8 Hollywood films that will launch you into space without leaving your couch

Why should billionaire Richard Branson have all the fun shooting into outer space aboard the Virgin Galactic? Here are eight films that will catapult you into the final frontier, complete with action, drama and thrills.

The Martian: The Matt Damon film follows a lone astronaut, left behind on Mars, who must find a way to survive and return to Earth. Directed by Ridley Scott, the mastermind behind ‘Alien’, ‘The Martian’ is based on a novel by Andy Weir. If you haven’t seen it as yet, you don’t know what you are missing.

Apollo 13: This 1995 classic is based on a true story about three men who are trapped in space and are running out of oxygen. Directed by Ron Howard, the dramatic science fiction thriller is all the more gripping knowing the story actually played out during NASA’s mission to the Moon in 1970. Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton play the three astronauts who may or may not have a happy ending. Watch it to find out if history isn’t your forte.

Doom: Having recently dropped on Netflix, this 2005 classic follows a Dwayne Johnson who actually had hair at the time. Based on the famous video game, the film follows a group of Marines sent on a rescue mission to Mars, where they come up against genetically engineered creatures. Aside from The Rock, the all-star cast includes Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike and Razaak Adoti.

Gravity: It would definitely not be a film Richard Branson would have watched before heading into space, but it definitely is a modern-day classic led by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. The immensely talented Alfonso Cuaron directs this space thriller where the two astronauts find themselves stranded in space after the mid-orbit destruction of their Space Shuttle.

Interstellar: Released a year after ‘Gravity’, Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending space saga was a star-studded vehicle with Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine starring. The story follows a group of astronauts, who travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity.

Total Recall: Going back in time, this 1990 classic even won a Special Achievement Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a construction worker embroiled in espionage on Mars and unable to tell whether his experiences are real or memory implants. The film was later remade in 2012 starring Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale, which wasn’t a patch on the original.

2001: A Space Odyssey: The 1960s saw the vision of one the greatest sci-fi films with Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968). Celebrated filmmaker Steven Spielberg, once called 2001 ‘the big bang of science-fiction’, and he wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Kubrick’s directorial was well ahead of its time, with ground-breaking graphics and special effects that laid the foundation for big budget Hollywood to swoop in and fine tune its way towards the tentpoles we see today. This film follows a voyage to Jupiter with a humanlike sentient computer named Hal, after a team of scientists discover a mysterious black structure in space that is affecting the evolution of the humans.

Star Wars: It would be 11 years since ‘Star Trek’s’ voyages on TV in 1966 before a man named George Lucas would use his vision to launch an adventure into space with the ‘Star Wars’ film franchise. ‘Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope’ was Lucas’ space-opera into a world that few had dreamed of. The juggernaut still stands today, after countless films, anthologies, animated adventures and TV shows that continue to draw in generations of fans.