When you think of Hollywood movies, you may not immediately think of an engineer. But, some of film’s biggest blockbusters feature intrepid engineers at the helm of our cinematic adventures. In fact, engineering characters have played major roles in scripts throughout the ages and perhaps more so now than ever. Here are five movies that feature engineering characters.
These are just a few movies that feature engineering characters in the lead, but there are many more playing supportive characters throughout some of Hollywood’s highest grossing hits.
The Original Cheaper by The Dozen. Not the Steve Martin versions, The Clifton Webb version.
Purdue Industrial Engineers
No Highway in the Sky, a British film made in 1950 about a fictional airliner that suffers in-flight breakup due to metal fatigue, bears an uncanny resemblance to the fatigue / overstress structural failures and in-flight breakups of the de Havilland DH.106 Comet that entered service for BOAC in 1952. In the film, the engineer Theodore Honey certainly held public safety paramount when he retracted the landing gear of the airliner he believed had a fatal design flaw while the plane was at the terminal.
What a fun article. Another movie to add to the list is Return To Me released in 2000 starring David Duchovny and Minnie Driver. Duchovny is a builder/designer. They don’t say he is a structural engineer, but it is implied. Arlington Road (1999) with Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins can be added to the list. Robbins character is an engineer, too! I might be pushing the envelope, but Morgan Freeman’s character in Batman Begins (2005) is also an engineer and plays a critical role in batman becoming Batman.
What about October Sky starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, and Laura Dern? It’s a true story of kid from Appalachia in the 1950s who wanted to design rockets when rocket science was still being developed. He learns about the principles of flight and experiments with rockets. He goes on to become a NASA engineer,
All interesting movies to be sure. One issue with The Imitation Game is that it glossed over the contribution of Polish code breakers. Several years before the war an Enigma type machine ordered by a German business firm was accidently sent to a Polish address. The Poles were able to take the machine apart and then made a duplicate, reassembled the original machine and sent it on the original recipient. They now had a working copy of the machine and were the first to realize that deciphering the codes would take mathematics and not just linguistics. When hostilities broke out in 1939 they sent all the information they had to the British, which gave Turing and his team a good head start to being able to analyze and read enemy messages.
All the Star Trek movies. “Beam me up _____!”
How does this list omit Chinatown, the 1973 movie with Jack Nicholson about bringing water to LA in the 20th century? One of the principal characters in the movie is Hollis Mulray, chief engineer of LA Dept of Water and Power, who is based on William Mulholland, the real life equivalent after whom the famous Mulholland Drive in LA is named. Terrific film, only murder mystery I know that is based on a true story about the public works engineering that transformed LA forever.
Richard Pryor plays a transportation engineer in the 1988 comedy, “Moving.”