wellville

The Road to Wellville, an American comedy-drama movie released in 1994, is based on the same-named novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle. It chronicles the narrative of an unusual moment in Battle Creek, Michigan’s (“Cereal Bowl to the Nation”) history when the town was at the center of a boom in cornflakes and other aids to appropriate nutrition and irrigation. Battle Creek was to flakes what the Yukon was to gold, and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake, peanut butter, and many medieval tools to scrub the body inside and out, towered above the other local reformers.

27. Fat Man and Little Boy

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Fat Man and Little Boy (also known as Shadow Makers in the United Kingdom) is a 1989 epic historical war film directed by Roland Joffé, who also co-wrote the script with Bruce Robinson. In the film, Gen. Leslie Groves plays (Paul Newman) who has been assigned to oversee the creation of the atomic bomb and J. Robert Oppenheimer plays (Dwight Schultz) the top-secret operation’s primary scientist, but the two men have a number of disagreements. Despite their numerous disagreements, Groves and Oppenheimer proceed with two bomb designs.

28. The Odyssey

Based on the nonfiction book Capitaine de La Calypso by Albert Falco and Yves Paccalet, Jérôme Salle’s 2016 French-Belgian biographical action film The Odyssey was written by Salle and Laurent Turner. The story revolves around French ocean explorer, biologist, and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau. It adheres to historical facts and was based on research and interviews with Cousteau’s coworkers.

29. October Sky

The 1999 American biographical drama film October Sky, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, Chris Owen, and Laura Dern, was directed by Joe Johnston. The script is based on the memoir of the same name and depicts the true story of Homer H. Hickam Jr. a coal miner’s son who in spite of his father’s objections decided to pursue rocketry after the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. He later worked for NASA.

30. Measuring the World

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This 2012 German/Austrian 3D movie Measuring the World is based on Daniel Kehlmann’s self-titled novel. The story of Homer Hickham and his aspiration to build a rocket first seems so straightforward, especially given that the movie is set in a mining town where the future seems as certain as the coal in the mine. Homer, however, is unable to carry on his father’s legacy. With the assistance of Miss Riley,(a kind teacher), members of his father’s staff, and his pals, Homer seeks to make his dream a reality.

Science fiction movies tackle many philosophical issues and themes while also giving audiences a glimpse into alternate realms. The authors of this anthology employ well-known science fiction films to examine challenging philosophical ideas. The advantages of reading science fiction are similar to those of reading fantasy: they foster imagination, creativity, problem-solving, and coping skills.