06 Dec Our Christmas/Science Movie top picks!
Here’s our top Christmas/Science movie picks to get you feeling festive.
The Christmas tree is up, the advent calendars have been opened and the dreaded Christmas shopping is creeping up on us. And with Christmas only a few weeks away, we thought we’d get festive with our top picks for Christmas/Science movies (yes, such things do exist).
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Home Alone
Macaulay Culkin plays eight-year-old Kevin Mcallister who gets left – you guessed it – home alone during Christmas vacation. It sounds like any kid’s dream, but he soon finds himself up against two burglars who are set on robbing his family home.
Now, some of you might ask “how is Home Alone considered a science movie?”.
The answer to that question lies in the pure engineering genius of Kevin’s booby traps. Take, for example, the heating up of the doorknob. By using an electric water heater on the doorknob inside the house, the doorknob on the outside of the house heats up.
Then there’s also the whole blowtorch to the head invention. By rigging a piece of string to the blowtorch, then attaching said blowtorch to the top of a door and to the handle, you’ve got the perfect engineered weapon. Once the door opens, pulling the string, the blowtorch will shoot fire at the entranceway.
The engineering smarts of Kevin and the fact that this movie is a Christmas go to, earns it the top spot on our Christmas Science movie list.
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The Star Wars Holiday Special
I mean, would it be a Christmas-Science movie list without a mention of the Star Wars Holiday Special?
This special is notorious for the audience’s less than impressive response. It’s never been rebroadcast, or officially released. However, The Star Wars Holiday Special is known as somewhat of a cultural legend because of its “underground” quality.
The television special is set between the events of the original film and The Empire Strikes Back. It stars the main cast from the original film, and we also get to meet Chewbacca’s family including his father, his wife and his son.
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Gremlins
Gremlins is indisputably one of the best Christmas films out there. It takes the idea of animal cognition to an extreme, but we’ll let it slide for this Christmas movie list.
We meet Randall Peltzer, a struggling inventor, looking for the perfect Christmas present for his son. What he finds is a creature called a mogwai. The mogwai, however, comes with a set of rules: do not expose it to bright lights or sunlight, don’t get it wet, and most importantly, never, ever, feed it after midnight.
Like any good film, things don’t go according to plan, with mayhem ensuing. From the attack of the town Santa to attempted murder – this one isn’t your stereotypical feel-good Christmas movie.
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Prometheus
Directed by Ridley Scott, Prometheus follows the crew of the spaceship of the same name, as they follow a star map. Seeking the origins of humanity, the crew arrives in a distant world and discovers a threat that could wipe out the entire human species.
Now, this might not seem super-Christmassy, but the movie takes place during Christmastime. The cherry on top that solidifies Prometheus in our list the scene where Idris Elba’s character delivers a, slightly tipsy, monologue around a Christmas tree.
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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
We have saved the best to last.
This 1964 comedy, directed by Nicholas Webster, has frequent appearances on the worst films ever made lists. But we argue that’s what makes it so great.
The film’s plotline goes like this: Martians, upset that their children have become obsessed with Earth TV shows which praise Santa Claus, decided to kidnap the man himself. The Martians take Santa, and two human children, back to Mars, determined to end his influence over their children.
We don’t want to give away the end of it, so you’ll just have to watch and find out what happens next.
Santa Claus and Martians in one film? There was no way we could overlook this one.
Credit: Cute little furry thingy hides in a toolbox in a scene from the film ‘Gremlins’, 1984. Credit: Warner Brothers/Getty Images.