8 Movies That Make Space Seem Absolutely Terrifying

In Ridley Scott's latest, The Martian, Matt Damon finds himself stranded in the outback of our solar system, left to fend for himself on the giant red rock of Mars. Like an interstellar version of Tom Hanks in Castaway, Damon's Mark Watney must improvise his own survival, using whatever tools he can find to prevent himself from perishing out in the wilds of space. The Martian's a different kind of vibe from films like Star Trek and Interstellar, movies which posit that space travel is a glamorous, awe-inspiring thing, even when shit's hitting the fan. Scott's latest effort isn't alone in its portrayal of space as an unsparing danger zone, either. While more cheerful movies have considered the vast blackness beyond our planet to be a blessing, just as many films have depicted the final frontier as an unknowable expanse full of terror. Ever since silent filmmaker George Melies sent a crew to an evil insectoid-infested Moon on a tin rocket ship over a century ago, the movies have been warning us away from venturing beyond our blue planet, presenting us with numerous tales of astral catastrophe. Here, then, are eight notable examples of cinema that make space appear to be absolutely terrifying. 8) Gravity Starting off with the film set closest to Earth on this list, Alfonso Cuaron's award-winning blockbuster spectacle Gravity may also be the closest any movie has got to turning space on-screen into something like a white knuckle rollercoaster ride. While the film never strays far from the Earth's atmosphere, Gravity assures you that even there the stakes can be horribly high. In a single bravura take, the film opens by smashing up a space station, caving in one astronaut's face with flying debris, and leaving two others dealing with an impossible, unprecedented situation. From there, it doesn't let up for even a second. As Sandra Bullock's Ryan Stone and George Clooney's Matt Kowalski desperately search for a way back down to Earth, they're forced to come to terms with decreasing oxygen supplies, malfunctioning equipment, and - ironically, for a film called Gravity - the constant pressure of a zero-G environment. The relief felt when the movie finally touches back down on the Earth's soil is enormous. 7) Apollo 13 Like Gravity, Apollo 13 tells of a nigh-on routine NASA mission-gone-wrong. The difference is that this one is based on real events, and puts into danger none other than Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon, three of the most lovable actors in Hollywood, thus lending this disastrous affair an almost unbearable kind of tension. It's probably no spoiler alert to say that all three survive, but even though likely everybody knows the story going in, it's the sense of dwindling hope that director Ron Howard lends to the film that keeps it gut-churningly tense. Set in 1970 between the Earth and the Moon, Apollo 13 documents how the titular craft - built to carry three men onto the lunar surface - almost found itself floating aimlessly out into space permanently, with Hanks' Jim Lovell only getting his team back home by some miracle. It's a story of how one small malfunction (in this case, it's an oxygen tank failure) can take astronauts from comfortable safety to near-fatality in mere moments. Space, Apollo 13 concedes, is not even a little bit accommodating of human error. 6) Moon Drifting a little farther afield, you have Duncan Jones' Moon, which - like so many space movies, including several others on this list - highlights what cinema perceives as the dangerous psychological effect of living off-world. In Sam Rockwell you have an actor giving a masterclass in the art of the dual performance (he literally plays the only two characters that aren't a robot or a video message) as astronaut Sam Bell and his doppelgänger. And the newcomer to his Moon base home - the fresher, more together version of Sam - underscores just what toll years of isolation has had on Sam. Obviously, as it's a Sam Rockwell film, you have the man displaying his dancing skills in Moon, but here it's just a sign of how crazy his character has become during his celestial stint; all Sam can give is a wild, mindless jig, as he cackles in the face of his double. There's an underlying sadness to the whole affair: Moon puts forward the notion that nothing is lonelier than space. And even when there might be some promise of relief, there's a chance help is never really coming after all. 5) Silent Running Speaking of the adverse psychological effects of space: Bruce Dern, everybody. In Silent Running, Dern is Freeman Lowell, a cuckoo-crazy beatnik who no responsible space program director should ever have allowed onto a space craft. Lowell, an ecologist sent in amongst the stars to man a greenhouse on board a space station, spends most of his time with helper robots and quite clearly feels more affection for plant life than for his fellow humans. Clearly, this was never going to end well. Silent Running is terrifying for two reasons: one, it argues that too much time in the void can loosen the screws on a person, isolating them almost to the point of dehumanization. Two, it displays just what happens if you're unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of the ire of someone like that. For Lowell's fellow crew members, it's death by space nuke - and all because the apparently peaceful space-groundskeeper wanted his plants to himself, the maniac. 4) 2001: A Space Odyssey In 2001, Stanley Kubrick takes us from the Moon, to Jupiter, to beyond the known boundaries of our universe. And every single stop is more miserable than the last, full of deceit, extraterrestrial mischief, and robots losing their artificial minds. It's the latter that leads to one of 2001's most terrifying moments, as the homicidal ship computer HAL 9000 traps astronaut Dave Bowman outside the Discovery One, forcing him to re-enter the ship the only way he can: through cold, oxygen-less space, minus a suit. After that, 2001 highlights one of the biggest dangers of space of all: the fact that we still don't really understand all of its mysteries, and aren't prepared for when it throws a giant, LSD-tinged curveball at us. Just when Dave has neutralized Hal and he thinks he's got the Discovery One mission back on course, he enters some kind of alien wormhole, and embarks on the trippiest moment in all of cinema, coming out the other side of an acid-frazzled freak-out as a giant space baby. Not cool. 3) Sunshine Quite possibly Danny Boyle's most underrated film, Sunshine presents a veritable smorgasbord of all the ways one can die horrifically in space. There's death by being burnt alive in close sunlight, death by being frozen into a human icicle whilst unprotected outside the safety of a ship, and death by being crushed into a pulp by your own flight technology. Once again, though, Sunshine reckons it's the madness that space brings that's the most dangerous. On a mission to nuke the failing Sun in an effort to reboot it (yeah, it's ridiculous), members of the Icarus II - including Cillian Murphy's Capa and Chris Evans' Mace - gradually turn against one another as the pressure of their task mounts up. Even as the body count goes up, you'd expect maybe Captain America or Scarecrow would see it to the end, but nope: once crazy flesh-demon Mark Strong - playing an abandoned astronaut-gone-wild - is murdering up Icarus II's crew and proving why you shouldn't spend any more than a couple of years alone out in space, even they can't win out. 2) Ikarie XB-1 There's a hopeful message waiting at the end of Ikarie XB-1. To get to that, though, you have to endure 86 minutes of one of the more realistic depictions of people succumbing to space madness in cinema. Jindrich Polak's film is little-seen, but has influenced numerous movies and directors since, including but not limited to Stanley Kubrick and his own 2001. None of those to have taken inspiration, however, have thought to lend such banality to the space experience as Ikarie XB-1, a banality that gives the viewer a relatable sense of how pants-crappingly scary it can be when things start to go wrong out there. On a mission to the surrounding planets of Alpha Centauri in search of life, the crew of the Ikarie XB-1 find that discovery of an aimlessly drifting ship full of corpses and nukes are the least of their worries. From there, insanity beckons in one crew member, as all the while a radioactive 'dark star' sickens the entire crew to the point of collapse, and the ship to the point of chaos. 1) Solaris Perhaps the ultimate cinematic tale of the negative impact that life in space can have on the human mind, Solaris - like Ikarie XB-1 - is based on a novel by sci-fi luminary Stanislaw Lem. It's a story that's been adapted twice for the screen, 30 years apart and by radically different filmmakers, with both adaptations implicit in their argument: that it's really better just sticking on Earth. Steven Soderbergh and Andrei Tarkovsky had quite different takes at Solaris, but the basic concept is this: a recently-widowed man sent aboard a space station begins to have visions of his dead wife. Is it madness brought on by the mental frailty caused in this unnatural environment, or perhaps by the titular planet the station is orbiting, and which might have supernatural traits? Who cares - once again, the fundamental is that man isn't meant for straying away from his home planet, not when the space station you're on is full of people killing themselves for no apparent reason.