Should definitely add Primer to the list. I've never seen another movie that uses scientific language that is not dumbed down -at all- for the audience.
Flight of the Phoenix (1965) - The heroic engineer is a German model airplane designer who rebuilds a crashed air freighter.<p>Threshold (1981) - Jeff Goldblum plays a biomedical engineer who designs and builds the world's first self-contained artificial heart.<p>Buckaroo Banzai (1984) - A stretch, I think, but BB and
the Hong Kong Cavaliers are all techies to one degree or another.<p>Real Genius (1985) - The heros are physics and CS majors, but that's close enough.
Minecraft: The Story of Mojang[1], just released this morning, is really good. It looks at Markus' original idea, the expansion of the company, the small team environment working on something huge, and lots of the other areas that the game has infiltrated in the past 3.5 years.<p>If you're including The Indie Game Movie, I'd say it's as least as qualified.<p>[1]: <a href="http://redux.com/minecraft-movie" rel="nofollow">http://redux.com/minecraft-movie</a>
Batman movies would be great for this list - he's one of the few superheroes that doesn't claim to have any actual super powers, but rather derives his power from kickass, well-engineered gear.
If you are including fictional engineers, I'd suggest Hiccup from the "How to Train Your Dragon" movie. It was basically through his engineering skill that he captured Toothless. It was also engineering to provide Toothless with a prosthetic tail and figure out how to fly with him. Learning how to train dragons was a mix of science and engineering. He's continued demonstrating an engineering and scientific approach to problems in the "Gift of the Night Fury" short and several of the "Riders of Berk" cartoons.
I.Q. is a nice one
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110099/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110099/</a><p>Although not sure if it qualifies as "Engineers as Heroes".
Some context on this: I found myself really loving movies that were able to tastefully dramatize engineers and the work they do. There are precious few movies that do this. Let me know if I missed any good ones.<p>Hopefully it will be some inspirational fuel going into the New Year.