And who–exactly–is claiming that Harry Potter is Hard SF?
No one, I just don’t get how one can dismiss all reality for a fantasy movie but must stick to rigid Hard SF[sup]TM[/sup] rules and bylaws in order enjoy a sci-fi movie.
Because a movie that ignores the rules of physics is a fantasy movie and not a science fiction one? There aredifferent rules for suspension of disbelief for different genres. If I was watching a Three Stooges short, seeing a worker grab a fellow worker by the nose with pliers and twist it with no concequences as par for the course–if it was a drama, I’d expect hospitalization, reconstructive surgery, a trial, and prison time to be involved.
Going by this, I would estimate Sunshine (which I have never seen or even remembered existed before reading this thread) to be around a 5.
I see your point, to a point. I hate the Home Alone movies for much the same reasons.
What tiny iota of difference does it make if it’s a “hard” SF movie–none of which appear to exist–or not? Why is anyone arguing about this? You either buy the premise and go along for the ride or you don’t.
Jesus, no one tell** Chronos** or Darren Garrison about *Snowpiercer.
*
FTR, I liked Sunshine with the standard complaint about the third act.
For some reason, I had no problems getting distracted by such details with Sunshine but I couldn’t stand Snowpiercer and the love speech partly ruined Interstellar for me.
Maybe hard science books or TV shows have more room to elaborate the details than movies. With movies, as long as a part of the setup is plausible if you don’t think about it much, it’s good enough. You got about 100 minutes to tell your story, get going so you can spend more time on the essential part about world-saving heroism.
If you had 500 pages, you might well be able to come up with an alternative forlorn journey to save humanity that had more solid scientific foundations but you don’t so this’ll do under these significant constraints.
You could make a similar complaint about the storm on Mars in The Martian that was unrealistically strong. Ok. It’s not realistic. Do you want the movie to spend half its running length just on setup like its inciting incident or do you want that time spent on the main action in the second act?
I maybe should’ve titled the thread “the most underrated sci fi movie I’ve seen”
I do think it is hard sf, but most of what I had to say about it wasn’t really related to how hard of sf it is.
Still, I think people want to seem smart by bashing this movie like it’s “The Core”. I’m not too impressed by dismissal of the premise since I suspect people are willing to buy sci-fi premises that are just as speculative and implausible with current knowledge.
I think it’s a failure of imagination not to be able to envision your own idea of how the premise might work.
By the way, they may call it a “stellar bomb”, I can’t remember for sure. And it heavily involves fissionable material. But it’s totally clear this is not just a big conventional nuclear bomb. There’s no implosion mechanism. Whatever happens to it, it involves some kind of energy beams or plasma or something as part of whatever it does. Something outside of our current understanding of physics and is a totally new technology.
And what it does is speculative even to them. They make a point of simulations breaking down because they don’t fully understand how what they built will interact with the extreme gravity, heat, and speed of falling into the sun. They don’t know if it’s going to work, but it’s the best humanity could come up with.
Assuming it must only be a big nuclear bomb is another failure of imagination.
Yeah, I know of Snowpiercer, and I have much the same criticism of it. Sure, OK, you want to make a movie about a highly-stratified post-apocalyptic society, that’s fine. And maybe it even did a good job of that. But why a train? Even if you’re positing that the super power source was built into a locomotive before the apocalypse, why does the train have to keep moving? Why not stay stationary somewhere, so you can build a more conventional town around it, and still use the loco for power? It being set on a train doesn’t add anything.
Similarly, if you want to make a movie about a space mission that’s needed to save humanity, there are ways to do that without resorting to stupidity like restarting the Sun. So why choose the stupid option?
I’m curious about the alternatives you’d like. It’s possible that some better premises were available given the constraints.
The trip to the sun wasn’t incidental. The sun being the villain and the hero of all life and something powerful beyond what we think about isn’t an accident. And if it was I just a scientific research mission to mercury then it doesn’t have the same stakes and it’s a completely different film. Ergo, something exotic and unknown to us happening to the sun is really the only way this story can be set up. And it works just fine. There are only a few people who seem motivated to bash it in an almost comic book guy style.
It’s like going to a thread about a sci fi movie with FTL and saying FTL isn’t real guys! What a dumb movie! It’s not sophisticated criticism.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t any sophisticated criticism. There’s been a lot in the thread and I appreciate it.
If there’s some plausible way to fill in the backstory with your imagination, that’s fine. If the story serves the premise logically and makes sense, that’s fine. I suspect some people wouldn’t apply that same level of scrutiny to something they’re more find of.
As far as SF goes it’s not even a big hurdle of a premise compared to other beloved SF stories.
I’m sorry, I shouldn’t take such a squabbling tone. I don’t feel like attacks on the movie are personal attacks on me so much as I feel people are being overly critical to something that’s not necessary to appreciate the film, so I feel like they’re missing out on enjoying the good that’s there for misguided reasons. That applies too to the people in the thread who haven’t seen it and may not now because they’ve been convinced it’s stupid when it’s not at all.
The old standby is the asteroid/large comet on a collision course with the Earth. Sure, it’s a bit cliched, but cliched is better than nonsensical.
Yes, that is sort of one of the definitions of “Hard SF.” Chronos and I have been pounding on the “uses realstic and accurate known science” part–some of the 20th century writers were known for doing hours of calculations by hand just to make sure that they got the physics right for even small elements of their story’s plot–you might meet aliens, but you could be damn sure that the alien’s ship would be in an accurate orbit. Science fiction that breaks no physics at all is also called “Mundane SF.”
The other definition of Hard SF that you alluded to is fiction where the fine details of the science and technology used are a central focus of the writing and aren’t necessarily plausible technologies as in Mundane SF, but the writer goes into great detail on how it works in the fictional setting of the book. (And is a lot more involved than teching the tech.) That is the version of “Hard Science Fiction” in the writings of people like Iain Banks, Neil Asher, Peter F. Hamilton, Alistar Reynolds, ect. For example, I searched around in a recent reread (The Soldier, 17th book in Neil Asher’s Polity universe) to choose a representative passage of Hard SF in the sense of “a hell of a lot of description.”:
Writing like this can be considered both “Hard Science Fiction” (by one of the definitions) and Space Opera. Both of those (the “no handwavium” one and the “extreme details” one) set a high bar for a movie or TV show to be Hard SF.
(BTW, I looked at the script for Sunshine–the details of the bomb such as it being made out of uranium and dark mater aren’t in the movie and–just like the q-ball cause–are only things that Cox has talked about post facto.)
Good God, this is dumb. Please stop commenting on movies. Darren Garrison as well.
Possibly yes. I’m not going to be definite or specific about the matter, but I suspect someone who is possibly the world’s leading expert on the detection of q-balls is someone I tutored on the theory involved ahead of their Ph.D. viva.
I was personally able to buy into the broad premises of the film while still thinking that the last third or so was utterly crap.
You know, at first I brushed it off but they’re are some similarities. Highly functional team of close knit experts, as you say. No one has to act stupid to drive the plot. They take reasonable actions to face an overwhelming threat. There’s no interpersonal drama. The stakes are not artificially elevated. We aren’t given a flashback story to show how this team learned to work together and give us a more personal connection to the characters. We just see them in action and it’s obvious why they work together so well and have their shit together.
And it’s also underrated. I think a lot of people like Predator as kind of a guilty pleasure action movie but it’s a legitimately great movie.
Fortunately the worst part passes early. The attack on the rebel camp is just way too over the top. They had a slick lead up to that scene that was understated and badass, with the team breaching the perimeter. But once the explosions start it’s just way over the top for the tone of the movie. I’ve read that that scene was shot with a different director and different crew for whatever reason and it really shows.
Other than that, legitimately one of the greatest action movies of all time. Top 5 easily. Tight script. On location shooting and fairly minimalistic special effects made it age really well for a movie that could’ve screamed cheesy 80s action movie - like Commando for instance - in lesser hands.
Where can I see a 2007 movie in a theater?