MAROON AUDIO JOURNAL / FILM · OCTOBER 3, 2026
Ten evenings of cinema about the universe, time and the human future
The faraway place on screen might be a planet nobody has reached, or a future city in the rain. These ten films move from journeys between stars to encounters between civilisations, bringing questions about time and the human future back into our lives. There is the pleasure of adventure, and there are moments worth staying with. Set aside an evening and begin with the story that makes you most curious.
Rating evidence checked October 3, 2026. RT is the critics’ Tomatometer, not the audience score or an average rating. IMDb values come from indexed official title pages of varying ages, rather than a live snapshot.
01 / 2014
Interstellar
A father's departure, and the making of a black hole
As Earth loses the ability to sustain humanity, former pilot Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, has built his life around a farm and his children. A mission to find humanity another home requires him to leave his own. Mackenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain play his daughter Murph at different ages; Anne Hathaway plays fellow explorer Brand. The cast brings saving humanity down to a father's dilemma: to give his children a future, he must first be absent from their lives. Seen through that conflict, distant planets become more than scenery. Every departure carries the wish to come home.
The black hole encircled by a luminous disc has a story of its own. Physicist Kip Thorne and the Double Negative effects team worked together to calculate how beams of light travel through the curved spacetime around a rotating black hole. To reduce flicker and create a smooth image, the team traced bundles of light rather than individual rays. The work became a paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity, which also explored the multiple images of stars seen from close to a black hole. The paper explains that the film omitted some variations in brightness and colour caused by Doppler effects. The spectacle has serious calculations beneath it, along with choices made for a cinema audience.
02 / 2024
Dune: Part Two
Making light itself unfamiliar
Following the first film, Paul, played by Timothée Chalamet, and his mother Jessica flee into the desert of Arrakis and try to find their place among the Fremen. Zendaya's Chani fights beside him and provides an intimate human connection within the wider struggle for power; Rebecca Ferguson returns as his mother. Paul wants to avenge his family, but increasingly understands that his choices may draw others into catastrophe. The tension comes from a young man trying to decide his own fate while the people around him keep assigning it a larger meaning. Love, revenge and a planet's future cannot easily move in the same direction. Watch 2021's Dune before beginning this part of the journey.
Beyond the scale of the desert, look at the eerie monochrome images on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen homeworld. Cinematographer Greig Fraser removed the camera's infrared-cut filter, then used filters to block visible light, recording infrared images that were further desaturated in post-production. Infrared changes how fabrics register; the costume department even had to replace some materials to keep garments black. Director Denis Villeneuve particularly liked the decision's irreversibility: because visible light had never been recorded, the images could not later be restored to normal colour. Watch what happens as characters move outdoors. Light itself becomes part of the world's unease.
03 / 1999
The Matrix
The action almost stops; the viewpoint keeps moving
Keanu Reeves plays Neo, a programmer by day and a hacker in another part of his life. He feels something is wrong with the ordinary world, but does not know whom to trust. Trinity, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, and Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, offer a way to pursue the truth, along with a choice that is hard to avoid: if a familiar life rests on a lie, are you willing to wake up? The way into the film is simple — follow a confused person as he learns what his world is. As the action becomes more extraordinary, the question becomes more immediate. When the rules can change, what can someone believe, and what can guide their actions?
The famous bullet-time effect is worth another look through its production. An array that included 120 still cameras captured the performers; combined with digital backgrounds, it allowed the action to appear almost frozen while the viewpoint continued to move. Some backgrounds were reconstructed from photographs. The apparent fluidity joins many static viewpoints with great precision. The performers' bodies supply the other half of the effect. The Wachowskis brought in Yuen Woo-ping to design the action, and the principal cast trained for four months before filming. The fights have sustained poses and rhythms. When Neo twists in mid-air, notice both the seemingly impossible moving viewpoint and the real shifts in his balance. The film's idea of rewriting the rules becomes a series of physical actions.
04 / 2015
The Martian
Growing the next meal
The Martian makes survival a series of problems that can be calculated and tackled. Matt Damon plays botanist Mark Watney, mistakenly presumed dead during an evacuation. He wakes to find himself alone on Mars: food will run out, equipment will fail, and Earth does not know he is alive. Jessica Chastain's mission commander Melissa Lewis brings his crewmates' responsibilities into the story. We follow Watney as he counts supplies, repairs things and tries to grow his next meal. Humour is another tool he uses to keep working.
The engineering has concrete roots. JPL provided the filmmakers with Pathfinder drawings and photographs; the production visited the laboratory, as did Chastain while preparing her role. The potatoes invite another question beyond the film. NASA plant researchers do consider them a nutritious, productive candidate crop for space. Real Martian regolith, however, contains perchlorates and other substances that make growing and eating crops difficult; treatment would be necessary, a complication the film leaves out. Knowing this does not remove the pleasure. The compelling process is turning fear into the next experiment, making a scientist's heroism specific and approachable. Small successes play like action scenes. It is a good film for an evening when you want to recover some courage to solve a problem.
05 / 1997
Contact
The antennas act in a film; the science continues
Contact turns the question of who else is in the universe into one person's driving commitment. Jodie Foster plays radio astronomer Ellie Arroway, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence while struggling to secure funding and research opportunities. Matthew McConaughey's Palmer Joss, a religious thinker and adviser, brings another persistent question into her life: what is worth believing? When an unusual signal appears, the difficulties are not over. How will a scientific discovery be understood, and who decides how humanity should respond? Watch the solitude before discovery, and the way discovery can make it even harder for someone to retain an individual voice.
The film adapts Carl Sagan's novel, and its white dish antennas belong to the real Very Large Array in New Mexico. During filming in 1996, the production used maintenance and testing periods to reposition antennas. Astronomer Bryan Butler, who helped with the shoot, also observed Comet Hale–Bopp between filming sessions. The scientific apparatus was appearing in a film and still doing science. That small fact adds weight to the gaze towards the sky. In real SETI work, computers sift through large numbers of channels before a signal reaches researchers; the image of Ellie listening through headphones makes an otherwise invisible computation into a moment an audience can hold its breath through. This is a film for following a question slowly, and for seeing whether honesty, longing and loneliness can all be recognised when evidence meets belief.
06 / 1982
Blade Runner
A classic's reputation was not written on opening day
Harrison Ford sets aside the lightness of an adventure hero to play the weary blade runner Deckard. Ordered to hunt several replicants, he faces a question that becomes increasingly difficult: on what grounds can anyone decide who is more human? Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty fights from the other side for more time to live. Sean Young's Rachael brings a relationship into Deckard's life that cannot be easily classified. The conflict between pursuer and pursued gives the rain, neon and immense buildings their weight. This future city contains a job that is steadily losing its moral certainty.
This is one of cinema’s defining cyberpunk worlds: advanced technology concentrates power while everyday life remains precarious. Tyrell’s manufactured people turn the question of ownership into a question about who may live. That tension also runs through Vangelis’s score, explored in our music feature, where the responsiveness of an electronic instrument opens space for feelings the city’s institutions struggle to acknowledge. It continues, in another generation, through Officer K in Blade Runner 2049.
The film's present reputation makes an incident during its original release especially interesting. Cinematographer John Toll recalled to the American Society of Cinematographers buying tickets with the film's cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, for an afternoon screening with about twenty people in the auditorium. Cronenweth had not previously seen the finished film. He became excited by it — by the whole work, rather than only his photography. The quiet screening and his enthusiasm make an intriguing mismatch. This is an anecdote about one screening, rather than a measure of the film's total audience.
Its later influence can also be traced to a particular person. In a Sight and Sound interview, Christopher Nolan described becoming fascinated by the density and layers of its images after watching it on home video. Seeing Alien afterwards helped him recognise the same director's mind behind two different worlds, and understand what directing meant. For a first viewing, the 2007 Final Cut is a good starting point. Leave your attention with the people and spaces before becoming absorbed in the history of the different versions.
07 / 2017
Blade Runner 2049
Building a future palace with light from water
Ryan Gosling plays Officer K, whose discovery during an assignment leads him towards a secret capable of unsettling the social order, and to a search for Deckard, again played by Harrison Ford. Ana de Armas' Joi exposes a softer part of K's private life. Gosling holds much of the emotion in pauses and glances; the film rewards staying with a character as questions slowly take shape. Notice how space surrounds people. Corridors, empty rooms and distant light often establish a relationship of power before anyone speaks.
Where the 1982 film asks how manufactured life is judged, K’s story draws us into what such judgments feel like from within. Memory, work and the desire for intimacy all become entangled with ownership. The musical continuity has its own change of perspective: the sequel’s composers, Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, take up Vangelis’s electronic vocabulary for a different protagonist and a changed world. Our Blade Runner music feature follows that connection through the instrument, the performance and the space left around a human response.
Wallace's office provides a precise example. Production designer Dennis Gassner told American Cinematographer about visiting a castle in Japan and being struck by its security arrangements. He surrounded the office platform with water to express its owner's control. Roger Deakins' team then projected moving patterns of reflected water onto the high walls. The apparently abstract golden images have a clear dramatic purpose: the environment creates the distance before the conversation begins. The beautiful shots are doing work for the characters.
Another production detail changes how we see the city. Gassner said the practical lighting used LEDs rather than neon. The film retains flowing light and atmosphere from its predecessor, using technology belonging to another era. Deakins won the cinematography Oscar for the film in 2018. Watch how light leaves K alone, and gives different spaces different temperatures. Seeing the 1982 film first makes it easier to feel both what the sequel inherits and where it takes the mood.
08 / 1968
2001: A Space Odyssey
Leaving Earth inside a rotating room
Set aside the urge to find an answer to every question and begin with the scale of a person in the universe. Keir Dullea plays David Bowman and Gary Lockwood plays Frank Poole, astronauts travelling towards Jupiter aboard Discovery. Their companion is the computer HAL 9000, voiced by Douglas Rain, which converses with them and helps run the ship. Dependence on technology is already enough to create suspense. When a machine seems to have a personality, how should a person understand and trust it? Kubrick leaves room for daily actions, mechanical rhythms and enormous distances to change our patience.
That unfamiliar sense of reality came from specific, painstaking work. In a contemporary American Cinematographer interview, Kubrick described a rotating centrifuge set about 11.6 metres in diameter. The camera rotated with it: the room appeared stationary while a performer could walk onto its walls and ceiling. Filming spacecraft miniatures could be so slow that movement was barely visible on set. Some shots exposed each frame for four seconds; moving a model hatch roughly ten centimetres could take five hours to film. The calm movement of a craft through darkness was made a little at a time. Released a year before the first Moon landing, the film still makes leaving Earth feel both solemn and unsettling.
09 / 2016
Arrival
First learn how to ask a question
If alien spacecraft appeared, even the simplest question might be difficult to ask. Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks, recruited by the military to understand the visitors' language; Jeremy Renner plays her collaborator Ian Donnelly. Everyone wants to know the purpose of the arrival immediately. Louise must slow down. With no shared vocabulary or ready translation, she has to establish communication both sides can understand. Arrival turns professional patience into suspense, placing an unusually heavy responsibility on a quiet person.
Its research spaces were not invented by the art department alone. When filming in Montreal, the production brought in McGill linguist Jessica Coon as a consultant. She gave feedback on the script, worked with the set designers, and lent books from her own office. Her research includes syntax, morphology and understudied languages of the Americas. The offices and discussions offer another route into the film: credibility often comes from small things that never demand our attention.
The production story invites another question. What is a linguist looking for when encountering an unfamiliar language? Coon later spoke at Princeton about Arrival alongside her fieldwork on Mayan languages, considering how a researcher can infer the structure of a language they do not know. Keep that question in mind and Louise's way of working becomes easier to enter. The film's deeper emotional and narrative arrangements are best left for the viewing itself. Its surprises extend far beyond the appearance of the spacecraft's interior.
10 / 2012
Prometheus
Eleven working screens inside a helmet
Noomi Rapace plays Elizabeth Shaw, travelling with a scientific expedition in search of clues to humanity's origins. Michael Fassbender plays the android David, whose politeness and composure add another uncertainty to the relationships on board. The film expands archaeological curiosity to a cosmic scale: we want to enter the immense spaces, while wondering whether we should. It contains strong threat, violence and bloody imagery; viewers sensitive to horror may want to check the content guidance first.
A tangible way into its future is the helmet. In an interview, costume designer Janty Yates described installing eleven working miniature displays inside each helmet, showing video, data and charts. This also meant batteries could run out mid-shoot. Fans at the back helped prevent fogging and kept air circulating. During fittings, Rapace lay down and rolled around to test whether the costume could withstand her character's movements. On-screen exploration equipment acquires the texture of something an actor actually wore and worked inside.
The enormous spaces carry similar traces of physical work. Production designer Arthur Max told the American Film Institute that many large sculptural sets were built in sections, transported and assembled, sometimes revealing their full form only when the pieces came together. For the spacecraft, the team began by asking what it was for: an exploration flagship equipped with advanced technology. The film's unsettling scale comes from the unknown, and from a carefully constructed material world in which performers could stand.
Ten films offer ten ways into the unknown. Choose the one that interests you most and give it a whole evening. Beyond the spectacular distances, the choices people make, and the work that created these worlds, deserve a closer look.