Holy crap. Farscape was semi-kinda-flimsily accurate? That's bigger news than anything else I'd heard of. I thought the freeze-dried popsicle thing was accurate cause of that B5 story Franklin told. Cause JMS made a big fuss about how he tried to be accurate. Crazy.

Yeah it actually takes quite a while for the 'coldness' of space to freeze something because vacuum has little to know mass in it and therefor nothing to suck the heat away from you.

@tetracycloide: *no mass

i cannot believe i just did that... wait yes i can

The speculative science in the film was interesting, but overall the film was quite a dud - eventually focusing too little on the engaging idea of man's first trip to the Sun and too much on the ghost-in-outer-space crap.

This gets me thinking that it might be interesting to feature an expanded look at different SF works' depictions of what happens to the unprotected human in a vacuum. So, here we see the freeze-drying effect in action; whereas Ford and Arthur are safe simply by holding their breath (albeit for an incredibly short time).

Who remembers that horror-in-space crapfest "Event Horizon"? There was a character that was sucked out an airlock (can't for the life of me remember why) and he basically ruptured along the seams. Fairly gross.

Yet the flick's resident scientist (from CERN, no less), claims you could, in fact, blow up the sun: [www.popularmechanics.com]

In 2001: A Space Odyssey that is how Dave gets back into the mothership, going around HAL's blockade of the doors.

But would his eyes pop out do to the pressure behind them?

That's fair. The first half of the film was brilliant. I didn't mind the ending, because they still pulled off some interesting things. However, my big problem with the science was the nonsensical rotating sections. The antenna rotated, but not the greenhouse, which had gravity, and it didn't look like the bridge rotated, but had gravity. And then the payload had really cool gravity system, cause it was just that big.

The question is: did he know this? When is it ok to bend the rules for dramatic effect? Because let's be honest, the freezing was much more interesting to the non-scientifically minded, than, you know, a simple loss of consciousness.

That being said, I thought the movie was great until the end. We did not need a personified antagonist. There was already enough conflict.

@CMG: I remember the awesome-ness that was Event Horizon . That movie is severely under-appreciated.

And I loved Sunshine . The scene where they were fixing the shield was a-mazing.

@CMG: Event Horizon? That movie was pretty scary. Maybe b\c I was all of...really young. But again, what it lacked in scientific logic, it made up for in suspense and action (IMHO).

@SinisterRouge: I never realized how loud and awesome sounding the sun was

@Acemarauder: Agreed. The cool part of the movie was the voyage, the weird things that happens to people's minds, and the jury rigging, not the zombie with the bad sun burn.

Charlie, "a bit iffy" is the understatement of the year (so far... it's early yet.)

@HeyThereKiller:
ouch. That's sarcasm with bite. Only two space movies/tv shows have refused to put sound in space, 2001 and Firefly. It's just convention now.

@SinisterRouge: See, I was all set for a good psychological thriller. The beginning fulfilled that, but in my opinion, the second half was a bit of a schlock-fest. I will admit that I'm a bit of a wuss when it comes to the horror flick.

@aspiringexpatriate: Actually I was being completely sincere... i think the movie had incredible sound design, and i really loved the sound that the sun made

Hey, keep in mind, one character does address another as "flyboy" in this clusterfuck. Let's not forget that it's that far from being good, huh?

@HeyThereKiller: You're totally a better geek than me! :eyeroll: Hilarious. And now I remember what I hate about fellow sci-fi fans.

@CMG: Yeah..I just liked the mind-fuck of it.

Oh.

Also, Chris Evans plays a flyboy, in all senses of the stereotype.

@SinisterRouge: this blog is making me regret not bringing my star wars encyclopedia... and tales from jabba's palace to my apartment...

@HeyThereKiller: Well, my bad, I honestly thought you were being sarcastic...Apologies.

@aspiringexpatriate: Whatever, he was fucking GOOD in Sunshine .

@aspiringexpatriate: A few more than two have done it, those are the only ones who have done it that people will know what your talking about.

And funny enough when Firefly jumped to the big screen, they added sound too, because they felt that the mass market wouldnt get the no sound thing.

@j0hnnyb: Ugh. I was so geeking happy through the first, like, two thirds of the movie. It was really, really good.

And then the freakin' zombie sunburn guy had to show up and ruin everything. Seriously, why?

@Falconfire: Apparently the mass market didn't get any of it. Fools.

HEY! I thought everyones eyes popped out like in Total Recall and Outland! This is a real let down!

@Falconfire: You have to give them credit though... most of the space sound effects in Serenity were during the big battle at the end, the rest of the movie tended to have very muted effects, as if it were rattling through your spacesuit or something. Visually, I always liked how you could see a ship enter the atmosphere and watch contrails appear.
I am a hopeless Firefly fanboy.

@collinxvii: You don't want to hold your breath if exposed to a vacuum. You want to exhale as much as possible and get all the air out of your lungs. Otherwise your lungs will rupture and you'll die suffocating on your own bloody froth.

@CMG: The devil made it happen.

@FrankenPC: Thats different. In mars, there is still air (not human breathable) and air pressure, so popped eyes are possible.

I thought Sunshine was resoundingly...meh. I've loved prety much everything Danny Boyle's done and Cillian Murphy is simply wonderful, but a movie that essentially consists of every possible way for someone to die in space (in almost checklist form) that turns into "haunted house...in SPACE!" at the end can't be saved even by Boyle's hyperactive style.

Or Murphy's beautiful bone structure.

I haven't seen Sunshine yet, but the movie has been out on DVD here in NZ since mid-October last year. And you guys are only getting it now?

@SinisterRouge: Aye, he was. I was defending the use of 'flyboy' not insulting his performance.

Yeah, Dasid, was only realeased in the US limited this summer. Makes you hate big conglomerate studios, no? We didn't get Children of Men until six months after London.

@aspiringexpatriate:

"freeze-dried Popsicle"? AKA "a stick"?

(and a small amount of powdered coloring and flavoring)

@cde: Popped eyes, no. Asphyxiation and death? Yes.

Mars atmospheric pressure is between 1/150 and 1/100 of Earth's (Or .6 to 1 kPa, if you prefer).

@aspiringexpatriate: I think (and I'll have to check it momentarily on my DVDs) that Space 1999>/i> treated space as being silent.

I'm not advocating this (out loud) but has a space agency ever actually put small animals in the vacuum, unprotected to see what the effects would be on a living specimen? Keep in mind that this is coming from the guy who voted the Laika Graphic Novel as best of 2007... so I'm not without compassion in regards to animal testing. I'm just interested in if had ever been done and if so what the results were.

Look. I hated this film.

I am all about the science fiction film as an adult form. '2001,' Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' and 'Solyaris,' 'THX1138,' and even the gloriously campy but jammed-with-ideas 'Zardoz.'

But unless a director can rise to that ideal, it's just embarrasing. Sunshine's awkward attempts to convey a kind of heavy poetic bleakness made me cringe.

Sunshine is a film which would have really benefitted from 1.) a cool monster, 2.) some badass robots, 3.) rayguns, 4.) nudity 5.) some more huge explosions in space-- Ones that made sound.

Yes, FredicvsMaximvs, I was wrong. Sorry, I haven't seen nearly enough SF as I thought I had. Someone up there already corrected me with a lil bit more leniency.

I remember the low-budget "Saturn 5" with Farrah Fawcett; the opening scene has two people in a compartment, and one guy hits an "emergency" button that dumps the contents to space (why???) The other guy goes screaming out into the void and explodes into pieces like a side of meat.

Minus the whole sound in space thing...and the flash freezing...and the ghost issues this movie was still light years (see what I did?) ahead of most space movies. I remember reading on the film fansite that the reasoning behind the sun's demise was due to a Q-Ball tearing through it but they didn't want to put that in the film because of the higher understanding needed to appreciate it. [www.sunshinedna.com]

The ending was truly touching though, seriously it was beautiful.

I have not had a chance to see this movie yet but the entire idea to go to the sun in a suicide style mission has been done before in this B ( or even C) type sci-fi movie from the late 80s or early 90s. For the life of me I cannot remember the name of the film but in that movie the sun got too hot so earth was turning into a desert , so they sent a last effort mission to regulate the sun ( or whatever nonsense like that) and it was a suicide run they knew they cannot comeback and all . The plot also featured a sabotage onboard the ship , as one of corporations wanted the sun hot so they can make money with water they had - they got one of the female member of the crew ( insert a nude shower scene) hypnotized or programmed via implanting some thing in her retina ( her my memory is fuzzier the ever) to do their bidding . Off course in the end the crew sacrifices themselves and save the world the end.

Anyhow anybody knows that film or am I on drugs and mad it all up ?

@dmoisan:

Saturn 3 was pretty decent. The beginning scene was because Harvey Keitel's evil character wanted to take the ship to Saturns moon. But he had been deemed psychologically unsound (in short, he was a homicidal maniac). So, he killed the real pilot and took his place.

Anyway, Wiki it. One of the BEST sci-fi robots of the day was in that movie, Hector. FREAKY as hell.

@selcouth14: Higher understanding? RTFA. Q-Balls were pretty much pulled right out of the physics consultant's PhD ass. He even says as much in the article. It's pure conjecture, even string theorists wouldn't touch the "Q-Ball" theory, and they're mostly full of ... hot air.

Rodneyoscopy. Yeah. I agree. And a good sci-fi movie should have a truly massive doses of all those elements. Continuously.

I just watched Sunshine. This was not the best of anything. This film was crap. If it was any worse, I'd assume Uwe Boll had directed it.
If you haven't seen this film... don't bother. If you did, you lost 90 minutes of your life.

In general, i think that speculative science is fine, fake science is not. It might be my pedantic side showing but making things up wrong just looks like poor fact checking.

I loved the storyline of Sunshine, but i really hated that they chose to rely on big effects and used them instead of shoring up some of the weaker points of the film.

I also disliked the main nerdy character (in the space suit in the clip above). I thought his acting was pretty weak. That and the poor choice to throw money at CGI where it wasn't needed detracted from the experience and made me want my $10 back from the box office.

@ceriphim: As else mentioned above, speculative science is fine, just because something hasn't been proven to exist (or not exist) doesn't make it so. This is a fucking Sci-Fi blog so suspension of reality shouldn't be a huge step for us readers...the same applies for movies. Besides, why would string theorists be concerned with Q-Balls? Oh wait...because one is a theory of how atoms and sub-atomic particles work together to form the known universe and the other is left over from the beginning of the universe and could quite possibly be comprised of the same particles/strings from said string theory.