Good sci-fi movies about the afterlife

[Azurite]

Good sci-fi movies about the afterlife I've watched are

1. Flatliners
2. Fields of Dreams..

there should be dozens more.. can you recall some?

In light of the passing of the esteemed physicist Stephen Hawking.. I want to take the time to watch some of these movies.

What is your belief about what happens after death?

For me. I believe most dead become schizophrenic, they lost their brain and what remains are incoherent. However for those very mentally intelligent and emotionally advanced people (elevated in thought, pure in heart). I believe they have more coherence in whatever survives that can make them think more. I have friends who talk to dead people and these are their experiences.

Read this CNN article too about few of the thousands of accounts of these happening worldwide...

https://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/23/living/crisis-apparitions/index.html

Have you seen the movie Interstellar? It's about transferring information from beyond spacetime.. i'll watch this again tomorrow as Hawking if he survives dead would have access now to more knowledge on the afterlife and if he can transfer some knowledge to us. He can give us breakthrough scientific information (for example, the black hole information paradox). There are numerous channelers all right but most are channeling mischievous dark matter denizens.. how to specifically contact Hawkins would be the challenge.

I'd appreciate any movies along the line of what I've described above.

 

[jedishrfu]

Here are some that I recall:

Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks (ie realname is Albert Einstein)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defending_Your_Life

Stairway to Heaven aka A Matter of Life and Death with David Niven

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Life_and_Death_(film)

What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come_(film)

Little Buddha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Buddha

Heaven Can Wait

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Can_Wait_(1943_film)

Ghost with Patrick Swayze

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(1990_film)

K-PAX with Kevin Spacey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-PAX_(film)

 

[jedishrfu]

With respect to your personal views on life after death, its something I want to believe is true but I'm caught in a web of reality that science has no explanation for it. We have anecdotal information from the stories that people tell but some facts are missing from the accounts making it impossible to explain what was seen scientifically. Sometime folks can confuse the time order of events. Sometimes folks have false memories or deja-vu memories.

From a psychological point of view, people need this assurance that there is life after death and that they will see their loved ones. The reasoning seems to be that the alternative of extinction after death is too terrible to consider. I guess folks are afraid that they'll be living in some sort of nether world with no one to talk to.

One thing that bothers me is that while this notion is used to comfort those who've lost a loved one, jurors might use this same notion to rationalize why some murder while terrible wasn't so bad since the victim went to a better place. I think this is why despite clear evidence to a crime, some jurors will minimize a murder, to give the defendant some reduced charge or sentence because dead people aren't really dead because they're in heaven. I have witnessed this effect from experience.

The closest I can come to believing any reincarnation theory, is from the K-PAX movie where Prot explains that things repeat after the big bang and so you'd better do things right this time around.

Prot: I want to tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.

While this quote is from a movie and has no clear way to be proven scientifically, it gives me comfort even though I doubt that the universe following a big bang will expand in exactly the same way meaning you will be created again and follow the same life trajectory.

 

[rkolter]

Anesthesia gives the best example of what I believe death is really like - you can be put under for surgery at noon, and suddenly be conscious later that evening and not realize time has passed. Eventually you realize time did pass - it is sunset, family are glad to see you are 'awake', you have a fresh surgical scar. And yet, there was no feeling of time passing. Death is often poetically compared to sleep, but it is not sleep. You do not drift away. The network of activity that we feel as our own presence in our own bodies, stops working when your body dies and shortly thereafter the components that allowed it to work at all break down. If an afterlife does exist, it does not exist to continue anything that could meaningfully be considered 'you' after your death.

If you want to have an afterlife, you have to live. The one thing that will continue after you are gone is the wake of lasting changes you've made in other peoples' lives.

 

[LLD1231]

I have a strong interest in NDE’s (near-death experiences) and none has been more compelling than the story of neurosurgeon, Eban Alexander III. He points out in his book, Proof of Heaven, that the part of his brain that allows for hallucinations was non-functioning during his experience. His NDE was so powerful that it completely changed the trajectory of his life. A must-read for anyone exploring this topic. I personally liked the story because Eban is highly intelligent with a logical mind.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Not really Sci-Fi, more fantasy, but I always liked Robin Willaim's What Dreams May Come
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120889/

 

[gibberingmouther]

I believe in an afterlife but I can't go into details because it is against the rules here. I believe I will make it over to the "other side" whole, not an incomplete shadow of myself. This belief does provide me a lot of comfort, I will say. My belief in an afterlife is related to my belief in a higher power who is basically in charge of everything. I hope I didn't violate any rules by saying this. If anyone wants to know more they can message me.

 

[livelar]

One film I saw recently that you might want to check out is "the discovery" on netflix. In short, science discovers that "we go" somewhere (but not where, exactly, at the beginning of the story) when we die, and can prove it. The story is much about the implication of this discovery on people and society. Worth a watch.

 

[jedishrfu]

There’s an Albert brooks movie staring Brooks and Meryl Streep called Defending Your Life about a guy must proof he’s much braver than what’s shown from his life to move forward.

There’s a couple of classic movies one with a young David Niven called Stairway to Heaven where he was slated to die in a returning bomber crash but the angel lost him in the fog and so he lived. Heaven tries to sort out the mistake and so a trial is setup. What I liked about this movie is that he tells his girlfriend what he believes will happen and she explains it to a neurosurgeon who believes he had a traumatic brain injury and is suffering from delusions. The trial and his surgery happen at the same time. A really great ending too.

 

[jedishrfu]

One thing about NDEs is that they may well be the brain attempting to make sense of the body shutting down and the loss of oxygen flow to the brain.

Some NDE reports talk about a kind of tunnel vision which is consistent with this loss of oxygen and the awareness that people sense things around them when they have clinically died.

https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/after-death-youre-aware-that-youve-died-scientists-claim

 

[profbuxton]

Why is it that people who believe in life after death always talk about seeing their loved ones? What about all those people who you may never have liked? They may be there also , so you would have to put up with them for eternity.Would you want to have to be there with all the people you have known or heard of who have gone before? They might turn out to be totally obnoxious anyway. And there would be lawyers!

 

[Tiran]

Not many of the films listed here are SF.

Brainstorm is, though.

 

[Dr John Smith]

I really liked the movie Stigmata. I liked the Exorcist, the Last Exoricist and all that sort of stuff. In fact I know you've asked for sci-fi movies, but in reality it's often horror / supernatural movies which address the afterlife best. If you get 'evidence' of ghosts or spirits, then effectively you have evidence of an afterlife do you not? A compelling argument I read else goes thus:-

Sherlock Holmes said 'when you have eliminated the impossible, what ever is left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth'. Whilst Holmes was the ultimate atheist / rationalist, his creator, the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not* - he was in fact obsessed with spiritualism, and many have therefore erroneously claimed that he was overly credulous. However, one could just as easily argue that by searching for evidence of the supernatural (for example through contact with spirits) he was actually utilizing 'Holmes-Theory' by seeking to 'prove' the existence of the spirit world and therefore 'disprove' atheism, a very comforting conclusion for one who had known so much bereavement.

*Conan Doyle was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research. Other members were future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, philosopher William James, naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, scientists Williams Crookes and Oliver Lodge.

Conan Doyle personally conducted a number of supernatural investigations. In 1893 he spent several nights in seance at the Henley Arms Public House in Watford, Northamptonshire, attempting to communicate with the resident ghost known as 'Patches'. The outcome of this investigation is unknown.

However, in 1894 Colonel Elmore asked the Society for Psychical Research to investigate mysterious sounds emanating from his home in Dorset. At night Elmore, his wife and adult daughter could hear chains being dragged across a wooden floor and moaning that sounded like a soul in torment. The family dog refused to enter certain parts of the home and most of Elmore's staff had left. Conan Doyle, Dr. Sydney Scott and Frank Podmore were sent to investigate the possible haunting. They spent several evenings in the home however their results were inconclusive.

One night the investigators were disturbed by a "fearsome uproar" but no damage or cause for the noise could be discovered. Conan Doyle left the Dorset home unsure if it was genuinely haunted or if the haunting had been a hoax.

Later the body of a child, approximately ten years old, was discovered buried in the garden. Conan Doyle became convinced that he really had witnessed psychic phenomena that was caused by the spirit of the dead child.

https://www.1843magazine.com/story/conan-doyle-spiritualism