Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Sci-Fi Movie Tier List

How do some of the most revered sci-fi classics hold up against Neil's judgement? You think you know how Neil will rank movies like Interstellar? Armageddon? Think again.

Neil deGrasse Tyson takes us through a catalog of some of the most important sci-fi films of the last century, ranks them against each other. Who will end up on the top of the pile? There's only one way to find out...

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0:00 - Introduction
0:09 - The Black Hole
0:58 - The Matrix
2:27 - The Martian
4:09 - The Blob
5:55 - Contact
6:48 - Interstellar
9:19 - Gravity
12:54 - Back to the Future
14:39 - A Quiet Earth
16:48 - Arrival
19:44 - The Europa Report
21:10 - Armageddon
22:20 - Close Encounters of The Third Kind
24:54 - Deep Impact
26:02 - The Day the Earth Stood Still
26:55 - Independence Day
28:58 - The Terminator
32:03 - 2001: A Space Odyssey
33:25 - Closing Notes

[EverClever]

The Thing, Alien, Aliens, Event Horizon, Predator, Sunshine, Abyss, Blade Runner…? Cmon Neil, lots of gold left in those hills.

[wintyrqueen]

The original Matrix script had the humans being used for cloud computing; it got changed to batteries because the executives thought audiences wouldn’t understand the concept. The directors even explained exactly Neil’s point, but the execs got it their way

[mcarston]

Context: Neil’s wife asked him what movie they should watch that evening

[Mako.UniverseUnveiled]

Interstellar deserves way higher. It’s a movie with working science. The problem wasn’t with food. It’s literally said in the movie that the food was infected with a virus that consumed oxygen and released nitrogen. At the beginning of the film it said that the atmosphere was 80% nitrogen already. The problem wasn’t food starvation but suffocation.

[clairemadeinheaven]

Neo: "Doesn't harvesting human body heat for energy, violate the laws of thermodynamics?"
Morpheus: "Where'd you learn about thermodynamics, Neo?"
Neo: "In school."
Morpheus: "Where'd you go to school, Neo?"
Neo: "Oh."
Morpheus: "The machines tell elegant lies."

[aishaalamoudi]

Putting Armageddon and Arrival in the same tier sounds criminal to me!

[Khomuna]

As a computer engineer, the biggest criticism I have against Independence Day is the assumption that an interstellar alien race's computer systems can be infected by a malware coded on Mac OS by a TV satellite technician.

[DizzyMcDizzy]

Sorry I am going to disregard the hoverboard comment. Wheels of a skateboard get caught on rocks and cracks in the ground; a hoverboard will glide right over. This invention would make for a smoother ride.

[taylordixon]

Arrival comment: They had hundreds or thousands of people involved with alien communication at dozens of sites around the world. We only follow the linguist and physicist. They also had mathematicians and biologists consulting. In the short story, there were hundreds of sites and it implied there were thousands of people involved.

[wandilembhele]

Interstellar and Gravity being ranked the equally is unsettling

[dodevoeten]

Neil Degrasse Tyson does NOT know the pain of wheelbite or random debris on the sidewalks.

[AndrewTimothy]

1. Interstellar
2. Terminator 2
3. Arrival
4. District 9
5. Short Circuit

[verdugosilver]

As a former cryptographer and current linguist, I disagree with Arrival needing a cryptographer. A cryptographer deciphers code, but there's much more fine nuance to a language than there is to a code. There are a lot of linguistical concepts conveyed in that film that go beyond the science of cryptography.

[victoriadesottomaior]

“Anytime people are fighting each other to look through a telescope, that’s a good day for me”😂 Love it!

[stevenesch]

I thought the issue with the plants in Interstellar was the soil no longer having enough nutrients, not a disease. I might be wrong on that.

[jgnnarvaez]

Your comments about the comet fragment hitting the Chrysler Building reminded me a realization I made recently while watching the trailer for "A Quiet Place - Day One." Whenever movie aliens land in New York, they land in Manhattan. They never land in Brooklyn or the Bronx.

[tonyb]

John Carpenter's The Thing should get an honorable mention for it's alien depiction and the tension between a small group of scientists when it gets loose.

[emilolsen]

About the Terminator. Skynet didn't know which Sarah Connor to target because records of pre war times were mostly destroyed, hence this method

[mattsanchez]

Arrival a C?? Nope, nope, nope. Literally one of the best science fiction movies ever, and I would contend best movies ever.

[iggyyo]

To put Armagedon in the same tier as Arrival is nuts