When a movie purports to be about space, it usually contains hostile aliens, some of them buxom and scantily clad. But there have been a handful of films which attempt to depict the actual exploration of space as it is and as it could be.

Destination Moon

Destination Moon, which came out in 1950, was the first attempt to accurately depict what a journey to the Moon would be like. Over ten years before the actual race to the Moon, the movie depicts how an American businessman finances a lunar expedition before the Russians get there first. The film was directed by George Pal from a script co-wrote by Robert Heinlein, very loosely based on his novel Rocket Ship Galileo, though also with elements of The Man Who Sold the Moon. The lunar landscape was imagined by the great space artist Chesley Bonestell. Years before the space age began, the film depicted space walks, space travel, and operations on the lunar surface with a remarkable degree of accuracy. The crew of the ship includes rocket engineer Charles Cargraves, played by Warner Anderson, General Thayer, played by Tom Powers, Jim Barnes, played by John Archer, and Joe Sweeny, played for comic relief by Dick Wesson. Woody Woodpecker puts in an appearance to explain the science of space travel.

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001 is the quintessential space exploration film. Its scope spans in time from millions of years ago to thirty three years from 1968, the year the film came out, and in space from Earth, to the Moon, to Jupiter, and to the stars. It is a visual treat, with scenes of space ships flying to the sound of the Blue Danube Waltz, of astronauts working at a lunar settlement, of a nuclear powered ship on a voyage to Jupiter, and of a psychedelic journey to the stars. As such, the film holds up, even though the year 2001 is now in the past and people have not been to the Moon in over thirty years, not to mention Jupiter.

One thing that detracts from the film is the bland, almost dispassionate way the characters of that now alternate 2001 behave. Indeed, the pre men of the first sequence seem more human than the humans who fly around in space ships. That possibly was a sly comment by director Stanley Kubrick on what he saw as the “dehumanizing” effects of technology. Even the computer character, HAL 9000, is positively scary in a kind of urbane Hannibal Lecter way when he decides to murder his human crew mates, calmly, logically, and remorselessly.

Then, of course, much of the movie was incomprehensible if one did not read the book by Arthur C. Clarke, which one supposes is a good marketing ploy. What was and where was that hotel room where Dave Bowman found himself in at the end of his LSD-style interstellar voyage? What was the purpose of turning him into that celestial, glowing fetus that we saw in the last scene floating toward Earth? Those and other questions were the subjects of endless discussions in that year before the Apollo moon landing.

2001 led to a much inferior sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, which was loosely based on Clarke’s novel by the same name. The story had more to do with the politics of 1984, the year the film came out, than with what might have been in the year 2010.

Apollo 13

Apollo 13, directed by Ron Howard and staring Tom Hanks as mission commander Jim Lovell, is positively the best film of the 1990s. It tells the true story of the mission of Apollo 13, a lunar expedition that suffered an explosion in flight and turned into a harrowing effort to get the crew home alive.

The story begins with the night Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and continues with the scheduling of Apollo 13’s mission, the last minute selection of Jack Swigert, played by Kevin Bacon, to the crew due to the potential sickness of crewmember Ken Mattingly, played by Gary Sinese. There’s a broadcast from space that no network picks up; hard as it is to believe, by April, 1970, lunar expeditions were considered boring. The accident itself is depicted as a fast, frightening event that might well have killed the crew then and there. The film proceeds from there on a nail biting, edge of the seat experience from the very moment the command module splash lands in the Pacific. Great support performances are turned in, as well, by Bill Paxton, as Fred Haise, Ed Harris, as Flight Director Gene Kranz, and Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Lovell. Lovell himself has a cameo as a Navy Admiral on board the recovery ship.

The lengths to which Howard and his fellow film makers went to get the technical details right are awe inspiring, down to the very controls in the command and lunar modules. To simulate micro gravity, Howard put the set of his space craft into NASA’s Vomit Comet aircraft, which the astronauts use to train for space missions. The launch sequence of the Saturn V was entirely done within a computer, but was so real that at least one lunar astronaut wondered how Howard had gotten footage that he had never seen before.

There are some nits to pick. The tension between the crewmembers was not as intense in real life as it was on film. They were too busy trying to get home to bicker. And one hears tales of the odd NASA veteran grumbling because, “The third flight controller from the left looks nothing like me.” Other than that, Apollo 13 remains one of the most accurate historical films in history.

Apollo 13 has been credited with reviving interest in space exploration. It was so well received by audiences that at many performances, the ending resulted in standing ovations. It is and will remain a classic.

The Dish

The Dish is set at the satellite dish facility near the small town of Parkes in Australia. Though none of the action takes place off the Earth, or even outside Australia, The Dish remains one of the sweetest, if also the most quirky, homage to the spirit of space exploration ever filmed. The time is July, 1969 and the occasion is the Apollo 11 moon landing. The Dish at Parkes will play a crucial role in transmitting sound, TV, and telemetry from the Apollo space craft to Earth.

Leading the wonderful cast is Sam Neil, playing Cliff Buxton, the director of the Dish facility. For him, the voyage of Apollo 11 is bitter sweet. His wife, who had so looked forward to seeing the lunar voyage, had recently died. He is well supported by Kevin Harrington, playing a sarcastic engineer named Ross Mitchell, Tom Long playing a love struck math wiz named Glenn Latham, and Pat Warburton, playing the bear-like, Clark Kent looking NASA minder named Al Burnett.

While power outages, loss of signal, and a big wind storm threaten the mission of the Dish, it is the various quirky characters that make the movie. Latham is in love with a girl named Janine, the sister of the facility’s rather dim security guard, and has no earthly idea about what to do about it. Mitchell and Burnett clash, though the bickering is made funny by Burnett’s inability to understand Mitchell’s Australian idioms. And yet they all come together when they need to.

The town, of course, is caught up in the excitement. The Mayor, played by Roy Billing, knows that his future political career depends on how well the Dish does. His son, a sharp lad, can spout off Apollo trivia as if he worked for NASA. His daughter, apparently the town radical, has a dim view of the whole expedition. "If you ask me it's the most chauvinistic exercise in the history of the world,” she retorts.

Without missing a beat, her mother replies, “That’s why nobody asks you.”

Still, with the Dish transmitting the television pictures of the first footsteps on another planet, even the radical is struck with awe. As was the whole world.

Mission to Mars

Brian De Palma, who made Mission to Mars, was often in the past accused of trying the channel Alfred Hitchcock in such films as Obsession and Dressed to Kill. In this movie, he tried to channel Stanley Kubrick, and mores the pity.

The film begins well enough, with a rescue mission sent to Mars in order to find out what happened to a previous expedition. The technical details, based in part on current NASA and private sector conceptions of what a Mars expedition would be like, were first rate. The acting by Tim Robbins, Gary Sinese, Connie Nielson, and Jerry O’Connell as the crew of the rescue mission, and Don Cheadle as the sole survivor of the first expedition is first rate.

The film goes off the rails after the Mars landing, with a depiction of the Face on Mars, a supposed alien artifact that was thought to have been photographed by the Viking Probes, but was subsequently determined to be a trick of light and shadow. Nevertheless, the astronauts enter the face and have an encounter with alien intelligence that is somewhat dull and unbelievable all at once.