Noisy Little Sunbeams
I just watched Sunshine and wow, outer space sure is loud. Especially the sunlight.
But that was just the third or fourth biggest complaint I have about the movie. The biggest thing is that it was mainly a less-scary version of Event Horizon. Is it a sci-fi movie or a horror movie?
Well, it was derivative whichever it was. Should we have an homage to Silent Running or to Nightmare on Elm Street? (Or was it Solaris vs The Ring?)
Not much happened for about the first 20 minutes, and when klaxons do sound, we see people running, spliced in with. . . different people running. And then they fix the problem by suiting up and going for a space walk. Real astronauts going on a space walk was historic. Actors doing a space walk "in a Hollywood basement" is boring. Do we really want to try boring the audience for over half an hour?
Furthermore, the silly premise of the sun having aged countless millennia while technology remained relatively stagnant from the early 21st century. (It looked like Cilian Murphy was cruising around the ship on an unpowered scooter.) If we want audiences to face the prospect of a dying sun (help me out here, but something like the 3,000th century, right?) with mid-21st century technology, how do we explain the dearth of scientific achievement between now and then?
And of course, the nonsensical sound effects: is there sound in outer space? Even if there is, why is sunlight loud out there, and silent here on earth?
--Spoiler Alert--
During a crisis, the crew faces the threat of an oxygen shortage, and the oxygen farm babe suggests killing three of the remaining seven crew members. She gets two others, the mission-focused meanie and --guess who-- the bleeding-heart liberal babe who cried when the captain died! Had they even met? Why wouldn't she mention this plan to mission-minded Cilian Murphy, or the 1st officer later revealed to be self-serving and afraid to die (who was in charge at the time and could've ordered them to carry out her plan), or even the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking psychiatrist?
--Spoiler Over--
And the female lead reminds me of Katie Holmes Cruise (probably because she shares so much screen time with Cilian Murphy). Is that girl cute, or does she just grow on you after months in relative isolation?
Just kidding about that last one. But the first few questions were ones the producers and directors should have asked themselves before or during the making of Sunshine. It would have been fun to MiSTify, but I'm beginning to think that about every movie. 2 of 5 dying suns. (Okay, sorry about that awful pun.)
Backlog Bob
--Update--
Comments on this post also contain spoilers. I mean real spoilers, not this baby-bottle stuff.
--Spoiler Alert--
P.S. Would a man's face really freeze and not explode in outer space? I remember being told that it would explode from the imbalance of pressure before it would freeze solid. Haven't the Russians done experiments to find this out?
But that was just the third or fourth biggest complaint I have about the movie. The biggest thing is that it was mainly a less-scary version of Event Horizon. Is it a sci-fi movie or a horror movie?
Well, it was derivative whichever it was. Should we have an homage to Silent Running or to Nightmare on Elm Street? (Or was it Solaris vs The Ring?)
Not much happened for about the first 20 minutes, and when klaxons do sound, we see people running, spliced in with. . . different people running. And then they fix the problem by suiting up and going for a space walk. Real astronauts going on a space walk was historic. Actors doing a space walk "in a Hollywood basement" is boring. Do we really want to try boring the audience for over half an hour?
Furthermore, the silly premise of the sun having aged countless millennia while technology remained relatively stagnant from the early 21st century. (It looked like Cilian Murphy was cruising around the ship on an unpowered scooter.) If we want audiences to face the prospect of a dying sun (help me out here, but something like the 3,000th century, right?) with mid-21st century technology, how do we explain the dearth of scientific achievement between now and then?
And of course, the nonsensical sound effects: is there sound in outer space? Even if there is, why is sunlight loud out there, and silent here on earth?
--Spoiler Alert--
During a crisis, the crew faces the threat of an oxygen shortage, and the oxygen farm babe suggests killing three of the remaining seven crew members. She gets two others, the mission-focused meanie and --guess who-- the bleeding-heart liberal babe who cried when the captain died! Had they even met? Why wouldn't she mention this plan to mission-minded Cilian Murphy, or the 1st officer later revealed to be self-serving and afraid to die (who was in charge at the time and could've ordered them to carry out her plan), or even the vaguely Middle Eastern-looking psychiatrist?
--Spoiler Over--
And the female lead reminds me of Katie Holmes Cruise (probably because she shares so much screen time with Cilian Murphy). Is that girl cute, or does she just grow on you after months in relative isolation?
Just kidding about that last one. But the first few questions were ones the producers and directors should have asked themselves before or during the making of Sunshine. It would have been fun to MiSTify, but I'm beginning to think that about every movie. 2 of 5 dying suns. (Okay, sorry about that awful pun.)
Backlog Bob
--Update--
Comments on this post also contain spoilers. I mean real spoilers, not this baby-bottle stuff.
--Spoiler Alert--
P.S. Would a man's face really freeze and not explode in outer space? I remember being told that it would explode from the imbalance of pressure before it would freeze solid. Haven't the Russians done experiments to find this out?
posted by weblogbob83 at 9:47 PM
4 Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
If you really were so much closer to the Sun than we are, is it possible that you'd hear noise generated by it? It's a ball of exploding gas. Sounds noisy, but I could be wrong. And just the fact that they can get close enough to the Sun to propel something into it strikes me as advanced technology. Who cares if he rode a scooter? The high tech solution is not always necessary or valid.
Is it just me, or did your critique focus on all the boring nitpicky stuff? I found the philosophical aspects of the film much more interesting that the techie/science stuff. The guy who was sliding towards Sun worship, wanting to see it more and more purely each time; the guy (on the other ship) so overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were trying to do that he started to feel they were defying "God's plan" somehow; the questions surrounding how you decide who should die when someone dying becomes necessary.
I actually think they could have explored a lot of that more fully than they did and it's made me interested to read the book to see if the author had more to say. Certainly his book 'The Beach' was much more interesting than the movie version.
I disagree about high tech solutions not being necessary or valid. (Disclosure: I briefly checked out your blog)-Like you I like fantasy fiction, often without technology (LOTR, Dragon King), but if you're going the futuristic, sci-fi, hi-tech route, go all out. At least enough to make it somewhat consistent with the timeline you're selling.
As for philosophy, that's a pretty good point, but I didn't like the way those issues were handled either, and I felt like discussing them would be even more of a spoiler than the spoilers included in my original post. What's more, I sort of take it as a given that Hollywood is going to deal with such issues ignorantly or ineptly, or at best allotting it too little time, as Sunshine did.
But while we're at it, I felt that the filmmakers tried too hard to make the computer guy, the oxygen farm dame, and the comm officer all morally grotesque, in contrast with the fine virtues of Murphy, the babe, and to a lesser extent the psychiatrist and the captain. And while we're on underdeveloped characters, how about the captain of Ic1? He just turns into Freddy Kruger and that's it? The only attempts to explain him are fuzzy ten-second clips and a confusing rant in the observation deck.
I would have been interested in hearing someone take the babe to task for refusing to take responsibility for doing what she knew needed to be done anyway - essentially putting herself above her shipmates when they know they have to kill the mentally disabled guy to save planet earth, and she refuses to agree to it. They were all going to die at that point anyway. Killing someone when you and he are both going to die anyway, and killing him is necessary to save billions of others is less morally troublesome than it is just plain unpleasant. By refusing to take responsibility, the babe was the most morally deficient of the four, but the other three (and the filmmakers) don't just let her get away with it, they respect her for it.
I know, I know: the boorish American guy, who is treated (by the filmmakers) like a big jerk the whole movie, finally saves the day at the end by sacrificing his body for his mates (or the mission), but by that point we're trained to view it as him "being a hero." There is no sympathy for him, even though he does the right thing at all of the most critical moments.
Overall, they spent too much time with cliched shots and new effects shots, and too little time developing character.
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