Comments on: Ain’t no Sunshine

By: riversol

riversol — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 03:28:50 +0000

DVD viewing complete. Yep, it’s a Hollywood attempt to create a “speculative fiction” flick with enough drama to draw in the “science-fantasy” crowd. The freezing in space cliche and oxygen fire suppression seemed to me the worst offending scenes.

Disjointed scenes and mediocre acting, however, probably wounded this film most. The horror aspect might have worked if they found a better cinematic technique than jumpy, blurry cuts….an edgy technique like the Japanese horror flicks Ju-on or Ringu perhaps.

Yet like others here, I felt the moive had enough “wow factor” space moments to make it thrilling, and occasionally thought provoking.

Wondering what other films out there people think are the best in the “speculative fiction” genre.

Both 2001 and 2010 were worthy. Children of Men too. I also liked The Fountain, though admittedly it has a good bit of sci-fantasy mixed throughout.

By: flak

flak — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 01:08:31 +0000

FINALLY got to see this DVD last night. My impressions? Very much like ‘JCF’s.’ Sure they never explain well why the sun is dying or how the ’stellar bomb’ is going to save it (outside of it “creates a mini big-bang” or something), and some of the science is a little iffy, but this movie is riveting. Its tense, sometimes creepy, often makes you wonder who and or what to trust, and in the end satisfying. Well worth the rental. A solid ‘B’ grade movie (couldn’t rate it higher becuase of the science stuff, just an extra 5 minutes of explanation would have made a world of difference there).
And why exactly is it anti-religious? I didn’t get that at all. Just becuase the psycho ends up pontificating about god? Yeah, becuase that NEVER happens in real life…

By: JCF

JCF — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:19:56 +0000

I hate to say it Phil, enjoyable movie as it was, your friend Brian Cox got it wrong. A nuclear bomb the size of manhattan would come nowhere close to being enough to ignite the sun. Billions of nuclear reactions of that size occur each second inside the sun, so the effect will be negligible. Secondly, you’d need to ignite the thing at the core, not the surface.

Still a good movie with great effects and possibly the best natural disaster movie I’ve seen. I typically hate the genre. But Sunshine combined the disaster with some Event Horizon horror-esque elements which worked well. I don’t think I ever got bored during it. Great stuff, if you can look past the bad science.

By: CERNite

CERNite — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:23:00 +0000

Still no review? I guess the US passed this one by. No big loss IMHO. I agree with David, it was too grating to sit through all the stupidities of the plot as well as the bad science. The movie started fairly well if you put away your science IQ, but toward the end it fell apart. The cheap tricks like single frame shots of the Icarus 1 crew to try to make things spooky as well as the intentional blurring and insertion of nonsensical images when the Icarus 1 captain is trying to sabotage things, just made me feel the director was short of inspiration. Note that only on DVD can you actually clearly see that these tricks are being played on you (I actually found them very distracting and confusing). As a physicist (who works at CERN, by the way, but is in no way connected with this movie, thank God – oops, I mean Planck!), I would have normally liked having a physicist playing a lead role as good guy, but I felt more insulted than anything else since no self-respecting physicist would have ever volunteered for a such a ridiculous mission. The IMDB had this rated as 7.3, which prompted me to rent it. I was quite disappointed, I would rate it around 5-6. As for the anti-religious ending (which is maybe why it hasnt made the big time in the US), I found it corny, not philosophical. In fact it was so blatantly anti-God, it made me, an agnotic, embarrassed. I guess all of us agnostic or atheist scientists had better watch our backs, you never know when a colleague might go wacko and decide to kill everyone around them who is working against what they consider to be God’s plans.
As many have already said, its too bad good hard SF movies are so few and far between. I think they should have left the Q-balls on the pool table for this one…

By: David

David — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:54:30 +0000

This movie went far beyond bad astronomy (although it had plenty) into just not making sense.

Exactly what is the Q-ball supposed to be doing to the Sun? Destroying it is supposed to not just stop the deterioration of solar output, but restore it to normal (see last scene). So it seems that the Q-Ball is somehow just suppressing the energy producing reactions at the core. However, we all know that it takes thousands of years for radiation to propagate from the core of the Sun to the surface. So, it should take thousands of years to see any change after the Q-ball is destroyed. Also, how is the bomb supposed to get anywhere near the core before it’s vaporized? Why do they detonate it above the surface where it won’t do any good?

Or, if the Q-ball is supposed to be orbiting inside the Sun sucking up enough matter to make a difference, how would destroying it be able to reverse the damage? Also in that case, how would they find it? They don’t seem to make any attempt to do so.

Then there’s the bomb which has the mass of Manhattan Island. Where did humans get the technology to send that much mass to the Sun? Or even to build a spaceship that large? And if they have it, wouldn’t they have sent a somewhat larger crew, like maybe hundreds? Why would they bother with the farm when the mass of the required life support expendables would be negligible compared to the bomb? Or why not send a slow robot ship with the bomb, then follow up with some faster ships with people (if they are really needed for anything other than screwing up)?

And how about those “fissionables”? We are told that all of the Earth’s fissionables (Brian Cox says uranium) have been extracted in 50 years. How did they manage that? Does it include the uranium in the oceans? Did they set up giant breeder reactors also? More to the point, once they had all that uranium/whatever, why not just use it to power civilization, instead of betting on this crazy Sun-saving mission? That would have been an especially good idea after losing half of it on the first attempt. Which reminds me, wouldn’t it have made sense to at least send a few extra ships full of crazy astronauts to see what happened to the “Icarus I”, and maybe try to salvage the bomb?

By: Christian Burnham

Christian Burnham — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 04:31:18 +0000

I loved the photography, the sound and the acting. Some great special effects for a medium budget movie.

It would have been so much better in zero-gravity. Is it really that hard to do realistic zero-gravity in movies these days?

I did appreciate that the physicist got to be the good looking hero.

By: Jacks of Science » Blog Archive » The Sun is Shining

Jacks of Science » Blog Archive » The Sun is Shining — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 20:01:33 +0000

[...] was waiting for this movie to be reviewed by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy, but he hasn’t seen it yet! After I saw the movie I was desperate for some scientific critique but even the SEED review was [...]