Simon Steel - Senior Director of Education and Outreach
Sunshine (2007, Danny Boyle)
The year is 2057 and the sun is dying. A team of international astronauts are sent on a dangerous mission to reignite our star and save humanity. Flying close to the sun (unless you’re NASA’s Parker Solar Probe) is never a good idea. Stopping along the way to investigate the previous mission that was lost and abandoned in mysterious circumstances is an even worse idea. Sunshine is a fantastic sci fi movie, that starts as a classic rescue mission and descends into psychological horror. But perhaps the biggest monster of the film is the Sun itself, which is almost overwhelming in its blinding malevolence. Have a large glass of ice water by your side as you watch this, and definitely stay in the shadows!
Aniara (2018, Pella Kagerman, Swedish language)
As the Earth becomes uninhabitable due to climate change, refugees board the luxury spaceliner Aniara for the three month cruise to a new life on Mars. But this short trip is transformed into an almost infinite voyage when a meteorite impact disables the ship’s navigation. When months turn to years turn to millennia can life, and sanity, prevail?Based on the epic poem by Harry Martinson, which was also the inspiration for Pohl Anderson’s classic novel Tau Zero, Aniara is the ultimate lost in space survival story. More than any other movie before it, Aniara demonstrates, in all its beauty and horror, the unimaginable scale of the cosmos.
The Descent (2005, Neil Marshall)
After a tragic loss, Sarah’s friends decide to treat her to a “get away from it all” vacation, spelunking in the Appalachian mountains. But as the group gets trapped in the underground cave system, they realize that they are easy prey for the troglodyte creatures that call the caves home. Possibly the most claustrophobic movie ever made, where the fight sequences are a welcome relief from squeezing through narrow passageways, this all-female cast displays a resilience, resourcefulness and strength of will that comes as a bit of a shock to their subterranean predators.
28 Days Later (2002, Danny Boyle)
Imagine waking up in hospital and finding that the world has been devastated by a disease created in a lab. Impossible you say! In this case, the virus makes people into zombies. But these aren’t your typical zombies that shamble along twitching and groaning. The zombies in 28 Days Later are Olympic sprint finalists and are very very angry with living people. Danny Boyle takes a classic horror genre and brings it way up to date and too close to home. The film draws questions about the ethics of animal experimentation, but more importantly about the fragility of society and what it means to be human. There have been lots of good zombie flicks in recent years (World War Z, Sean of the Dead, the Walking Dead series) but nothing comes as painfully close to living through a zombie apocalypse as this.
Oxygene (2021 Alexandre Aja, French language)
A woman wakes in a cryogenic chamber with no recollection of how she got there. As she runs out of oxygen, she must rebuild her memory to find out how she got there, and how, or if, she should find a way out. A variation on the “buried alive” scenario, this particular coffin is a plush high-tech affair with a friendly (maybe) if over-zealous AI medical robot. Most of the action takes place inside the chamber, barely larger than its occupant, who begins to unravel the situation of how she ended up in there. And the more she decides she wants out, the more the chamber is determined to keep her in. This is a classic human-robot standoff with a great twist at the end, and a perfect nightmare scenario for people who are uncomfortable in enclosed spaces, or have a problem with IV needles.Read More Staff Picks:
