Movies About Creative Thinking: Limits that help

Part two of seven. Films where the hero is locked inside hard limits: time, space, and whatever objects happen to be at hand.

The most tense part of the selection. Plan your evening accordingly.

An accident on the way to the Moon. Engineers on the ground dump onto a table the set of objects available to the crew and assemble a solution out of those alone.

Topics: taking inventory of available means, priorities under pressure, solving a problem collectively with no second attempt, calm professionalism as a working style.

Aftertaste: tense while you watch and very satisfying afterwards. One of those films where you know the ending and still sit on the edge of the couch.

A botanist is left alone on Mars and starts solving problems one at a time: water, food, communication, transport.

Topics: decomposing a big problem into a chain of small ones, humour as a way to hold on, improvisation with a scientific basis, international cooperation for the sake of one person.

Aftertaste: surprisingly light and cheerful for a survival film. Optimistic, funny in places, and it leaves you with a surge of energy.

A climber is pinned by a boulder in a narrow canyon. He has a day's worth of water, a cheap knife, and a video camera.

Topics: working through the options to the end of the list, denial and acceptance of the terms of the problem, a reassessment of one's own self-sufficiency, the value of connection to other people.

Aftertaste: claustrophobic and physically unpleasant, yet with a strong lift right at the end. Watch it once; forgetting it will not be an option.

A logistics company manager ends up on a desert island with a few parcels he was not supposed to open.

Topics: repurposing the function of an object, time as a resource and as a punishment, solitude and an invented companion, returning to a world that has moved on.

Aftertaste: slow, quiet, deeply sad. People usually remember the ending more often than the whole island.

Ninety minutes, one actor, one car, a series of phone calls. A construction manager drives down a motorway and runs the largest concrete pour in Europe over the phone.

Topics: a formal constraint as a device, managing a complex process by voice and by ear, the price of one matter-of-principle decision, reputation and obligations.

Aftertaste: hypnotic and restrained. An intimate film that holds you without a single event on screen.

An astronaut is stranded in orbit after the shuttle is destroyed, with a limited supply of oxygen and fuel.

Topics: a resource budget as the basis of every decision, panic and its cost, orientation in space with nothing to hold on to, the will to continue after losing the point of it all.

Aftertaste: visually overwhelming, anxious, with a sense of relief at the end. One of those films where the sensation matters more than the plot.

Next part: obsessed with the craft.

The whole series:

1. Inventors and engineers
2. Limits that help
3. Obsessed with the craft
4. A change of viewpoint
5. When nothing comes
6. Making it together
7. Documentaries