I actually thought a lot about Pinbacker’s motivation. I was actually thinking about starting a thread to debate of there was one last best hope for Earth, would you want a religious person on the crew? Let alone commander. I think a fully atheist crew would be important because you don’t want someone under that kind of pressure thinking religiously like that. Which makes me wonder if a written story about the selection process for Icarus 1, or a story from Pinbacker’s perspective would be interesting.
I liked it. I don’t think it needed the horror detour, but it was a decent movie.
I love sci-fy and would like to see it.
Netflix doesn’t have it. Where can I find it?
According to just watch.com it’s only streamed by HBO. At least in the US.
I really like your point about movies taking their stakes seriously and giving the characters/audience enough respect not to have to personalise it. And one of the reasons I like that point is because it highlights what is wrong with Pinbacker.
Pinbacker does personalise it. In the first two acts, the “villain” is the mission - the most difficult, most vital mission any group of people will ever undertake. How they respond to the pressure, as you say, is the story. But with the introduction of Pinbacker, the movie gives us an actual villain. The stakes go from “confronting your own weakness if the face of an awful responsibility” to “stop the bad guy”. It’s not just a bad third act. It undercuts the first two - the interplay between characters, the constant surmounting of naturally occuring obstacles we were invested in becomes just a prologue to a slasher movie. It would have been a much more effective movie if we’d witnessed the crew continue to struggle against the impersonal physical, technical and mental challenge of the mission. The idea of someone being driven insane by the pressure isn’t a bad one, but would be so much better if it were one of the crew we knew. Trey is perfectly positioned for the part. You could see him rationalise that his mistake was part of some grand plan, and he was the agent of the Almighty.
Compare this film to The Martian. It’s a much lighter tone, obviously, but it’s a movie that is solely concerned with the hero(es) ability to confront a hostile environment and maintain focus and positivity in the face of a harsh and uncaring universe. There’s no antagonist, just a protagonist trying his best and it works.
Thank you. That’s the sort of perspective I was hoping to find. I can’t disagree. The Pinbacker idea sort of insidiously creeping up among some of our crew would have been a better way to play out that theme.
We could’ve still had the rendezvous with the Icarus 1 and the mystery of its failure could’ve still been explained by Pinbacker cracking, but he didn’t have to still be alive. The discovery and the logs perhaps could’ve triggered similar thematic sentiments in our crew, but with a different third act obstacle to overcome.
Pinslasher could have been better used as some kind of collective delusion or hallucination the crew suffered as a result of the stress. The hallucinated segments would have allowed for the change in style that was apparently desired. Maybe that would have been too reminiscent of Solaris?
It would have been interesting for the characters to start going crazy under the stress, attribute their changed mental state to some sun mysticism and then realize: “No, wait, that mysticism thing is bullshit. We’re just being affected by the stress” and then coped with that up to the very limits of their minds.
Like many, I loved the first two-thirds. The third act was just so, so disappointing.
Ren Höek: “You know, they say sometimes people go crazy on these long trips. They get the… SPACE MADNESS.”
It’s interesting to think about the ways people could crack. The movie does cover them fairly well, I think:
- Error through overload. Happens to Trey, could happen to anyone. A potential catalyst for other types of breakdown.
- Mentally shutting down in response to stress (esp, as seen, in response to the above but possibly more interesting if in response to someone else’s error, while that person picks themselves up and soldiers on?)
- Self-preservation at all costs. Short-sighted, sure, but natural enough.
- Rejection of goal of mission and embrace of annihilation, via some sort of psychotic break.
-
- Not hinted at in the movie: excessive willingness to self-sacrifice. I think the risk of clearly seeing that this mission might call for one’s death in the line of duty is that one becomes too focused on this as a potential solution to problems. E.g. character self-sacrifices in Act Two when another (slightly less certain of success) option was possible because nothing is more important than the mission, only for the survivors to find in Act 3 that they desperately need the dead crewmember’s skills.
Although there are many flaws in act 3 of this film, the one thing that has stuck with me is how gravity works on the surface of their payload. It is a giant cube that supposedly has the mass of Manhattan. During the fight on the payload, gravity always seems to be perpendicular to the surface. When they go around a corner gravity suddenly shifts 90°. In reality, gravity should always act towards the centre of mass. Moving towards an edge should feel like climbing a hill that is gradually getting steeper.
Bad physics always pull me out of a movie. The terrible science at the start of “The Core” got me to stop watching five minutes into the film.
That the Sun was going out and that something humans could do was capable of restarting it.
Did the movie tell you that the sun had run out of fusable mass 5 billion years early for no reason?
Is that the only possible explanation, and therefore the movie is, conclusively, as dumb as the dumbest sci-fi movie?
The Q-ball idea is mentioned in the commentary tracks.
ETA; Chronos, what SF movies do you like?
Give me a movie where an evil sorcerer has snuffed the Sun with a dark ritual spell, and the heroes must deliver a powerful magic item to the Sun to restart it, and I can buy that. Try to dress it up as “hard SF”, and it doesn’t work.
How the heck are humans supposed to be able to reverse a Q-ball?
With the giant sci-fi maguffin in their payload bay. I think you have a distorted idea of what hard sci fi is or what it requires. Alternatively, it feels like you’re missing the point on purpose.
To make an analogy, lots of sci-fi stories have FTL travel. This is very theoretical a and likely cannot be done. But not every sci-fi story has to explain why the physics of FTL work. If the story itself doesn’t revolve around how the FTL works, it can go unexplained and still be hard sci-fi.
But if plot points hinged on understanding how the FTL drive works because the plot hinges on it, then details about the drive have to be explained.
In Sunshine, we are given enough information for the plot to work. We know something happened to the sun that’s exotic and unexpected. And we know they devised the best solution they could but it’s all theoretical to them. That’s all the information we need to understand the plot.
We’re explained more about how their sun shield works, because plot points hinge on us understanding what’s going on with the shield when they fuck up. So we need to know more about how the sun shield works than we need to know what’s happening to the sun.
If they inserted a ten minute scene at the start of the movie of Brian Cox trying to explain supersymmetry and q-balls, then it would explain the premise. But this is completely unnecesary narratively. It wouldn’t enhance or inform any plot point later in the movie. It would just be background information. It would make cool supplementary background info, like a DVD extra, but it wouldn’t enhance the narrative of the movie itself.
This is pretty general writing 101 type stuff.
Someone here doesn’t know what Hard Science Fiction is, but it isn’t Chronos.
Added thought, this is a movie that doesn’t hold your hand. The characters do not tell each other things that they would already know as a way of giving that information to the audience. There’s very little exposition. You’re just thrown into the mission and expected to keep up.
But at the same time, nothing is left opaque to the viewer either. We can piece together what’s going on. We’re never shown that there’s a massive worldwide effort behind this mission but we can piece together that there works have to be. We’re never shown this crew being selected, but we understand that there must have been a comprehensive search. We’re never shown the crew training in flashbacks, but one character says to another when suiting them up “relax, we’ve done this a hundred times in training.” and it just makes sense. Yes, they must’ve spent years doing nothing but training. But the film doesn’t have to bludgeon us over the head with it and show us flashbacks to the relevant training.
Using your imagination to fill in the scenario with the sun is the sort of thing it asks of its audience. You seem to lack imagination, so you assume that the reason could not possibly be plausible and therefore must be the dumbest possible explanation, which is that the sun is dying in 50 years instead of 5 billion, and that we’re gong to drop a bomb on it because sure why not. As if no one involved in the writing or filmmaking gave it any thought.
I’m trying not to be too personal in writing this. I’m not intending to insult. I just think perhaps you require more hand holding in the stories you prefer.
Now that I’ve had to think this out, the lack of hand holding and exposition, and the way it just throws us into the story and asks us to keep up is actually one of my favorite aspects of the film.
Do you think 2001 is hard science fiction? Because I can think of lots of things in that film that are never explained, but it’s hard science fiction.
Hard science fiction, especially written sci-fi, often goes into great detail about all sorts of technical stuff. But that’s not what makes it hard sci-fi. The term doesn’t mean every aspect of the world is explained in technical detail. 2001 doesn’t fail to be hard sci-fi because we’re never told how HAL’s advanced computers work in detail or how their propulsion system works.
2001 and Sunshine are actually extremely similar in a lot of ways. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the writer was inspired by it.
I can’t think of any SF movie that I’ve ever seen that I would consider to be Hard SF. All that I can think of is Apollo 13, if Apollo 13 hadn’t actually happened.