The most memorable movies about space disasters

Like most Michael Bay films, Armageddon is gloriously absurd. Oil drillers are trained to go into space so they can drill into an asteroid to place a bomb to blow it up, thus saving the planet. This movie also gave us “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” but Aerosmith. People were fans, as it was the highest-grossing film of 1998.

You’re not mistaken. There were two outer space disaster movies released the same year. In fact, both Deep Impact and Armageddon are about a space object threatening to hit Earth. However, Deep Impact is very different because it’s a comet, not an asteroid. Deep Impact was less successful than Armageddon, forever left to play second banana.

Let’s get a little more realistic. Apollo 13 actually happened. Ron Howard’s movie is about a real-life space disaster that threatened the life of the astronauts on board. Everybody was safe, which makes for an intense but tolerable movie.

Home Alone: Lost in New York , but with an astronaut. And no Sticky Bandits. Matt Damon plays an astronaut left behind on Mars who is forced to fend for himself while awaiting a rescue mission. There’s a lot of detail in Ridley Scott’s film, based on a hit book. Memorably, The Martian won Best Picture – Musical or Comedy from the Golden Globes, even though calling it a comedy is a massive stretch.

Oh man, if you saw this one in theaters, you were likely gripping your armrest. Alfonso Cuaron did a fantastic job creating a visceral disaster movie that basically only had one character in it. That’s Dr. Ryan Stone, played by Sandra Bullock in a great performance. Never has a movie felt more like you are in a space disaster yourself.

While the execution isn’t great, the premise of Apollo 18 is quite good. In reality, the Apollo 18 mission was canceled. This movie presupposes that it did happen but was suppressed because something went very wrong. As you may have surmised, this is a found-footage horror movie.

We don’t want to spoil Annihilation, but also, we kind of can’t. Honestly, we aren’t sure what it’s about. Oh, we’ve seen it. And yet, we still could not really articulate what we saw. All we know is a meteorite hit the United States and created "The Shimmer.” Beyond that, we are at a loss for words.

Well, how could we not include a movie simply called Meteor? It’s not a good movie, but man, it has a great cast. This is one of those all-star disaster films like The Towering Inferno , but only with a meteor the threat. We’re talking about Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Martin Landau, Henry Fonda, and more.

What if a rogue planet was about to crash into Earth, ending all life, and you didn’t care? That’s basically the essence of Lars von Trier’s film. This is the man who made Antichrist and Nymphomaniac . He’s not exactly a cheery filmmaker. Kirsten Dunst does a good job in the film, but this is not for everybody.

The world is going to end in three weeks when an asteroid strikes Earth. There is no saving the day here. And yet, this is a comedy-drama. Steve Carell and Keira Knightley star as two people facing this fate, who run across each other and navigate a world that has, understandably, fallen into chaos and disrepair.

This is one of those classic B-movie sci-fi programmers from back in the day. A star is going to destroy Earth, so humanity starts building space arks to get people off the planet to the star’s planet Zyra. When Worlds Collide got the blessing of being in the opening song from Rocky Horror Picture Show.

As we said, intelligent beings coming to Earth to attack humans don’t count, but The Blob does. The blob doesn’t think. It just grows. And grows. And consumes. It comes to Earth in a meteorite, and things get worse from there. Notably, The Blob is the feature film debut of Steve McQueen.

Yes, this family film series has a movie about an outer space disaster. Weirdly, it has nothing to do with the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. In the film, Scrat the squirrel is blasted off into space in an abandoned spaceship and accidentally directs an asteroid toward Earth. As one does.

Before Jurassic Park and Congo, a Michael Chrichton book gave us The Andromeda Strain. In fact, it’s the first novel he published under his name and his first successful novel. It tells the story of a deadly organism discovered on Earth. To make matters worse, it turns out to be extraterrestrial in origin.

This was a borderline choice, but not because of quality. Alien is one of the best horror movies and one of the best space movies. However, we had to decide whether or not the Xenomorph was a bit too advanced for our tastes. Alien feels much more elemental than future films in the series. It feels like a movie about the harshness of space wreaking havoc on this unassuming crew. As such, it made our cut.

Sometimes space concerns are manmade. Take, for example, Space Cowboys . The concern here is an old Soviet satellite is going to crash into Earth. A few “vintage” astronauts are sent into space to repair it. We’re talking Clint Eastwood (who also directed), Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland. Basically, it’s Baby Boomer  Armageddon.

In the year 2057, the Sun is dying. That’s not good for Earth. A spaceship is sent with a bomb to try and reignite the Sun and save life. Danny Boyle directs an ensemble cast. The movie is a little more atmospheric, drawing influence more from  2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris than action films.

A few months after Apollo 11, we got a movie with a grim idea of what could happen to astronauts in space. Three astronauts are, well, marooned in space. One of them is played by Gene Hackman, and the movie won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. On the other hand, it also ended up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Eventually, humans will go on a mission to Mars. Hopefully, it goes better than the film about that very topic. Mission to Mars is a Brian De Palma film about the first manned mission to the Red Planet, but it doesn’t go all that well. It’s not a total disaster, but plenty of disaster is in the mix.

Once the face of absurdist comedy alongside Will Ferrell, Adam McKay has gotten into doing dark comedies with political themes. Don’t Look Up is no different. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play two astronomers that discover a comet is on its way to destroy Earth. Bleak hilarity ensues, with some political commentary thrown in for good measure.