What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?

One that immediately comes to mind is "The Imitation Game", on the life of Alan Turing during WWII.

For something less tech-oriented, "Molly's Game" is inspiring for me. The characterization of Molly as being both smart and relentlessly hard working is motivating to me, while also showing the dangers of taking it to the nth degree.

In a similar vein to "Molly's Game", "The Queen's Gambit" series on Netflix is not about tech, but very much on being the best you can be at something, along with the dangers of taking it too far.

"The Hundred Foot Journey" has nothing to do with technology at all, but rather cooking (which I usually hate). But, it captures the feeling of iteration, hard work, and self-improvement, and the notion of dealing with adversarial people and eventually becoming allies.

While definitely silly and kid-friendly, "Real Steel" gives me similar "iteration and self-improvement" vibes that give me a mental boost.

Finally, on the anime side, I have one hugely overlooked recommendation that I LOVED and yet got very little recognition: Knights and Magic. It's standard "isekai" setup has a software developer transported to another world, but he very much captures the excitement of taking an engineering mindset to problem solving when coming up with new mechanical solutions to each new fight. It's not as technical as I wish it were, but in terms of capturing the spirit of tech and engineering in a stylized way, this show was a ton of fun for me!

Hackers (1995)

Not joking, it's a silly and campy movie but it captures the enthusiasm I had as a kid for making computers do things.

Not about coding, but about achieving something through persistence and hard work: Fitzcarraldo (1982)

General Magic (2018) absolutely captures the essence of running & working at a startup doing innovative work on products that were well ahead of their time. Marc Porat is an incredible speaker, and he sheds a ton of light on what struggles they went through (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RaTIF6st4c), and the thought process behind bringing Magic Cap to market. The soundtrack alone (done by Benji Merrison) makes the film worth watching, and it's my go-to album for when I need to get focused. Highly recommend. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/

I found the original “Indie Game: The Movie” very personally inspiring, the sequel less so. It’s a documentary about a number of indie game developers working really hard and risking it all to make it. The passion these people are pouring into their games is palpable.

“Mr. Robot” is great if you don’t mind it’s overdramatized dystopian atmosphere. Probably one of the most realistic use of computers in a TV show. It has ups and downs, some of its best and worst episodes are in its final season, it’s a pretty interesting roller coaster.

“Computer Chess” is a weird black and white fictional movie about people trying to build the best Chess AI in the 80s. I really enjoyed it. Does a great job capturing the vibe of the era.

The Martian. I don’t know of any other movie that better celebrates the uniquely human ability to overcome challenges through innovation and persistence. That movie gets me charged up.

Documentaries

- Citizenfour 2014: Actual interview between Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden

- Voyage of Time: Life's Journey 2016: Voyager probes development and deployment

- Zero Days 2016: The background story and effects from Stuxnet

Films

- The Challenger Disaster 2013: Dramatization of Richard Feynman and his investigative work of this event

- Batteries Not Included 1987: When mechanical-based lifeforms descend into NYC to help an elderly couple

- Pi 1998: Fun film with lots of computers and wiring

- I Am Mother 2019: Post-apocalyptic robotic "rejuvenation" of the human race

- Gravity 2013: Fairly accurate dramatization of what space is really like

- Real Genius 1985: Silly film of college hackers before the 1995 film Hackers

- The Abyss 1989: Aliens under the sea, somewhat related to the 1998 film Sphere

- Innerspace 1987: Fun scifi version of Honey I Shrunk the Kids!

I got you

Documentaries

- The Airbnb Story[1] <-- Start here

- High Score (A netflix series on the history of games, the first episode has a part where some college guys had to change hardware to make games harder)

- The Pirate Bay, Away from Keyboard

- Silicon Cowboys; highly recommend this one, I believe we wouldn't have the industry as it is today, if it weren't for Compaq.

Movies

- Who Am I, No System is safe (Look for one with English Subtitles)

- Echelon Conspiracy

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XicLf8cyh5E

The beginning part of the Founder (i.e. the story about how Ray Kroc turned McDonalds into a huge empire) is sort of inspirational in that the man has gumption and he recognizes the potential for Micky D's to become huge even though the original McDonald brothers never wanted to take it as big.

In fact, there's a portion of the movie where's psyching himself up to go and hustle by listening to a recording of Calvin Coolidge's speech on Persistence.

Like all that was really cool. My fave moment, though was when the McDonald brothers describe how they optimized the layout of their McDonald's location in San Bernardino.

In the last 3rd of the movie you see the bad part of Ray Kroc and how he ripped off the brothers but aside from that the first half is pretty inspirational to me.

Overall, a great movie.

How I Built This with Guy Raz is the closest thing to canned inspiration. It's just intimate conversations with very successful entrepreneurs. Recent episodes with the founders of Moderna and Mailchimp were amazing. The one that turned me on was the interview with Nolan Bushnell of Atari and Chuck E Cheese.

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this

Apollo 13 (1995) - there are various scenes showing the engineers working through various technical problems (much like gravity and the martian)

Antitrust (2001) - The technical portion is goofy, but discusses the open source software movement, VCs, working for a major tech company (an evil bill gates character played by tim robbins)

Sneakers (1992) - Personally, one of my favorite movies of all-time. Code breaking, old school hacking (think wargames). I think the best description i've heard of it is an 1970s caper movie. You will never see a better cast in a movie. Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Dan Ackroyd, River Phoenix, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell all play major roles

Mythic Quest (2020) - Apple tv show about creating video games and running a tech company

Pirates of Silicon Valley. One of my favorite movies of all time.

Since my divorce, I've found that I get a lot of help out of media like this for recharging my spirit to work on things. Sometimes kids' movies are the best, because they aren't at all about the 'how', but they are about the 'why'. Here's a list of a few that I find helpful:

Tomorrowland

Big Hero 6

Robots (2005)

The Martian

Sneakers

Real Genius

Wargames

Macguyver (80s show)

Cosmos

October Sky

Iron Man

The Astronaut Farmer

Flight of the Phoenix

Something Ventured

Now if I can only figure out how to get a team behind me like in those movies... :)

Great suggestions here, many that I've either never heard of or never considered - I look forward to checking them out and please keep them coming, I'm hopeful this can turn into a masterthread to keep coming back and discovering motivational media.

Should maybe have done this earlier but adding a few of the ones I've already watched.

Technical Motivation:

  - Silicon Valley (TV show, 2014-2019)
  - The Social Network (2010)
  - The Imitation Game (2014)
  - Halt & Catch Fire (TV show, 2014-2017)
  - Iron Man (2008)
  - Primer (2004)
  - The Martian (2015)
  - Hidden Figures (2016)
  - Flight of the Phoenix (1965 original or 2004 remake)

"Sales" Motivation:

  - The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
  - Door to Door (2002) - Underrated straight-to-TV film about a man with cerebral palsy who wants to become a door-to-door salesman
  - Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - Pure sales, persistence and Pacino 
  - Salesman (1969 documentary) (As above, but instead of Pacino it's real door-to-door bible salesmen and what they go through)

Honorable Mentions:

- Mr Robot (2015-2019): probably the most thrilling and technically accurate depiction of technology and hacking ever put to a screen, but as someone else said it's also very dystopian and depressing, and not too motivational except in the brief bursts that they show Elliot setting up a hack. Either way no VisualBasic GUIs here.

- Flash of Genius (2008): about the inventor of the modern windshield wiper who had it stolen from Ford and sued them. The premise is motivational, but I personally found it more of a cautionary tale on what you can lose for your principles when you go up against the giants.

Code Rush is one of my go-to's when I need inspiration. I was in tech when it came out and it really inspired me how much a group of dedicated programmers could do. https://archive.org/details/CodeRush_616

Same for Triumph Of The Nerds and its follow-up, Nerds 2.0.1 - A Brief History Of The Internet. Fascinating to hear what went on in the back rooms and halls of the people creating the Internet and Web. https://archive.org/details/nerds-2.0.1-a-brief-history-of-t...

Hackers Definitely some unrealistic Hollywood effects but, it's fun and is a good representation of how tech in the 90's felt.

Antitrust It's fun to see the obvious digs at Bill Gates. John "Maddog" Hall consulted on this film which is why you see things like Gnome on all the screens. I got to talk to him in the hall at a conference once right after Antitrust came out. Really interesting guy.

Sneakers: One of my all-time favorites. The premise wasn't super-realistic (guy figures out a back door to all encryption and murder ensues) but the technology of the time was otherwise pretty accurately represented, and the acting is superb.

You'll notice that all of these came out over 20 years ago. I haven't seen much since that captures the feeling of what being in technology felt like to me. People still had that sense from the 60's and 70's that technology could be used to make the world better. People really did want to use technology for more than making money off of ads and personal data.

Primer, both for the discovery within the film and the fact they were able to make an aware winning, cult movie for like $70,000.

Maybe try the opposite. You can have too much of a good thing. Cover the screens, spend time outside, read a good book unrelated to tech, diversify your time.

If motivation were a battery you wouldn't try to recharge it and use it at the same time. It might get you a little more uptime but the stress leads to early failure.

Some years ago I stumbled upon an "old" documentary on the Voyager missions, from the 80s or 90s I think. It covered the work done on orbit mechanics in the early 70s, the realisation that in a couple of years time there'd be a once in a generation window to send a probe to visit all the planets in the outer solar system, and the political and engineering challenges that had to be overcome to make it happen. It really clarified what an incredible achievement the whole project was, and is by far the most thrilling and inspirational documentary I've ever watched. Sadly can't remember what it was called. I've looked on youtube, there are other voyager documentaries on there, but not this one.

I think The Movies That Made Us on Netflix is great. The general premise is exploring a classic film and the arduous journey to make it happen. The films and their directors are household names now but at the time they really had to push to make it happen with some directors being complete unknowns. Sometimes they were basically establishing their genres as with Toy Story and Halloween. With others, like Elf, they were using techniques like forced perspective and stop motion animation when they were under tremendous pressure to use CGI. I think it's a really great illustration of how the obvious classics were, at one stage, a long shot like everything else.

If you're open to including Twitch channels, Stephen Wolfram's is amazing. He discusses (and makes) software, talks physics, math, biology... And he also runs his company while live streaming.

October Sky - story of a coal miner’s son becoming a Nasa engineer. It was a big inspiration in my high school.

A lot of documentaries produced and published by ARTE are very interresting and are on various topics

- Physics/Astonomy

- Nature

- Social

- Economy

- Informatics

- etc

https://www.arte.tv

They have awesome youtube channels, but I know only about the frenchs one (they probably have french, german and english)

https://www.youtube.com/user/ARTE

https://www.youtube.com/c/arteplus7fr

To Mars by A-Bomb: The Secret History of Project Orion. Inspiring by the sheer grandiosity of the task, the will, and the ingenuity to tackle it. Back in the 1950s, while a trip to the Earth Moon was still just science fiction stuff, those guys were planning to go as far as Saturn in a couple of decades, riding nukes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1039992/

Apollo: Missions to the Moon[0]

There is no narrator for this documentary. All of the "narration" is from recorded tv, radio, and home movies from the time. It is really inspiring to watch humans overcome Earth's gravity to get to the Moon as it happened over 50 years ago.

[0] https://www.natgeotv.com/int/apollo-missions-to-the-moon

Pentagon Wars, which is about the nature of how products become ludicrously elaborate when political pressure is wielded… and about how testing is affected.

Moneyball - Taking a data driven approach to a problem and trusting in the process.

Pretty much any space-related documentaries. Rosetta probe's trajectory alone is one heck of a motivation.

However it's also beneficial to have a dollop of reality on top of Iron Man fantasies. I think that docs like Indie Game and Startup.com must be on the first year CS cirriculum and a required viewing after Social Network. For many, it would help setting expectations a bit more straight.

"The Secret Of My Success" with Michael J. Fox: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093936/

It's funny, silly, totally 80s, but one of the best inspirational business movies out there. It is my go-to when in the same demotivated funk.

Certainly Primer and Halt and Catch Fire. At times, Interstellar.

The Wind Rises: A romantic story of a technologically backwards Japan creating the first Zero plane. It's extra inspirational for those of us in developing countries.

Spider-Man Homecoming: Probably low on the list, but I actually liked Vulture reverse engineering tech, cuts close to home.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi: More about the concept of shokunin and how deep it runs. Sushi is one of the simplest things out there, and Jiro makes it even simpler. And yet every piece is built to perfection - the rice, fish, and all the components down this supply chain from the fishermen to fish cleaner and rice merchant.

These may be a bit far afield, but they are fun to watch anyway:

The movies Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The Artist (2011) are both about response to technological change: the introduction of sound into the movies. The classic noir Sunset Boulevard (1950) touches on a dark side of that.

The musical My Fair Lady (1956) is about education, science, and technology for personal and social transformation. The movie version (1964) shows some early sound recording technology to comic effect.

Triumph of the Nerds

War Games

Real Genius

Any of the 'How it's made' series.

Some movies about the Apollo missions are incredible:

- the recent Apollo 11 movie with restored footage

- in the shadow of the moon documentary (and the related Moon machines series), awesome music as well

- Moonwalk one

I just watched "Generation Startup" it's a really cool story around the struggles of young tech entrepreneurs.

It's a documentary. Worth the time.

There is one nobody mentioned: Space Hackers (2007)

In the space race era, two Italian brothers mount a big antenna in their house with a RF transceiver to communicate with those in the outer space.

They not only talked with some astronauts, but also keep a really good register of what they done, even some controversial things like a Russian person who died in a mission that no newspaper informed about in that time.

"The Americans" is not only a great classic TV series but has lots of examples of cold-war era tech and planning complex missions.

Flash of Genius[0], "The story focuses on Robert Kearns and his legal battle against the Ford Motor Company after they developed an intermittent windshield wiper based on ideas the inventor had patented."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_of_Genius_(film)

I've enjoyed Suits. It's about lawyers, but with an intertwined hacker ethic (one of the lead characters is a college dropout practicing law without a license). There's a bit of cheese that spoils it for me sometimes, but for the most part the emotional drama is pretty engaging, and it definitely inspires a determined, gritty attitude.

The Secret Life of Machines - Tim Hunkin - TV Series, now on the web

Connections - James Burke

The Origins of Precision - Machine Thought - Youtube

MacGyver - 1980s TV show

Triumph at Saturn from NASA: https://youtu.be/SY-hQJ5pMd4

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28942285

The Farthest (2017) A documentary about the Voyager space probes, and the people who built them, launched them, and who continue to keep them operating.

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

Sales: Boiler Room, Glengary Glen Ross

Inspiration: Free Solo (watching someone with singular focus that achieves excellence, it's absolutely incredible)

Tech: meh, not sure much does it here. Tons of entertaining stuff, but not sure what else. Sorkin is good I guess: Steve Jobs and The Social Network.

I highly recommend Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani [Feature Film] available on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qd_hEja6bzE .

The episode about the Halloween movie from the Netflix series movies that made us. Those guys were all unknowns working in a network of established players that wouldn't take to them. Not tech but those guys embody the entrepreneurial spirit.

I know what you mean about The Social Network and Silicon Valley. Not tech specifically, but definitely motivating and inspiring for me are:

Moneyball Margin Call Limitless The Big Short Wolf of Wall Street That Fyre documentary and at Christmas - Trading Places

I enjoyed 'The Bit Player' about Claude Shannon. Also the mini series Devs.

In no particular order, and covering a variety of genres:

- Sneakers (1993)

- Antitrust (2001)

- The Godfather (1972)

- Mindwalk (1990)

- Groundhog Day (1993)

- Finding Forrester (2000)

- Startup.com (2001)

- Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)

- A Knight's Tale (2001)

- Tron (1982)

- Wargames (1983)

- Quigley Down Under (1990)

- True Grit (2010 (or 1969, but the 2010 is better (imho))

- Ender's Game (2013)

- The Space Between Us (2017)

- Hackers (1995)

- Apollo 13 (1995)

- Twister (1996)

- The Matrix (1999)

- Sharknado (2013)

- Dark Passage (1947)

- Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

- The Dreamer of Oz (1990)

There're a few to get you going :)

Movies and Hollywood in general are a pretty bad source for that kind of material.

The Andromeda Strain. The film and the book are both excellent. It's a sci-fi when all is said and done, but it sticks in the mind, and is a good symbol for/of modern scientific practice.

I'll go technical here:

Mr. Robot Who am I (a movie, which is released a bit earlier than Mr. Robot but eerily similar)

Leaving aside all the technical correctness especially on Mr. Robot, they both inspired me a lot.

The Dish (2000) https://archive.org/details/TheDish2000

An older pick that came to mind is McLuhan: The Media is the Massage. It has that sense of "possibility" to it, even being a half-century old.

A few random options:

- Hamilton

- Jiro Dreams of Sushi

- Senna

- Band of Brothers

- A Beautiful Mind

- The Theory of Everything

I found October sky movie to be pretty motivating.

Man on Wire (2008)

I enjoyed "Rise of the Centaur", a documentary about a company that develops an intel compatible microprocessor.

Sneakers and Pirates of Silicon Valley

Interstellar. Halt and Catch Fire.

You might like "Bogowie". On the documentary side: "Something Ventured"

Cosmos, the old one and the 2014 reboot and the 2020 sequel. They're all fantastic

The Computer Chronicles - old but captures that early spirit of anything is possible!

For sales, The Premise, episode 5. One of the best pitches I’ve ever heard.

I’d like to suggest the delightfully intricate worlds of one, Wes Anderson.

Whiplash, even though it’s about music and arguably a cautionary tale

Primer. Inspires me every time I watch it!

If you need external inspiration to do something that's usually a bad sign. If you need it to start a business that's a recipe for disaster.

I tend to agree with Elon Musk, he said: "If you need inspiring words, don't do it." [0]

[0] https://www.facebook.com/drivelinebaseball/videos/if-you-nee...

Hidden Figures

Mythic Quest was a lot of fun.

The Matrix

Halt and Catch Fire