We caught up with IWC ambassador Dr Brian Cox at this year’s Watches & Wonders, where he shared his thoughts on which science-fiction film truly impressed him with its accuracy to scientific principles. It didn’t come as much of a surprise when he mentioned a 2007 flick starring Cillian Murphy was worth watching, considering he was brought on as a consultant for the film.
2023 concluded with Oppenheimer, a 3-hour biopic centred around the Manhattan Project and the troubled American theoretical physicist responsible for the birth of atomic warfare, as the third-highest-grossing movie of the year.v
It flipped the script on the tired old narrative that films had become too long, or that the sci-fi genre, thanks, in part, to the everpresent superhero fatigue, had become too farfetched and unbelievable for modern audiences to appreciate.
So when we had the opportunity to speak with IWC ambassador (and world-renowned physicist) Dr Brian Cox at this year’s Watches & Wonders, we had to ask him about his preference for sci-fi feature films and his pick for most accurate.
Unsurprisingly, two of Christopher Nolan’s celebrated releases made Cox’s list… but there was one lesser-known Cillian Murphy-led feature that stood out.
“Interstellar is brilliant because it was essentially written by a physicist – Kip Thorne, Nobel Prize-winning physicist. So Interstellar is a fantastic thing,” Dr Brian Cox told DMARGE.
“I worked on a film called Sunshine years ago, which is a lesser-known film; Danny Boyle directed it. Cillian Murphy is in it, who of course just won the Oscar for Oppenheimer – Oppenheimer by the way, is a brilliant film – so Sunshine is worth watching, partly because I worked on it, and partly because Cillian always says that he did an impression of me in it.”
Released in 2007, Sunshine is a sci-fi thriller directed by famed English filmmaker Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and boasts an all-star cast of some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh and Australia’s Rose Byrne.
The film follows the crew of the Icarus II, faced with a dangerous mission to reignite Earth’s dying sun; a last-ditch effort to save humanity and stop the planet from plunging into the next Ice Age…
OK, maybe it’s a bit farfetched, but Dr Brian Cox revealed that he visited the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) alongside Cillin Murphy to gain a better understanding of astrophysics to prepare for the film… talk about going above and beyond.
