If we’re going to the stars, we’re going to need a way to get there. That’s a simple enough proposition, but it gets complicated quickly. Physicists remind us about the trouble with traveling fast enough to get anywhere else without taking ages to get there. Psychologists and physiologists fret about the effects of spending long periods in the absence of Earth’s gravity.
Fortunately for us, movies seldom if ever concern themselves greatly with such weighty inquiries. They simply assume that in the future scientists will come up with something that violates Einstein’s speed limit and keeps us stuck to the floor while we’re on our way. Freed from worry about how we’ll make spaceships work, we can focus on more entertaining questions such as what they will look like and what they will do.
Here are eight particularly entertaining answers.
Saucers, saucers and more saucers – This could be a list all by itself. The notion of saucer-shaped spacecraft runs like a river through the genre. Aliens show up in them. They use them to freak us out and attack us. They try to leave in them. And for that matter, once we take to the stars ourselves we sometimes take a page from the aliens’ book. Though it’s impossible to pick just one example, the saucer had to be on the list.
The Space Ark - Of course the other “classic” spaceship design is the rocket, that long, skinny, shiny tribute to man’s desire to penetrate the heavens. Stainless deco rockets show up just about everywhere from Destination Moon to Bugs Bunny cartoons. But if I have to settle on a single example, I’ll go with the Space Ark from When Worlds Collide. It has the look and feel we need plus an out-of-the-ordinary horizontal launch track. Its role in a fun – if somewhat far-fetched – movie doesn’t exactly hurt, either.
The Executor – I’m guessing most Star Wars fans offered a choice of vehicles from the series would probably opt for the Millennium Falcon. I hate to say it, but I sorta share Princess Leia’s initial impression of Han Solo’s dragster. Instead, for my money the baddest ride in a galaxy far, far away is Darth Vader’s personal star destroyer, the Executor. The name’s a little awkward – is he going to execute people or just make sure their estates are properly distributed? – but for a combination of smooth design and awesome firepower this ship is hard to beat.
The Martian war machines – This one’s a bit of a cheat, because technically the Martians don’t use these to cross the vast gulfs of cold, empty space. Instead they use them after they arrive to trash the place, making them more like tanks than spacecraft. Though H.G. Wells had something more like the machines from the Steven Spielberg version in mind, I strongly prefer the smooth, deco styling of the George Pal production. These things kick our asses and look good doing it.
The moon bus – As noted in the list of our eight favorite sci fi movies, one of the great appeals of the genre is the implication that the extraordinary may someday become ordinary, that in the future we (or perhaps our descendants) will be able to journey to other planets with the same ease with which we currently travel to other cities. One of the big draws of 2001: A Space Odyssey is that it presents us with just such a world. Pan Am will be able to rocket us off to an orbiting hotel, and later we can visit the Moon. While we’re there, we’ll get around on moon buses, transports that look like a cross between a spaceship and a subway car. The familiar ordinariness of the thing is what makes it so appealing. In the present I might take the bus to work, but in the future I’ll use something similar to get around a place that now I can just dream about.
The Nostromo – On the other hand, the spaceship in Alien takes this almost too far. It’s a grim, greasy, dark place guaranteed to send shivers down the spine of anyone who’s ever worked in a factory. Who wants to imagine a future where the job market will be as miserable as it is today? Still, the industrial look and feel – combined with the quibbling in the script over Human Resources issues – make the setting and the monster eerily realistic.
The Thunder Road – I vaguely remember when I was a kid and I still had a sense of wonder or at least an imagination. Explorers combines a child’s ability to turn a pile of junk into a spacecraft with just enough alien tech to make the thing actually work. The aliens’ ships are clever as well. I wish I’d seen this movie when I was young enough to really appreciate it.
The Enterprise – To be completely precise, the original TV version of the Enterprise will always be nearest and dearest to my heart. Still, the slightly modified ship from the first couple of Star Trek movies is close enough for government work. The design incorporates both the saucer and the rocket into one awesome starship. But the thing that’s always intrigued me the most about it is the fact that it makes no sense from the perspective of those of us who live with gravity and aerodynamics. On Earth this thing would never fly, but in the boundless freedom of outer space it works perfectly. That makes it as forward-thinking as the series of which it was a vital part.
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