Brad Pitt returns to the movies this week with Ad Astra, a sci-fi tale of a lone astronaut venturing out beyond the outer edge of our solar system in order to find his lost father, who was working on an experiment that may doom the universe. If that premise seems familiar, it’s because “lone astronaut” has become somewhat of a cultural trope in science fiction. Making a man (or woman) contend with the infinite expanse of space is a great way to create drama and create buzz for acting awards, and numerous movies and other media have given us their spin on it.
Here are 11 of our favorite spacemen — and women — drifting all alone.
Sam Bell (Moon)
In Duncan Jones’ 2009 film Moon, Sam Bell is the sole employee at Sarang Station, mining helium-3 from the rich soil of Earth’s satellite. Sam is there for a three year contract, after which he can retire on Earth with his wife. Unfortunately, communications glitches have cut off direct contact, leaving him deeply isolated and confused. Things get even worse when he crashes his moon rover and wakes up to discover an exact duplicate of himself. Sam isn’t as alone as he thinks up there — he’s actually a tank-grown clone with implanted memories that gets decommissioned after his term is up, not sent back to Earth. It’s a deep and weird twist on the concept that delivers.
Dr. Hans Reinhardt (The Black Hole)
Disney’s 1979 The Black Hole is a major touchstone for geeks of a certain age, a weirdly creepy story of a spaceship crew that encounters a long-lost vessel with just one survivor: Dr. Hans Reinhardt, played by the inimitable Max Schell. As captain of the Cygnus, Reinhardt stayed with his ship after it was damaged in an asteroid field, and he’s spent two decades accompanied only by robots. The isolation warped his brain, and now he’s planning to pilot his craft right into the titular black hole to see what happens. The big twist is that Reinhardt’s robot crew aren’t robots at all, but lobotomized humans stripped of their free will to serve the mad pilot. There has been talk of a remake for decades, but we’ll see if it ever happens.
Dave Lister (Red Dwarf)
When an on-board radiation leak results in the death of the entire crew of the mining vessel Red Dwarf, the sole survivor is slacker Dave Lister who happened to be in suspended animation. The ship’s computer keeps him there for three million years, and when he awakens he finds himself the only human on board. Lister doesn’t stay lonely for long, though — unfortunately for him, as he’s joined by a holographic replica of the priggish Arnold Rimmer and the evolutionary descendant of his cat. Still, he’s the only actual person on board, so he deserves a spot on here.
Lee Miller (Love)
2011’s Love follows a one-man mission by astronaut Lee Miller to travel to the International Space Station in the year 2039 to determine if the abandoned platform is still safe to use. Unfortunately, while he’s up there chaos breaks out on Earth and he loses contact with his ground crew. He winds up stranded on the station for six long years, clinging to life while losing what remains of his sanity and becoming obsessed with the journal of a Civil War soldier he finds there. Throw in a mysterious cube-shaped alien and you have a real mindbender of an isolation experiment.
Freeman Lowell (Silent Running)
The 1970s saw a rise in ecological and environmental themes in science fiction, and 1972’s Silent Running is a prime example. Freeman Lowell is the botanist on a four-person crew taking the Valley Forge, which contains geodesic domes containing samples of Earth’s dying plant life, to orbit outside of Saturn. When he’s ordered to jettison the domes, he rebels, kills his crewmates and hijacks the ship to flee with his three robot companions. Drifting in space, Lowell has to make hard choices as he vainly struggles to keep the last remnants of Earth’s biodiversity intact, and the ending of this one is an all-time downer.
Mark Watney (The Martian)
Even if you land on a planet, the struggle isn’t over. 2015’s smash hit The Martian starred Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney, who gets left behind during a massive dust storm on the red planet. Forced to survive on his own for the four years it will take for Earth to send another mission, he battles the inhospitable planetary surface to produce enough oxygen, water and food to survive. With nobody to talk to but his diary, he surprisingly manages to keep his brains from scrambling long enough to find a way to communicate with Earth and eventually get rescued. Sorry for the spoiler, but you really should have seen this flick by now.
William Stanaforth (Approaching the Unknown)
The protagonist of Mark Elijah Rosenberg’s directorial debut Approaching the Unknown has a difficult mission: he’s the only human being aboard a NASA mission to Mars to deposit water generation machines on the planet’s surface. Unfortunately, on the way there his system malfunctions and he becomes entangled in a mysterious nebula that halts his progress and sets him out on a psychedelic journey through reality. While the movie isn’t the most compelling, Mark Strong does a solid job as Stanaforth and it delivers some interesting visuals.
Ryan Stone (Gravity)
When her first space mission is interrupted by a cloud of debris tearing through the space shuttle Explorer, Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity is cast adrift outside of Earth’s atmosphere for an incredibly tense hour and change of nail-biting survival courtesy of director Alfonso Cuaron. Although George Clooney’s astronaut character Matt Kowalski is around in the first half, he quickly leaves the picture, forcing Stone to fend for herself as she improvises a way to make landfall safely. This one really seizes onto the sheer panic of being alone and virtually helpless in an atmosphere completely inhospitable for human life, with some vertiginous zero-gravity camera work thrown in for good measure.
Major Tom
One of the most iconic fictional astronauts ever, David Bowie introduced the stranded Major Tom in his 1969 hit “Space Oddity.” In that song, Tom is launched on a solo mission beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, but something goes wrong and he loses communication with Mission Control. Floating helplessly through the void, Bowie would follow up with the character several times — first in 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes,” then finally in the video for 2015’s “Blackstar,” in which his final fate is revealed as a mysterious skull found by an alien civilization. I suppose that’s the best you could hope for.
Dave Bowman (Space Odyssey Series)
One of the most famous lonely astronauts in cinema history, Dr. Dave Bowman starts off with a human companion in co-pilot Frank Poole, but when their onboard HAL-9000 computer blows a circuit and becomes homicidal it isn’t long before Dave is all alone on the Discovery One and fighting for his survival. After Dave gets to the processor core and deactivates HAL, he learns the true reason for his mission: to investigate a mysterious radio signal sent from the monolith on the Moon to Jupiter. When he arrives, he’s taken on a psychedelic journey to the next level of human consciousness with nobody to keep him company. Bummer, man.
Jim Preston (Passengers)
We’re not sure how we’d handle the psychic strain of being all alone in outer space for God knows how long. Jim Preston, played by Chris Pratt in Passengers, doesn’t handle it well. Sure, he’s got 5,000 other colonists on the Homestead with him, but they’re all in suspended animation after a stray asteroid wakes him up 90 years early. He manages to hold out for a year, growing a seriously dope beard in the process, but is eventually tempted to revive a companion to hang with during the long trip. Morally, that’s not cool and we were pretty disappointed in how badly the film dealt with his decision, but we also can’t honestly say we’d have been able to hold out either.
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