President Barack Obama, esteemed film and TV critic? Given his apparent love of confirmed classic Blade Runner, that's a post-presidency career we should all fully endorse. Obama was invited to guest-edit the November issue of Wired and used the opportunity to compile a list of essential sci-fi viewing for those into TV and movie slices that are the opposite of shitty.
"I love this stuff," Obama said in an essay awesomely entitled "Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive" Wednesday. "Always have. It's why my favorite movie of last year was The Martian. Of course, I'm predisposed to love any movie where Americans defy the odds and inspire the world. But what really grabbed me about the film is that it shows how humans—through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other—can science the heck out of just about any problem."
So how does POTUS like to "science the heck" out of cinema? Well, in addition to riding hard for Ridley Scott's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep adaptation, Obama's also all about the magnum opus vibes of Stanley Kubrick's equally great 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's also some iconic Steven Spielberg and George Lucas entires sprinkled into Obama's recommended viewing list, which you can peep in full below:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Blade Runner
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
- Star Trek (OG TV series)
- The Martian
- The Matrix
- Cosmos (OG Carl Sagan version)
Hey Obama, you missed one: the best Pixar jam of all time, WALL-E.
