Five Science Fiction Movies That Get the Science Right

"I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong, and somehow I was wrong about everything."

This Russian classic makes the list not so much for the specific science it portrays, as for its portrayal of the limits of science and of human understanding.

Psychologist Chris Kelvin is dispatched to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, to find out why the crew has stopped responding to messages from Earth. He discovers them in a state of emotional breakdown, and is soon in the same condition himself. After falling asleep on the station for the first time, he wakes to find his wife Rheya, who committed suicide years before, next to him.

Somehow, and for no reason ever made clear, Solaris has brought Rheya back, constructing her using her husband's memories. But is she really Rheya, or is she just Chris's flawed recollection of her, seen through his own preconceived ideas and limited understanding? Solaris itself is equally inexplicable, creating bizarre geometric shapes across its surface that may or may not be alive.

Stanislaw Lem, who wrote the original novel, was convinced that extraterrestrial life would be so strange that humans would be unable to understand it. Solaris gets right to the heart of this idea.

Despite being a trained psychologist and an educated man, Chris cannot even understand his wife. How then, the film asks, could he possibly understand something as alien as Solaris? Devotees of quantum mechanics and the consciousness problem will no doubt sympathise.