I enjoyed it, for the most part, though I agree that the Horror movie ending kind of spoiled the moodiness of the beginning. IMO Pinbacker would have been more effective as a ranting frail maniac rather than a rage zombie.The shots of the sun and the impression of an incredibly hostile, incredibly beautiful universe made the film worth seeing, and more than made up for any flaws. The acting was very good. The bad science was not nearly as bad as The Core or Armageddon, and was easy to ignore due to the movie’s many virtues. It wasn’t even that bad; Since they never go into what was wrong with the Sun, it’s almost plausible that it could be fixed with some sort of super bomb.
The moral of the story: If you’ve got a simple but difficult mission, stick to the goddam plan! The moment the decided to check out Icarus 1, you know it’s not going to be good. Granted you mostly know this because you’re watching a movie, but still altering course on an incredibly difficult mission just screams bad idea.
Good catch on the Dark Star reference, 1.618. I missed that in the movie.
Sorry to zombify but I just saw this and I had a complaint I can’t believe no one else mentioned.
In what world (other than the movies) do you crew the manned mission to save humanity with a bunch of whiny, quarreling, incompetent, and of course beautiful 20-somethings? None of them, save for Mace and the captain, seemed to realize that flying to the sun might be a one way ticket, or for that matter seemed very eager to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity.
Next, the navigator forgets to realign the shield when he changes the ships course? Isn’t that the first freaking thing one would do? Adjust the giant metal disc separating the ship from the sun. And why wouldn’t that kind of thing be double-checked by anyone else, or by the talking, all knowing computer? By the time I got to captain suntan I was already long checked out of this one, which is a shame because the cinematography and the acting were really quite good.
This is a case where good directing couldn’t save a bad screenplay.
Since you just saw it maybe you can tell me how the Freddie Kruger character got from the old, dead ship onto the new ship. When I saw the film I somehow missed this.
After connecting and opening, the airlock is simply a hallway if they didn’t close it again. He waited for the crew to get away from it and went over himself.
As to why the computer didn’t detect it - it probably did, it just didn’t say anything. It seemed to know that he was there, but didn’t think that was worthy of alarm and didn’t say anything until specifically asked. It’s plausible that it wasn’t trained to handle intruders.
There wasn’t much of an indication as to why the captain went insane. I can see why 7 years alone like that would make you nuts, but why did he sabotage the mission in the first place?
Also - when the computer was taken offline, the Icarus 2 began orbiting the sun. Would it become tidally locked so that the shield was always facing the right way without computer control?
Something else that irritated me about the ending was that Freddie Kruger was obscured by some kind of special visual effect whenever he was on screen. It gave me the feeling that the make-up looked like shit and their solution was to blur it out with the funky effect. That and the nonsensical idea that someone who is burned over 100% of their body and stranded in space for several years could move around with ease and kill healthy people. If I burn my finger in the kitchen I’m out of commision for a coupla’ days.
Inner Astrophysicist wants to know how the heck the Earth survived being burned to a crisp when the Sun went into its Red Giant phase (which it must have done so already, if it’s already cooling down).
Inner Cynic also wants to know if the Ouendan/Elite Beat Agent crew got recruited to cheer the Sun back to life.
Not sure if this is still a zombie or reanimated thread , but the computer was telling the kruger captain that he was not cleared to raise the computer mainframes out of the cooling tank , and mentioned that he was not wearing a biometric device, which is how the computer could tell who was who and where they were at any given time.
Restarting the sun with a bomb seemed to me like they were trying to re light the pilot light,do that and nature takes its course. One thing that i am not sure about is , was this movie anti science or anti religion.
on the one hand you have kruger captain scuttling the mission cause he thinks humanity has got to die , cause he had a heart to heart with god , but on the other hand , the physicist has no problem whacking the navigator , cause whats one man in the greater scheme of things, when it comes to saving humanity
One of the best movies of the year, though it had one major flaw: despite the brilliance of the first two-thirds of the movie, in the last third all the depth of subtlety of the movie was sacrificed and it ended up as little more than a monster movie. I suspect, though I can’t know, that Boyle felt something similar. At least, that’s my theory for the distorted views of the “monster:” I feel like Boyle was disappointed that he couldn’t come up with a better way to tie things up, so to show his reluctance to commit fully to the monster-movie ending, he only showed the monster through distortions. In denial of the monster’s mundane cliche-ness, in other words, he tried to lend it some abstractness; to make it seem less prosaic. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s my speculation.