Tom Hanks’ two favourite science fiction movies: “The classic that it is, for all time”
Very few major stars have managed to go the entirety of their careers without avoiding sci-fi, even if Tom Hanks has only become semi-familiar with the vast reaches of outer space, futuristic technology, ravaged dystopias, and distant worlds having appeared in an eclectic range of cosmic stories over the years.
That said, it took him a long time to cross it off his to-do list. For the first 40 years of his professional life, the closest the two-time Academy Award winner came to dabbling in cinematic sci-fi came in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, which only barely qualifies because the biographical drama features his character spending the majority of their screentime beyond the stars.
The first time Hanks dived headlong into hard sci-fi, the end result was polarising. The Wachowksis and Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas may have split opinion down the middle, but the star regards it as one of the greatest films he’s ever been lucky enough to take part in. It was ambitious, unwieldy, frequently nonsensical and constantly eye-popping, which is exactly why he’s not alone in holding it so dearly.
Techno thriller The Circle was supposed to be sci-fi, but if anything, it’s becoming more prescient by the day after Hanks took on a rare villainous role as an unscrupulous tech CEO who uses the power of social media to manipulate events to their advantage. Post-apocalyptic survival drama Finch was definitely a science fiction tale, though, with the leading man venturing out through the wastelands to seek safety with a dog and robot in tow.
That’s about the extent of Hanks’ involvement in sci-fi, which helps explain why the genre tends to be notably absent whenever ‘America’s Dad’ casts his eye over his favourite features. One unexpected inclusion was Rian Johnson’s Looper, with the time-travelling action thriller being named as a film he couldn’t stop thinking about.
As somebody who also has a vested interest in space exploration and happens to be a person who evolved into an avid cinephile growing up in the 1960s, it’s decidedly less surprising to discover Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey as being another of Hanks’ most cherished sci-fi flicks.
Describing it to Collider as “a movie that played in theatres for four and a half years” without getting the recognition he believed it truly deserved, that sentiment ultimately shifted in favour of its current and eternal status, which Hanks summed up as “the classic that it is, for all time.” A popular opinion, but also a completely accurate one.
Looper and 2001 would make for an interesting double bill considering they have very little in common other than the genre they occupy, but if Hanks was tied to a chair and forced to watch a pair of sci-fi movies back to back – and Cloud Atlas was removed from the equation – then they’d command his undivided attention.
