To some extent, it's understandable that space adventures play fast and loose with physics. After all, who wants to watch Han Solo spend years on the journey to Alderaan, only to find that the planet has twice Earth gravity and he can barely stand up, much less swagger?

The categories of mistakes in our report card should be pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, I'll expand on them a little bit:

• There's no sound in space
• Not all planets have Earth gravity
• Planets should have diverse climates, instead of one unified climate across a "desert planet" or "forest planet."
• It shouldn't be too easy to communicate with alien creatures, without some kind of high-technology "translator" explanation.
• And it definitely shouldn't be too easy for humans to interbreed with aliens.
• Humans exposed to vacuum without a spacesuit shouldn't explode or shatter. And a "hull breach" where the ship's crew is exposed to vacuum should kill everyone instantly.
• You can't have fires in space, unless there's oxygen leaking out somehow.
• Asteroids or other objects shouldn't be able to float close together without falling into each other's gravity
• People shouldn't be able to dodge lasers and other speed-of-light weapons
• And there's no reason why someone would move in slow-motion in zero gravity.
• Faster-than-light travel is probably not ever going to be possible.

The biggest challenge in creating good starship feng shui is the fact that starships move around all the time. So you can't necessarily know which part of the ship will be facing "north." Traditional Earth-bound feng shui uses a special compass to locate the "ba gua" in a space, so you'll know where to position major features. But with a starship, those points of reference may not have any meaning, notes Janice Sugita, author of The Feng Shui Equation:

Since it is a moving object, the normal use of a compass for orientation of the qi does not apply in a "spaceship". Placement of the interior walls, doors and architectural features can alter the flow of qi that may be beneficial or not to the occupant. An example: if you place a desk or computer in the path of a sharp corner from a wall or column the occupant may feel unconfortable and not sit for long periods of time. It is the broken or disturbed natural flow of qi in the space that is directed to the occupant.

Human beings lived in nature far longer than they have lived in artificial, man-made environments, therefore it will be very important that space ships incorporate images from nature into the interior design of the craft. People are soothed by images of nature, so plants, images of nature, water features, and materials made from natural substances like wood need to be integrated into the design so that space travel becomes less stressful. It will be essential that human beings keep their connection to nature to balance all the cold, industrial feelings of machinery.

Perhaps plasma screens with nature scenes could be viewed throughout the space ship. Sounds of birds, streams, and ocean waves could be heard in the background, and perhaps a domed structure with a forest environment like the ship in Silent Running could be added so passengers would have the experience of a walk in a garden while on those long flights between planets. Anything to lower stress levels resulting from long periods of time out of a natural environment would assist the space travelers in finding rest and relaxation while on their galactic travels.

It's best to think of post-apocalyptic movies as "survival movies." There's never been a post-apocalyptic film where the global nightmare killed every single human — unless it was some 1960s avant-garde experiment showing an empty wasteland for two hours. The point of post-apocalyptic movies is that people do survive, even if they have to endure horrible things in the process.

In I Am Legend, we spend a lot of time admiring how well Will Smith has preserved normal life, including stir fried veggies and DVDs. Just like Heston's swinging pad in Omega Man, Smith's living space looks comfy, even luxurious. When I talked to I Am Legend production designer David Lazan, he mentioned that his goal with Will Smith's house was to make it look as much like a normal Washington Square townhouse as possible — until the shutters come down at night.

And the TV show Jericho is all about how the lucky Kansas town clings to domesticity in the face of the mass slaughter of half the United States. The show lingers lovingly over its characters' pristine kitchens and nice clothes, even as they indulge in the greatest luxury of all — petty soap-opera drama.

Part of the thrill of survival movies is witnessing the extreme stuff people have to do to remain alive. It's the same reason we love watching people eat bugs on Survivor, or kids terrorizing each other in the short-lived Kid Nation. When it's not being cozy, Jericho spends a lot of time lingering over the near-starvation of the townspeople and the frozen corpses they have to step over just outside of town.

A few things have changed since 2000, when the nastiest catastrophe to hit the world was John Travolta in a crappy headpiece. These days, the hardest thing is guessing which decaying-orbit bomb will hit us first. Climate crash, Krugmaniac economic collapse, terrorism, peak oil, wars, a nuclear North Korea, avian flu, etc. But more than that, it's increasingly clear that the early 21st. century way of life in America is unsustainable. We can't keep up our current level of energy use or foreign debt forever. It feels a lot like the 1970s, the last time huge disaster movies were this popular.

So we try to imagine what it could be like when the American empire falls and/or the globalized post-industrial economy collapses. And we look for stories that show how we might possibly salvage our asses in that situation.

But maybe there's another explanation: we actually want to tear down our world of maxi-corps, sprawl and environmental destruction. And we can't imagine any way that could happen other than through some kind of omni-fucking calamity.

(Note: Children of Men came out in the U.S. on Dec. 25, 2006, which means almost everybody here saw it in 2007.)

What's more insulting is a glance at the list of other entrants on the list, which will soon be boiled down to the nominees:

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• Evan Almighty: seriously, a bunch of CGI animals? Giant waves? We're weeping, on the inside. Doctor Doolittle had some similar effects, from what we remember. We love Steve Carell, but not as Neo Noah.
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• The Bourne Ultimatum: sure Matt Damon kicked some butt, but other than that chase across the rooftops and a car chase or two, the vfx didn't blow our pants off.
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• The Golden Compass: this movie got lost in the wake from the Harry Potter yacht, and the effects looked impressive, and a bit too Narnia-esque.
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• I Am Legend: we'll tip our hat to this one, since those desolate shots of an empty Manhattan are simply gorgeous, and the hordes of infected were pretty scary as well. Especially that shot where they're all huddled together the in dark. Yikes.
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• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: This is what happens when you marry a really shoddy story that's full of holes with a ton of CGI. A mess that looks fake and is ultimate unsatisfying. Like a bowl of wax fruit.
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• Transformers: decent effects, like the drawn-out Optimus Prime transformation and some of the slow-motion fights, but in the heat of most of these robo-battles, it was hard to tell what was going on. Something we keep hearing about this flick.
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• 300: We wanted this to capture more of the spirit of the Frank Miller graphic novel, but simply copying scenes from it didn't work. Sure, Gerard Butler was great, but at times this felt a bit goofy. Still, we'll admit the effects were the film, and not badly done.
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Sunshine, while you might not be the Academy's darling, you're certainly ours.

Basically, Harvey would die of asphyxiation. He would quickly get "the bends" because the air in his lungs would be trying to escape, and hypoxemia would result. He wouldn't explode, because his skin is actually strong enough to hold everything together even in vacuum. But he also wouldn't suddenly turn into a freeze-dried popsicle, like he does here. It takes time for your body temperature to equalize with the near-absolute zero of space.

NASA knows a lot about what would happen to unshielded humans in vacuum, because of an accident in 1965 where a poor guy's suit ruptured in a vacuum test. He lost consciousness quickly but was otherwise unharmed. There's also the experience of the poor chimpanzees (PDF) whom scientists exposed to a vacuum back in 1964.

Here is the oxygen room from above.
And here's the oxygen room once Icarus starts getting super-heated from the sun.

There's also a clip of Michelle Yeoh looking lovely and washing carrots in the oxygen room here.

• Danny Boyle chose to make Sunshine instead of the sequel to 28 Days Later, because he's not a custodian, he's an innovator. (Although he's hinted lately he may make 28 Years Later.) Boyle has alternated between science fiction movies and "realistic" films with surreal touches. Trainspotting and Shallow Grave are both set in the real world, but a veil of unreality clings to both of them. (Not just the ceiling baby, but Ewan McGregor's unraveling characters in both films.) Zombie movie 28 Days Latermanages the near-impossible: it actually manages to feel post-apocalyptic without killing off its entire cast in the first half hour. But Sunshine is Boyle's greatest achievement. The story of a small crew on a desperate mission tor reignite the sun, it manages to blend the horror thriller with the trippy cosmic film. But both genres have a steel underpinning of hard science and psychological complexity, and everything feels like it's happening for a real reason. Upcoming project: Boyle's next film is Slumdog Millionaire, about an illiterate kid who tries to become a contestant on a Hindi game show.
• Guillermo Del Toro is best known for the acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth, one of the most powerful — and darkest — explorations of escapism ever filmed. But he also made two of the best genetic-engineering thrillers of all time: Blade II and Mimic. (Mimic was originally supposed to be a 30-minute segment in an "anthology" film featuring a segment from Boyle.) Both films feature monsters created by science. In Mimic, a scientist creates a super-insect to destroy cockroaches that are carrying disease. But the super-insect evolves into a giant monster that can assume human form. And in Blade, vampires hack their own genome to create near-invincible creatures. Upcoming projects: Del Toro is filming Hellboy 2. He's also working on 3993, a ghost story about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and At The Mountains Of Madness, an HP Lovecraft adaptation set in Antarctica.

• Charlie Kaufman has only been a writer up to now. But he's managed to create a more consistent vision in his films than most directors. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovitch have a shared set of surreal concerns: characters journey into someone's head and discover, to your horror, that identity is always a first draft. Kaufman's characters are always revising their personal narratives and confronting different versions of themselves, like Kaufman and his twin in Adaptation. It's also worth hunting down the little-known Human Nature (directed by Eternal Sunshine's Michel Gondry) in which a mad scientist tries to train a mouse to use a salad fork. Upcoming project: Kaufman's directing his first film, Synecdoche, New York, due out next year. (It's about a director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his cast, creating ever-stranger New York stories inside a theater which is a scale model of New York.)
• Kathryn Bigelow. Her best-known science fiction film is 1995's Strange Days, about a former cop who sells bootlegs of people's memories on data discs. And then one of those discs turns out to contain someone's memories of murdering a prostitute. But Bigelow's CV is full of claustrophobic thrillers with weird touches, from 1987's vampire romp Near Dark and 1990's cop drama Point Blank to 2002's K19: The Widowmaker. As with Boyle, even her real-world stories are so unnerving they feel like alternate reality. Upcoming project: Her next film is an Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.

"Deep space, at the edge of the galaxy. The future. A new prisoner arrives on top security prison ship and psychiatric research unit Dante 01. Sole survivor of an encounter with an alien force beyond imagining, Saint Georges is a man possessed by inner demons, caught up in the battle to control the monstrous power within him."

Translation: sounds like your standard "holy crap, we're on the edge of space and sanity, and this alien thing has really screwed us" scenario.

The Weinstein Company has bought the U.S. distribution rights, which hopefully means we'll be seeing it on our shores not too long after the January 2nd premiere in France. While the premise might sound tired, Caro's other films make great eye candy.