Why don't you get smart with me

May 24, 2024 1:22 PM

The Imitation Game, Twister, Apollo 13 - these favorite movies of mine all have in common teams of smart people working together to solve problems. While this is not the only type of movie I like, I'd like recommendations for more of this kind. I realize that I may have seen some that you'll recommend but don't worry about how old the movie is, I might watch it again anyway.
posted by TimHare to Media & Arts (44 answers total)

The Martian, although I imagine you've already seen that.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:23 PM on May 24

WarGames
posted by Melismata at 1:23 PM on May 24

Moneyball feels like it’d fit this vibe.
posted by BlahLaLa at 1:25 PM on May 24

Sneakers
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:25 PM on May 24

Hidden Figures
posted by HearHere at 1:26 PM on May 24

Do you consider heist movies to be in scope? They can very much be about putting together a team of very smart and skilled people to solve a very difficult problem.
posted by automatronic at 1:27 PM on May 24

Competency Porn! That's what I call it. I love these movies too.

I put Aliens II in this category - Ripley throughout shows incredible competency with people, with nuturing, with strategizing, with learning new weapons, and in pulling off my second-alltime-favorite fistfight on film.
posted by Silvery Fish at 1:50 PM on May 24

Would The Great Escape work? That’s POWs planning an escape from a German camp.
posted by FencingGal at 1:53 PM on May 24

It's not a movie, but the West Wing is really really good competence porn.
posted by kbanas at 1:59 PM on May 24

The 1969 movie Marooned was the Apollo 13 of its time. I haven’t seen it in 50 years, but reading the Wikipedia plot summary, I think it would fit.
posted by FencingGal at 2:06 PM on May 24

Argo
Contagion
posted by capricorn at 2:14 PM on May 24

Real Genius
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:24 PM on May 24

Arrival

Ocean's 11-13

A Few Good Men
posted by biffa at 2:28 PM on May 24

Manhunter. The FBI team comes across as very competent and determined.
posted by SPrintF at 2:30 PM on May 24

Not exactly the same, but I’d put The Big Short in this category.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 2:39 PM on May 24

The African Queen
Castaway
Charade
Tremors franchise -- they do keep getting smarter!
posted by TrishaU at 2:44 PM on May 24

The Flight of the Phoenix.
posted by hortense at 2:47 PM on May 24

The Andromeda Strain is a superlative example of this. That's all it is: brilliant scientists working together.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:50 PM on May 24

If you're OK with TV as well as movies, I'd recommend Scorpion, which is a four-season broadcast show with multiple smart people working in a team. It's weekly competence porn with a liberal dash of interpersonal drama typical of a weekly CBS kind of show. There's a healthy dose of gentle humor, but very low-cringe factor, and the solutions they come up with are never obvious.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 3:33 PM on May 24

The Sting, perhaps.
posted by Alensin at 3:47 PM on May 24

Hackers, maybe
posted by sigmagalator at 3:51 PM on May 24

The Dish (2000)
posted by nickggully at 4:06 PM on May 24

The old Mission Impossible series from 1966 to 1973 was this. You can watch them on Apple TV (but not for free).
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:06 PM on May 24

Inception
posted by Archipelago at 4:43 PM on May 24

October Sky
posted by credulous at 5:17 PM on May 24

Seconding The Dish!!
posted by les34 at 5:35 PM on May 24

Leverage and Leverage: Redemption - it is one of the few shows where the revival is just as enjoyable as the original series.
posted by Constance Mirabella at 8:49 PM on May 24

Thank you for all of the suggestions !
posted by TimHare at 9:00 PM on May 24

Not a movie, but the original Mission: Impossible TV series still holds up and scratches the competency itch for me - - the first season is available to stream free on PlutoTV.

(Note: I do not include the movie franchise in my recommendation because it mostly did away with the tried and true five-step formula (receive mission / assemble team / plan mission / execute mission / team extraction) and with it the best of the focused competency.)
posted by fairmettle at 9:41 PM on May 24

Departure (TV series) has some of this dynamic: following some passenger aircraft/train/ferry disaster, Kendra & team are sent in to investigate and figure out what happened.

The Bureau / Le Bureau des Légendes (TV_series), a series about french intelligence services, has some of this dynamic as well, with agents in the field working with their handler & being supported by technicians back at HQ. Then again, given this is espionage, there's also a fair dose of smart people not working together.
posted by are-coral-made at 2:39 AM on May 25

If you like the Martian, and are willing to go to sound rather than vision, the Audiobook of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary is great.
posted by lalochezia at 4:40 AM on May 25

Silence of the Lambs
Se7en
Inside Man
All the President's Men
Zodiac
Bridge of Spies
The Paper
Sicario
The Hurt Locker
Zero Dark Thirty
posted by emelenjr at 9:53 AM on May 25

Foolproof
posted by gudrun at 5:47 PM on May 25

Along with some of the above spy shows, I'll add The Sandbaggers, the late 70s/early 80s show about the men and women of the British SIS, known to most of the public as MI-6. It's not really an action show; they didn't have the budget, so it's mostly a backroom drama of all aspects of the job, and then they splurge on some cool location stuff. But above all, it's about people with the job of amoral calculus because their enemy is amoral. It's got some surprising moments, for sure, but it's really really good drama by smart people.
posted by Sunburnt at 2:47 PM on May 26

Interstellar
posted by bitterkitten at 7:28 PM on May 26

[[btw, this post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!]]
posted by taz at 2:33 AM on May 27

Heat (1995)
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 8:57 AM on May 27

Again veering toward TV, but The Bletchley Circle scratches this itch.
posted by Tesseractive at 1:03 PM on May 27

Spotlight and The Post - two recent movies about newspapers.

The Killing Fields has a sequence of trying to forge a passport that exemplifies this. Brilliant film; not lite viewing.

Greyhound (2020) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, two about naval warfare against clever enemies might do.

In a way, time loop movies can be this. Groundhog Day is not much for teamwork for a while, but Edge of Tomorrow and Palm Springs get to teamwork relatively early in their runtimes.
posted by artlung at 6:47 PM on May 27

This is a specific theme that runs through most, if not all, of Christopher McQuarrie's movies.

The characters aren't often good people but they are highly competent. Speaking of which, his films often feature Tom Cruise who takes training and commitment to performing stunts extremely seriously and the results tend to show.

Usual Suspects, The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher, Edge of Tomorrow, Valkyrie, Top Gun:Maverick and the latest Mission Impossible movies all involve competence as a key character trait. Some more ensemble than others.

In Edge of Tomorrow, it's actually the main arc of the film: incompetent coward learns competence and courage thanks to tutelage from person who is already both those things.

And if we're allowed TV shows, I'd add The Expanse and Slow Horses as shows that both deal explicitly with (in)competence.

(Edit addition: a lot of David Mamet films fit the same style and have had mentions above. Spartan being a prime example of military competence porn...)
posted by slimepuppy at 1:54 AM on May 28

This is a major reason why I love the movie Searching (2018) so much. (Read as little about it as possible before watching as there are some major twists that you don't want spoiling.) It's a story about computers, the internet, social media, and for once the protagonist (or screenwriter) isn't a technophobic idiot, but an intelligent person who does all the sensible things they should do. It's not one of those movies where you are shouting at the screen for not doing the obvious thing.
posted by snarfois at 6:57 AM on May 28

Under heist movies, I think Logan Lucky (2017) might qualify.
posted by snarfois at 7:02 AM on May 28

Another TV show that might fill the bill is The Repair Shop.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:25 AM on June 4

A movie I’ve always consciously filed under “competency porn” is Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three. Parts of it have not necessarily aged well, but it is at heart about an extremely competent person, played by Jimmy Cagney, taking command of a complex, difficult, and ever-changing situation.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 5:14 AM on June 6