'Watchmen' is Neil deGrasse Tyson's Sole Comic Book Movie in His Top 10 Sci-Fi List

Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex caught up with superstar astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, days before the season finale of his series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and asked for his top ten sci-fi films. The list included some classic movies you'd expect to find - 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Day Earth Stood Still, The Terminator, The Matrix - but one stood out as Watchmen was the only one from the comic book genre.

 I don’t know if I am alone in thinking that “Watchmen” is the best-of-genre among all superhero films. I liked it because the characters had fully expressed, complex personality profiles.  They experience love, hate, revenge, megalomania, moral anguish and trepidation. Nothing polished about them. For this reason, they were all more real to me. If the world really did have superheroes in it, “Watchmen” is the world it would be.

That's some nice praise from a man whose life work is finding answers  through evidence and reason in science but when it comes to his fiction Zack Snyder's adaptation of the DC Comic's graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons hit all the right notes for the scientist. 

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)