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Space isn’t a forgiving place to be stuck. There’s no air, no pulling over for directions and no margin for error. When something goes wrong, you’re left with whatever you have on hand for however long you can make it last.
That fear drives the new sci-fi epic “Project Hail Mary,” opening in theaters Friday, with Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft light-years from Earth with no memory of how he got there. Gradually he realizes he’s been sent on a mission to figure out why the sun is dimming and how to stop it. What begins in isolation turns into something closer to a buddy movie, as Grace ends up working with an alien he names Rocky, another traveler trying to solve the same problem.
The film, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, comes from sci-fi author Andy Weir, whose earlier, similarly survival-themed breakthrough novel “The Martian” was adapted by director Ridley Scott in 2015. That movie put Matt Damon alone on Mars and made the act of thinking through one life-or-death problem after another the engine of the story. The result was a critical and commercial hit that earned seven Oscar nominations, including best picture.
Put someone out in space long enough and the story can go in many directions. Sometimes it’s about survival. Sometimes it turns inward. Sometimes it gets more horrific or even darkly comic. Here are eight of our favorite movies about people lost or stranded in space. Watch them somewhere with plenty of oxygen.
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‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)
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Stanley Kubrick’s landmark mind-melter begins as a mission to Jupiter and ends somewhere much harder to define. Once the ship’s computer, HAL 9000, turns on the crew, astronaut Dave Bowman is left alone, moving through a vessel that no longer feels entirely under human control, HAL’s calm voice still speaking as if nothing is wrong. Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made and looking even more prescient in the age of AI, “2001” strips away the usual markers of a survival story and becomes something colder and more disorienting, less about escape than about drifting beyond anything familiar.
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‘Solaris’ (1972)
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Adapted from Polish author Stanisław Lem’s novel, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s slow, hypnotic “Solaris” follows a psychologist sent to a remote space station where the crew is already beginning to unravel. The planet they are studying has a life and mind of its own. It brings figures from their past into physical form, including the psychologist’s dead wife, Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk in a haunting turn), who reappears in his quarters as if she has never been gone. When he tries to eject her into space, she simply reappears, leaving the crew unsure whether they’re being studied, judged or driven toward madness. Long seen as a philosophical counterpoint to “2001,” the film turns isolation inward, where the danger isn’t running out of resources but being unable to escape yourself.
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‘Silent Running’ (1972)
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The directorial debut of visual effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull, known for his work on “2001,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Blade Runner,” “Silent Running” imagines a future where the last forests on Earth survive only in domed gardens drifting through space. Bruce Dern plays their caretaker, a man who refuses the order to destroy them and is left alone on the ship, tending the plants and teaching his small drone companions to help him. Released amid the environmental movement of the early 1970s, the film was a modest success at the time but later became a cult favorite, in large part due to Dern’s offbeat performance and the handmade quality of its world. Mournful and a little strange, it uses space as a vehicle to explore what it means to hold on to something when everything else is gone.
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‘Dark Star’ (1974)
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Made on a shoestring budget and expanded from a student film, director John Carpenter‘s feature debut imagines space travel as something closer to a dead-end job. The crew drifts through a long, low-priority mission, killing time, playing pranks and arguing — including with one of the ship’s self-aware bombs, which has to be talked out of detonating after it starts questioning its own existence. “Dark Star” plays its premise for laughs, complete with a beach-ball alien that bounces chaotically and dangerously through the ship. But its humor is rooted in that hazy 1970s sense of drift, when boredom and isolation start to blur together and nothing feels especially urgent, even when it probably should.
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‘Alien’ (1979)
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As its famous tagline put it, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic, which won the Academy Award for visual effects and spawned an enduring franchise, turns the commercial towing vessel Nostromo — essentially a tug-hauling cargo ship — into something claustrophobic and unforgiving. After the crew answers a distress signal and brings an alien life form back with them, their vessel becomes a trap, its corridors narrowing as the creature moves through the shadows. What starts as a parasite quickly turns into something far more lethal, emerging in stages the crew can’t anticipate — including one of the most famous and shocking scenes in movie history. As Ellen Ripley, Sigourney Weaver meets the threat with grit and nerve in a situation where there is nowhere to go and no help coming, a performance that helped define the modern action heroine.
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‘Apollo 13’ (1995)
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Based on the real, ill-fated 1970 lunar mission, Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” turns a failed trip to the moon into a slow-building fight to get home. After an onboard explosion cripples the spacecraft, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) and his crew are left working through a chain of problems with limited oxygen, power and time. The film lives in its details — frost creeping along the walls, carbon dioxide levels rising, improvised fixes worked out step by step — as each small success only leads to the next crisis. Even with the world watching, the experience feels isolating, the crew sealed inside a failing machine with no room for mistakes.
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‘Moon’ (2009)
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Director Duncan Jones’ low-budget debut “Moon” keeps its focus tightly contained. Sam Rockwell plays a lone worker nearing the end of a three-year stint on a lunar base, his days shaped by routine and the steady voice of the station’s AI. When that routine begins to slip — after a crash on the lunar surface and the discovery of another version of himself — his grip on reality starts to go with it. With only Rockwell on screen for most of its running time, “Moon” makes being stranded in space feel less like a physical problem than a psychological one.
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‘Gravity’ (2013)
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Alfonso Cuarón’s immersive survival thriller drops its characters into disaster almost immediately and never really lets them recover. After a catastrophic debris strike destroys their shuttle during a spacewalk, Sandra Bullock’s astronaut is left untethered, spinning silently against the vastness of space, while George Clooney’s veteran astronaut tries to guide her from a distance. The film is built as much on sensation as on story: You feel the scramble to grab hold of something before it’s too late, the awareness that even a small mistake can carry you out of reach. “Gravity” reduces the experience of being lost in space to visceral things like breath and movement and the simple act of staying oriented.
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