Best movies about smart people to help you figure out your university, career, and life

Movies about smart people are an endless well of inspiration — many have told Reese Witherspoon about how Elle Woods from “Legally Blonde” inspired their law careers, and the US Navy reportedly saw a surge in their numbers after “Top Gun” was released.

While those movies don’t clearly and accurately portray life during the pursuit of these careers, they help us get an idea about what to expect in the future.

It goes beyond narrowing down what programme we can study too. Beyond signalling to us whether what we’re more drawn to is engineering instead of music, they’re also highly entertaining ways to find out which are the best-fit countries for us too.

Whether you were inspired to go abroad to Rome to follow in the footsteps of Lizzie Mcguire in “The Lizzie Mcguire Movie” or to take a page out of “The Spanish Apartment” and live your life out in Spain for a year, movies like these open up a world of possibilities that you might not have considered otherwise.

That said, we’ve compiled a list of movies about smart people for you to check out and hopefully inspire you. But first, a note of caution about taking everything you watch in these films as the gospel truth.

What ‘Based on a true story about a smart person’ really means

While many movies that begin with the disclaimer “Based on a true story” are inspired by real-life events and people, there is no doubt that there is a certain element of drama added to them.

Some movies are loosely based on a true story and have a jazzed-up plot for entertainment purposes or shock value, like the hit horror movie “The Conjuring.”

In the movie, the malevolent spirit of Bathsheba Sherman is the source of the paranormal activity, haunting the family after sacrificing her infant son and then hanging herself on a tree. But while the real-life Bathsheba Sherman was believed to be a devil-worshipper, her suicide was entirely fabricated.

Many people have watched The Blind Side but are still unfamiliar with the real Michael Oher. Source: AFP

These dramatisations can have a real-life impact. The film “The Blind Side” tells the story of Michael Oher, a homeless Black teen who became a professional footballer with the help of a caring white woman and her family. 

While the movie is highly praised for its emotional scenes and strong message, the liberties it took with the particulars of his story affected the real Michael Oher. He had zero profit from the movie’s US$300 million at the box office, and his NFL career was constantly overshadowed by the attention from the movie.

“People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie,” said Oher in 2015. “They don’t really see the skills and the kind of player I am. That’s why I get downgraded so much, because of something off the field. This stuff, calling me a bust, people saying if I can play or not… that has nothing to do with football. It’s something else off the field. That’s why I don’t like that movie.”

It’s a good reminder that drama creates smash hits at the box office and we should always be able to differentiate it from real life.

Instead, use movies about smart people for their greatest purpose — i.e. inspiration — and a starting point for research to kickstart a greater career and life for you.

Movies about smart people that are based on true stories

Hidden Figures

Before computers and machines, there were human computers — women, to be exact.

“Hidden Figures” is a movie about three of these women, who helped NASA send the first men into space. Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were mathematicians who calculated orbital trajectories while struggling to fit into an industry and time that still largely segregated women and African Americans. 

Despite the show’s powerful message, it must be said that it also played into the white saviour character trope. The trope separates white people into two groups: the bad white people who oppress the minorities and the good white people who save the minorities. 

Al Harrison, a white man, stood up for Johnson in the movie and even went so far as to smash the “Coloured” bathroom sign after learning that she had to walk miles just to relieve herself. In reality, the actual Harrison never did anything like that, and neither did he “let” Johnson into the mission control room to watch the launch.

While the movie dramatises some aspects, it pays good tribute to the untold story of these three women. The real Johnson, who was 98 at the time of the movie’s release, enjoyed it immensely.

“It was well done. The three leading ladies did an excellent job portraying us,” says Johnson, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t a fan of the movie, stating that he would have preferred to not have a movie made about him while he was still alive. Source: AFP

The Social Network 

A film adaptation of the 2009 book “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal” by Ben Mezrich.

The book talks about best friends Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg and how they were inspired to create Facebook. However, conflicting ideas and betrayal transformed the friends into enemies, and the two fell prey to the adult world of venture capitalists, big money, and lawyers. 

After its release, “The Social Network” was an incredible hit. It has won several awards, including Golden Globes, British Academy Film Awards, Academy Awards, and more. It has also inspired involvement in start-ups and social media, with top entrepreneur Dave Knox commenting, “Fifteen years from now, we might just look back and realise this movie inspired our next great generation of entrepreneurs.” 

Unfortunately, despite its booming success, Mark Zuckerberg himself wasn’t a fan of the film, citing inaccuracies and unnecessary dramatisation. Rather than partying hard like in the film, he spent most of his years focusing, working hard, and coding Facebook. He repeatedly stated over the years that he didn’t build Facebook to attract women like in the film – in fact, he had met his wife even before he created the platform.  

Zuckerberg did admit, however, that the film managed to nail his wardrobe down to a T. “It’s interesting the stuff that they focused on getting right – like every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own.”

Obviously, a movie about a man who bombed Japan is a highly sensitive and emotional topic to local folk. Source: AFP

Oppenheimer 

The highly acclaimed 2023 movie follows the story of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who spent years developing and designing the atomic bomb before witnessing the world’s first nuclear explosion in 1945. The movie grossed over US$976 million worldwide and is the highest-grossing biographical film to date. 

In real life, Oppenheimer is best known for leading the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, which created the world’s first atomic bombs. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he then became an advocate for the regulation of nuclear energy, believing the bomb itself to be “an evil thing.”

While a large part of the film explores Oppenheimer’s response to the long-term consequences of his actions, the actual Oppenheimer never publicly apologised for his role in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Christopher Nolan, who directed the movie, still believed that Oppenheimer had felt genuine guilt for his actions and worked to portray him as exhibiting those feelings. 

Obviously, the film wasn’t as well-received in Japan, with many locals feeling like Oppenheimer was over-glorified for his role in developing the deadly bomb. One point of contention was the film’s choice to not visually depict the nuclear bombing – some Japanese people were satisfied with the choice, but others, like Takashi Hiraoka, former mayor of Hiroshima, felt like it downplayed the horrifying reality of the bombing.

The new 50-pound banknote has the face of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing. Source: AFP

The Imitation Game

This biographical thriller tells the story of cryptanalyst Alan Turing, who decrypted German intelligence messages for the British government during World War II. In the film, he invents a machine that cracks German codes and singlehandedly turns the tide in the fight against Germany in the war. 

For his work, he is credited as the father of computer science. Sadly, he was convicted of “gross indecency” due to his homosexuality and was sentenced to probation that involved chemical castration, which eventually led to his suicide two years later – all of which the movie mentions in its epilogue. 

While it is one of the highest-rated biographical films of all time, it’s also one of the most inaccurate.

The central plot of the movie – that Turing singlehandedly invented and built the machine that broke the Germans’ Enigma code – is entirely untrue. Much of the conflict between Turing and Commander Denniston was also made up, with the latter’s real-life family taking issue with the film’s negative portrayal of him.

Regardless of the creative liberties the movie took, the gist of Turing’s romantic feelings was true. He really did befriend and develop romantic feelings for a boy named Christopher Morcom at Sherborne School, who unfortunately died from bovine tuberculosis in 1930. 

Stephen Hawking and his former wife, Jane, attended the UK premiere of the film “The Theory of Everything“ together. Source: AFP

The Theory of Everything

Classified as a biographical romantic drama, the award-winning film follows the lives of Jane Hawking and her ex-husband Stephen Hawking, exploring the latter’s diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and his success in the field of physics. 

Do not be mistaken – many people think of the movie as “The Stephen Hawking Story”, but it was actually based on a 2007 memoir by Jane Hawking, who retells the tale of their courtship and 30-year marriage from the singular perspective of a wife gradually overwhelmed. 

While still faithful to the facts, the movie took some creative liberties with the timeline. In real life, Stephen and Jane hadn’t yet started dating when she learned of his illness, while the film presents this as a bombshell after they were an established couple. Another example would be the movie focusing on Stephen’s groundbreaking PhD work and subsequent theories about the nature of time but overlooks the fact that Jane was also struggling to complete her own during their relationship. 

Regardless, the real Stephen Hawking enjoyed the film enough that he granted the production permission to use his own synthesised voice for the final cut. When the film was first presented at the Toronto International Film, a nurse had to wipe a tear from Hawking’s cheek. His stamp of approval came in two simple words — he called the movie “broadly true.”