Best Engineering Movies

A Beautiful Mind

Flash of Genious

I agree 100% with Tucker.

I just watched Atlas Shrugged, I and II, since I got Netflix. Great movies, with great parallels to the mess we are watching unfold.

I read the book when I was a kid, but can't remember the end. Looking forward to part 3; I might have to break down and go to a theater.

Pi - A paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature.

Yes, Pi is excellent.

Agreed....I especially like (in no particular order):

• Cherry
• Cranberry/Apple
• Pumpkin
• Mincemeat
• Blueberry (my wife's)
• Peanut Butter
• Key Lime

How about "Falling Down" starring Michael Douglas who plays a recently layed off defense engineer?

It seemed like ''Falling Down'' was more of an anti-engineering movie, especially because the writer(s) chose to have nobody, engineer or otherwise, step forward in time to save the lead character from himself...

A lot of good flicks shown so far....... some sci-fi but truth in it.

• I like to add the 1964 flic Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

They did depict the correct maneuvering of the craft by retro rockets........

but like a Hollywood movie it had errors....... like the one alien in a space suit firing its ray gun....... if you look in his visor he had the retro 60's mustache (aka a stashe like a porn star would have in the 60's and 70's)

• Also the 1989 flick Fat Man and Little Boy

At the risk of being labeled a curmudgeon, there's a depressing note to all of the movies listed. The very few movies produced this century were about engineering accomplishments of the last century.

Well, movies are for entertainment.......... Just like SciFi writers...... Your best ones are writen by engineers, scientists and physists. They'll use thoeries as a base of their stories, and give them a twist for entertainment value which sells more books. Maybe your looking for documentaries......

I'm well aware that movies are for entertainment. I also agree that the proffered movies that I did see present excellent aspects of engineering. I just lament that no engineering concepts or constructions of the past dozen years are considered dramatic or entertaining enough to be incorporated into a movie.

The only movie that comes to my mind that fits my desire is Contagion. A brilliant movie that scares me to my core. Instead of celebrating science and engineering though it lays bare our impotent intelligence to Mother and Human Nature.

I haven't seen it yet, but what about 'Jobs'? Surely the movie must have covered the development of the iPhone, which first came out in 2007, etc.

Also, I should have added to my earlier list the Ironman I and II movies. (I exclude Ironman III since in that movie the genetic engineer is the 'evil entrepreneur'. - Which is the problem with many of the movies out of Hollywood over the past 20+ years. In so many of the movies the engineer/businessman/entrepreneur is the bad guy. Tiresomely, unimaginatively, wrong.)

Fitzcarraldo! Just YOU try getting a showboat upstream and uphill in Amazonia.

My pick would have to be FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX based on a true story. I think it was remade, but did not have the feel of the original.

- I also enjoyed UNSTOPPABLE - it was fun to imagine how to solve the problem before the movie solved it for me.

Is there a blog on the WORST engineering movies ? The ones with the worst technical blunders or fallacies or ignorance. Science Fiction will take a beating I am sure.

'Independence Day' has got to be the worst/dumbest. Unless there really are palm trees in Los Angeles that can withstand a nuclear blast, and aliens who travel trillions of miles through space use software that can easily be hacked by someone (a journalist!) with with an Apple computer.

I thought MOONTRAP was silly - machine guns on the moon. Guns solve everything.

For historical authenticity, and technical accuracy, I liked ''Mars Attacks''...

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Well, I actually did like the Slim Whitman music, anyway...

I always get a kick out of idiotic scenes in movies where they get it totally wrong. About 15 years ago there was a volcano disaster movie out called Dante's Peak, and near the end, as a river of lava was pouring into the city through a main street, in desperation they quickly built a dam out of those concrete traffic barriers used during road construction. They had a nice CG shot of it as the virtual lava arrived, and was blocked by the dam. The city was saved! Of course the arch of the dam was in the downstream direction. I'm normally quiet in a theater, but I just burst out with, "Ah geez, these idiots! They got the arch of the dam backwards!" My wife elbowed me really hard and said "SHUT UP! Nobody here cares!" Probably true but I thought they needed to know.

jhammond

Yep, sometimes watch a movie, you just have to let your mind go blank...................... ^{some people just don't snap out of it}......

Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Oddessey?

Good point about Falling Down. A very dark movie indeed.

I was just about to say 2001!

How about Bridge on the River Kwai?

Yes, how about the ''Bridge on the River Kwai'' as an engineering movie?

One of my all time favorites, of any kind...

Sort of (Hamlet) goes to the (War in the Pacific).

Similarly, all the lead characters die in the end, including the bridge, except for the (solder), and the (scholar)...

I would have to add 'The Andromeda Strain', (the original, not the remake). Fairly realistic science in the way the lab was set up to handle biological contamination.

That was a scary movie.

These were more fun, than engineering, but I think that Robocop, and Terminator deserve a mention.

Back to the Future doesn't belong.

I suggest Contact and second the nomination for 2001. And let's not forget The Absent-Minded Professor (Flubber).

McGyver isn't a movie, but it was a television series for a long time.

I think it deserves honorable mention in this category too.

What should be added to the list?
Pretty much anything written by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlien, or Arthur C. Clark.

Office Space makes the top ten? Can someone please explain this to me? Sorry, I just don't see it as an engineering film.

I agree that Office Space is a stretch to fit in this category and with so many other movies easily fitting into this category a stretch should not be here. As for an Asimov nomination I offer Bicentennial Man for the social engineering of robots. It's not just about gears and positronics.

I'll second your nomination of Bicentennial Man. Excellent film.

No love for the disgruntled software engineers at Initech? Okay, while not being a great movie about engineering it's a pretty good movie about modern cube-farm life for a lot of engineers. Who among us hasn't laughed about the 'memo regarding the new cover sheet for the TPS reports', or groaned about the 'experts' brought in to 'improve' things. That kind of crap happens in engineering offices everywhere.

Now give me back my red stapler!

Honestly, if you haven't seen Pi, you should rent it or stream it. One of my favorites!

Yay!! It's on Netflix, and I just added it to my list.

I've probably watched about 12 movies since 1990, so I've got plenty of catching up to do.

I've got the movie and the soundtrack. I can't think of a better soundtrack for a movie than was used in Pi, and that includes a lot of great films.

Giorgio Moroder's application to Fritz Lange's Metropolis?

While technically not an Engineering movie perhaps an honourable mention on the futuristic setwork used in 1932. Great film. And GM's sountrack is awesome (which is a personal like).

I watched it last night, and thought it was depressing as hell.

Made me happy to be dumb.

The Mosquito Coast

This film may be both the best (first part) and the worst (second part).

I'm not sure I would classify this one as an 'engineering movie', but I've always enjoyed Blade Runner.

And what about the Star Trek: The Voyage Home where they saved the whales? I mean, how can you overlook Scotty's transparent aluminum?

Not to mention the Heisenberg compensator that solved the question to enabled teleportation.

I don't think you can beat brass fittings and crushed velvet.

First men in the Moon

The Time Machine

Yesterday's Science Fiction is the futures Engineering .

Those two movies I loved.

By the way, James Stewart was in a 1950's movie called ''No Highway in the Sky'' where he solves the engineering dilemma of why a certain type of passenger airplanes crash at different at different times, directly due faulty engineering...

It was in black and white, but it was rather dramatic, in it's ''day''...

Now that I think about, James Stewart was also the lead character in ''Carbine Williams''.

(Williams) developed the concept and working prototype and was on the development team produced the M-1 Carbine used by the U.S. throughout WWII...

For the worst engineering movie, I have to nominate ''Towering Inferno''...

And, of course, I can't leave out ''Fate is the Hunter'' as a reminder to consider all possible scenarios in the engineering design process...

I would recommend the movie "Primer".

It was actually created by a former engineer. It is a time travel movie, and it makes you have to think even more than Inception.