"The Last Man On The Planet Moon"
Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer and Wally Wood's August 31st 1952 episode of The Spirit was right in the middle of the Outer Space sequence of stories, but that didn't mean it lost its focus on small vignettes about the common man - In this particular case, about a man whose space madness meant that he hallucinated a world where he was the only man left from his mission, trapped all alone on the Moon. Forward thinking stuff from a period when Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon made space safe for newspaper comics readers.

Solaris
Stanisław Lem's original 1961 novel, that is, not the George Clooney movie. Lem imagined an alien being that prompted psychological responses in humans who tried to contact it, producing a particular strain of space madness - Trauma As Particularly Awkward First Contact. While Lem's novel depicts an unknowable and somewhat disturbing idea of such event, it was soon co-opted into cuddlier forms by...

Countless Star Trek Episodes
The various interstellar folk of Gene Roddenberry's future had a tendency to go insane every now and again, but there was always a comfortable external explanation for it all - An alien virus, mind-control of some sort, or Vulcans getting horny. Anything that could allow the Enterprise and her fine crew to leave after an hour, secure in the ultimate safety and pride of being outer space frontiersmen and insanity just being something that's akin to drunkenness:

Dark Star
Suicidal astronauts on a long-term mission who have to talk an intelligent bomb out of exploding, resorting to explaining philosophy because their cryogenically-frozen commander tells them to? No wonder that Lt. Doolittle (spoiler) surrenders to his dream of surfing to oblivion at the end of the movie. Never mind 2001, this was the movie that made a generation realize what space travel could do to your mind.

The Black Hole
...And for the kids that were too young to see Dark Star, there was always Disney's The Black Hole, in which mad Maximilian Schell (who had killed his own crew, turned them into robots, become obsessed with the black hole of the title and ends up melded to a killer robot and in Hell or something) managed to put another generation off the idea of going off into space. Those who weren't confused about the whole thing and/or distracted by the cuteness of VINCENT, that is.

Red Dwarf
1992's "Quarantine" demonstrated that it wasn't just humans who came down with space madness, when hologram Arnold Rimmer caught a virus that not only drove him quite mad, but finally introduced his latent crossdressing and puppetry tendencies. If only all other space madnesses came with their own Mr. Flibbles.

Event Horizon
Some have called Event Horizon the Pandorum or Sunshine of its 1997 day, but we prefer to think of this Sam Neill-starring SF-horror movie as The Black Hole for people who are afraid of robots. Again proving that hanging around cosmic events can lead to hallucinations and psychosis, Paul WS Anderson's thriller brought a spooky atmosphere, love of Latin and very little originality to the space madness genre, but we love it nonetheless.

Sunshine
Talking of unoriginal SF-horror movies, Danny Boyle's 2007 worst-case-scenario-fest (In turn, shamelessly ripped off by Ron Moore's failed pilot Virtuality) demonstrates yet again that, when your spaceship discovers a seemingly-abandoned spaceship floating in the void, the sensible thing to do is always to ignore it and carry on your mission. Points are subtracted for the unexpected and somewhat disappointing devolution into a generic slasher movie towards the end, but any movie where space + isolation + the sun = space madness can never be all bad.

Moon
Taking the traditional space madness ingredients (Namely loneliness, existential angst and improbable situations that can't be easily explained by what we know as science), Duncan Jones' debut movie comes up with something that, unusually, pays off without devolving into cliche or an "enigmatic" lack of answers. For that alone - as well as not succumbing to either space madness or movie hero syndrome - Sam Rockwell's Sam Bell takes the win.

The Ren and Stimpy Show
Surely the greatest example ever made of what space madness truly is. Oh my God, an ice cream bar!
See if you don't agree for yourself.

The article over at EW's PopCandy blog, wonders why SFTV fails to draw a large audience when SF movies do so well:

What is it about science fiction that home viewers are turned off by? It can't be the genre itself: If you look at the top 10 grossing movies of all time, six of them are sci-fi (and the others have pirates, hobbits, and ogres...and, yes, a boat). Clearly, the American public loves their science fiction...why don't they want it on a regular basis, piped into their living rooms, for free?

The problem, I think, isn't with the cost of SFTV or SF movies, but the scale. Mainstream audiences aren't going to see Transformers or Star Trek because they're SF, they're going to see them for the special effects and giant explosions - and, often, big-name, familiar actors - that they offer. It's almost accidental that they're science fiction at all (And I say "almost" because, I think, science fiction offers the possibility for such explosions and special effects much more readily than other genres). Television science fiction, meanwhile, tends to concentrate on much smaller, more cerebral stories - through necessity of budget, as much as anything else - and those are the types of SF movies that fail at the box office (See Solaris, Sunshine). If there was a TV show that left its brains at home - or, at least, far in the background - and offered up fast-moving, special-effects-laden action on a reliable weekly basis (Like, say, the first season of Heroes, although I may be stretching with "reliable" and "action" there), then I'm convinced it'd be a massive hit... especially if you could find some fading A-list actor to headline it.

But what do you think? Is science fiction television doomed? And if so, why?

The Great Sci-Fi Divide: Why don't we want science fiction on TV? [EW.com]

On the 28 Days Later sequel:

Says Boyle:

There is an idea for something to do with a way of concluding [the story]. It's not really come to anything yet. It's quite a big idea, but it'll be an economic decision. Because what happens with franchises like that — because it is a franchise now, in effect — is the studios do the math. And they say, 'It will make so much on film, and so much on DVD, and therefore, yes you can have that, or no you can't.' But there is an idea for it — a good idea, I think.

Why he'll never do another space movie after Sunshine:

"It is really tough" to direct a science fiction movie, Boyle says, and space movies are the hardest. "Having made a space movie, I now understand why [so many] directors only ever made one of them. Because it's so difficult to do, to get it right." The big problem is that the audience is so demanding — everything has to look right and be consistent. "And I'm one of them. We're merciless. If you get the detail wrong in a space movie, [the audience says] 'Ohhh, the man ought to floating, there wouldn't be any gravity.' It's pitiless."

"Obviously, I think 28 Days Later is a science fiction movie," Boyle adds. "I don't think I'd make another space movie as such. But a scifi movie, no, absolutely."

He also said it was nice to go shoot a movie in Mumbai after "three years in a studio" making Sunshine. "It's really precise and focused, and you don't get anything for free. Nothing walks in the door, because it can't. Obviously, you're in a sealed hostile environment." You couldn't pick a better contrast from that type of environment than Mumbai, where there are constantly surprises and you often end up getting stuff you never would have expected.

Would he ever direct a big-screen Doctor Who movie?

Okay, I had to ask, even though I knew it was a dorky question. With the BBC finally talking about making a big-screen film of its long-running time-travel soap comedy, would Danny Boyle even consider directing it? Sadly, the answer is no:

I wouldn't do it, and I'll tell you why: My memory of Doctor Who is linked with really naff special effects in the 60s, and I couldn't think of any other way of doing it than that. I mean, I was terrified of the Daleks. I remember being so frightened, [of] the really naff special effects like the early days. I couldn't do it any other way. Russell T. Davies has kind of developed it, and has bridged it into the 21st century. It's brilliant, what he's done. But I could never see it like that. I would be the wrong guy to ask about it. I couldn't transform it, really, in a way. But it's a brilliant show, it's brilliant that they've reinvented it for a new audience. It's a huge hit in that format. I love the fact that Chris Eccleston did it for a season, and this new guy is obviously very good. I wish them well with it. But it wouldn't be for me, no.

My dreams are crushed.

Is Slumdog Millionaire a five-minutes-into-the-future film?

Boyle's new film, Slumdog Millionaire, follows Jamal Malik from his childhood to his amazing winning streak, as an 18-year-old, on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Suspecting that Malik has cheated on the show, the police arrest him and demand to know how he could have known the quiz-show's answers. Based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, the movie uses Malik's explanations of his winning streak as a framing device to narrate Malik's short life to date.

When Annalee and I watched the film last week, we were struck by how much it features an emergent global culture of game shows, reality TV stardom, iphones, and pop music that mashes up Bollywood music with Ska and hip-hop.

I asked Boyle if his film was showing how the present is the future, similar to William Gibson's recent novels. He said that looking at India is like seeing the future of Capitalism, because in order to succeed, capitalist economies have to grow really quickly. And economies like India and China are growing unimaginably fast. "There are as many as 300 million people who are officially middle class now in India, and they are driving this change in taste, in the films they want to watch, the music they want to listen to, the stuff they want to buy... and you can feel it happening in front of you."

Boyle added:

In terms of William Gibson, you also get a glimpse of what cities are going to be like. Because there's no city getting smaller. Every city is expanding. Every city just grows and grows, and gets bigger and more crowded. And India, Mumbai especially, has got that. There are way too many people. It's a very little island, Mumbai, and most of it's mangrove swamp, there's very little land, and there's 20 million people there. There isn't enough water, there certainly isn't enough sanitation, they don't have enough electricty. And most of the time — occasionally, they have these riots — but most of the time they live together. They somehow make it work. Our cities are going to be like that eventually. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but in 50 years' time they're going to be like that.

When will Alien Love Triangle come out on DVD?

I asked Boyle a question about dysfunctional family relationships in his films, and somehow this turned into a discussion of his 2002 cult classic, Alien Love Triangle. Only 30 minutes long, the film stars Kenneth Branagh as a man who invents teleportation. And then he discovers that his wife (Courteney Cox) is really a male alien hiding in a female human's body. To make matters worse, a female alien (Heather Graham) shows up to take Cox back to their home planet. Yeah.

Boyle explained that Alien Love Triangle is his film about family life. "It's apparently a superficial comedy. But what it's really about, it's about the British, and what they will do to protect the apparent perfect family ideal — the lengths they will go to to protect that. I'd love you to see that." At one point, Cox's male alien and Graham's female alien "transform bodies at one point in it... They do this kind of transgressive thing, it's really bizarre. But it's really funny. Once you've seen it, you think about family life."

"Very few people have seen it," he laments, because it's too long to be shown as a short before another film. He hopes the film will come out on DVD one of these days. Miramax owns the rights to it, and it was just shown in a special screening at the smallest movie theater in Wales, which was closing. Originally, the movie was going to come out as a charity DVD, but that hasn't panned out. There's also been talk about including it as an extra on the Slumdog Millionaire DVD.

12) Searle in Sunshine.

Okay, I may be the only person who really loved Danny Boyle's blazing space opera about a doomed crew trying to reignite the sun. That's okay, I can be right all on my own. I especially love the way the character of Searle, the ship's psychiatrist, surprises you in his final moments. He's kind of a prurient asshole for most of the movie, obsessed with looking into the sun with as little filter as possible. He's a pretty terrible therapist. But when the chips are down, he knows he's the most expendable crewmember. When four crewmembers from the Icarus II get trapped on the wrecked ship Icarus I, with the airlock damaged, Searle agrees to stay behind so the rest of the away team can get back to the Icarus II. He helps blast the others out the airlock, then exposes himself to the sun, dying the same way as the Icarus I's crew.
If you're going to be a creepy therapist, the least you can do is self-immolate to save the rest of us.

11) Woody in Mission To Mars.

This is a pretty terrible movie overall, but a fantastic death scene. Our heroes have to abandon their vessel. And then Woody, played by Tim Robbins, leaves the others and launches himself at the Resupply Module (REMO), but after he attaches the line from the other astronauts at the REMO, he keeps moving towards the planet. His wife, Terri, wants to go after him, but Woody knows she'll die in the rescue attempt. So he takes off his own helmet and dies of depressurization rather than let her die for him. (Thanks to Meredith for the suggestion!)

Runner up: Speaking of depressurization deaths, Graeme really wanted me to include Cally's death from Battlestar Galactica. But I didn't really think her death was awesome. Sorry, G.

10) Graham in "The Sleeper Wakes" by H.G. Wells.

One of Wells' weirdest stories involves a man known only as Graham, who sleeps for over 200 years and wakes to find that he's not just the richest man in the world, but actually the owner of the entire world. He eventually discovers that the White Council, which governs in his name, is oppressing everyone, and he helps a revolutionary named Ostrog to mount a revolution. But afterwards, Ostrog starts oppressing people just as badly as the White Council had. So finally Graham gets mad. This time, it's personal — he gets into an airplane and rams a whole bunch of Ostrog's air fleet. (Remember, this was written in 1910.) Finally, he rams his plane into Ostrog's, then spirals to Earth, knowing that the revolution will prevail at last.

Runner up: Someone suggested Hari Seldon from Forward The Foundation, but I haven't read that book and couldn't find much about it or track down a copy. Was his death truly awesome? Let me know.

9) The Controller in Doctor Who, "Day Of The Daleks"

"Day Of The Daleks" is probably not on my list of the 100 greatest Doctor Who stories of all time, but it has a few really amazing moments. The greatest of these is where the Controller finally stands up to his Dalek masters. All along, the 22nd century bureaucrat has been fooling himself that he can help the Daleks govern the human race and actually do some good along the way, helping people when the Daleks aren't looking. But after a few chats with the Doctor, he finally realizes you can't work within the Dalek system. He helps the Doctor escape, and when his coverup fails, the Daleks decide to exterminate him. "Who knows?" he says. "I may have helped to exterminate you." Awesome.

Runners up: Various people suggested the deaths of various Doctors, but none of them really jumped out at me as especially cool. One person suggested Adric, and I'll protect his/her identity, to save him/her from the inevitable scorn of the masses.

8) Lt. Paul Wang from Space: Above And Beyond.

"Everybody's favorite tortured bipolar guy," Lt. Wang, callsign "Joker," gives his life to hold off the aliens while everyone else gets away. "This is for you!" he shouts as he pours ammo into the enemy. Commenter oconnellmd suggested this scene, and I can see why.

7) Certain people in Blake's 7, "Blake"

I'm going to show an unusual degree of restraint and not say who dies in this episode. Let's just say it's an incredibly fitting end for the saga, one which makes all of the stuff that comes before seem cooler because it leads up to this. In my write-up on how to discover Blake's 7, I actually advocate watching the last episode first. At the very least, I think this is one spoiler that makes you appreciate the rest of the show more. But don't take my word for it: watch for yourself.

6) Pham Nuwen from A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge.

Pham Nuwen is animated by the Old One, a super-powerful artificial intelligence, and he dies fighting the Blight, another super-A.I. First Pham downloads as much of the Old One into his brain as possible, overclocking his human brain by containing this massive superhuman intelligence, which will inevitably destroy him. And then he launches the Countermeasure, an advanced weapon which moves the boundaries of the Slow Zone far enough to enclose and destory the Blight. But the Countermeasure also has the effect of terminating Pham at the same time:

The Countermeasure's writhing had slowed. Its light flickered bright and then out. Bright and then out. She heard Pham's breath gasp with every darkness. Countermeasure, a savior that was going to kill a million civilizations. And was going to kill the man who triggered it.

Almost unthinking, she dodged past the thing, reaching for Pham. But razors upon razors blocked her, raking her arms.

Pham was looking up at her. He was trying to say something more.

Then the light went out for a final time. From the darkness all around came a hissing sound and a growling, bitter smell that Ravna would never forget.

(Thanks Annalee!)

5) The T-800 in Terminator II.

After Arnold Schwartzenegger's T-800 helps Sarah and John Connor defeat Robert Patrick's mean T-1000 by blowing it up and knocking it into molten metal, Arnie knows he has to go too. If there's anything left of the T-800, the technology could be used to reconstitute Skynet and bring the badness down on our heads. So Arnie gets Sarah Connor to lower him — slowly — into the molten metal. He gives a thumbs up as he descends to his robo-fondue doom. (Thanks, Annalee!)

4) Biggs from Star Wars.

I was seriously considering making Obi-Wan the coolest death from Star Wars, but really, screw that guy. First of all, as he points out himself, he comes back a thousand times more powerful afterwards. And secondly and more importantly, he's kind of a big martyr, as everyone points out in the awesome parody Hardware Wars. And Biggs doesn't have any super Force powers, or the ability to come back a thousand times more anything. All Biggs has is a X-ing, a can-do attitude, and an awesome porn-stache. And he's the greatest wingman ever, taking enemy fire and blowing up so that Luke can nuke the death star and get all the glory afterwards. And look how stoic Biggs is in this deleted scene from Episode IV, telling Luke he may never come home again because he's off to join the rebels:

When does baby Biggs get his own episode of the Clone Wars cartoon? Preferably with a little baby mustache?

3) Spike from Cowboy Bebop.

Martian bounty hunter Spike Spiegel gets into a duel with his former best friend, Vicious after Vicious' Red Dragon gang has killed Spike's girlfriend Julia. Spike finally decides to face the past with Vicious that he ran away from three years earlier, and he storms the Red Dragon headquarters, killing a bunch of its members as he climbs. Vicious manages to slash Spike with his katana, but then Spike shoots Vicious dead. Spike comes down the stairs, wounded and weakened, to face all the remaining members of the Red Dragon. Spike makes a gun with his fingers and says "Bang"... then collapses. Most people seem to assume Spike dies of his wounds, and it's not hard to find tons of people online listing this as one of the coolest death scenes in all anime, or all Asian films, let alone science fiction.

2) Someone from Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Since this book just came out and it's a bit of a major spoiler, I won't say who dies and how — click here if you've already read the book and/or don't care about spoilers.

1) Spock from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.

I'm not putting the pointy-eared green blooded Vulcan first just because I know I'd get lynched otherwise. I'm not even including the death of Spock because I pretty much memorized all the dialog from that scene as a little kid. I'm including it because it's the template of how to do a memorable, important death in a science fiction epic. The movie isn't ABOUT Spock at all, but it still feels as though the whole film has been leading up to his death. A lesser film would have been more clumsy and obvious about giving Spock a bunch of cool moments leading up to his death, and trying to manipulate us into feeling the Spock love before he snuffs it. Instead, we do get plenty of cool Spock moments, including giving Kirk his present and mentoring Lt. Saavik. But it's woven into the rest of the movie, and the film's running theme of the "no-win situation" and the impossibility of cheating death every single time help to set up the death of Kirk's best friend way better than a scene where Spock talks about what he's going to do when he retires and goes back to Vulcan. The result is one of the most amazing moments in Trek history, one of those moments where you can really beleive Trek is a sweeping saga instead of just a zany adventure with green women and Saurian brandy.

Runner up: I can't believe I left out Roy Batty in Blade Runner, as various commenters have pointed out. Especially since I went on a whole tangent about Roy's amazing death scene in my rant about why there shouldn't be a BR sequel earlier in the day. Suffice to say the Roy Batty death scene is definitely one of the all-time classic, and easily up there with Spock's.

Writing on her awesome The Script Reader blog, Cecelia explains,

Listen, fellows, I am not religious. I never went to church as a girl or repeated prayers or hymns over and over again. My sacred texts are Alien, Aliens, Predator, The Terminator, and Total Recall... But even if I’d only seen them once I’d recognize a “new version” of Alien(s) and/or Predator without having to be told what it was in a cover letter. Why? Because every sci-fi action script since those movies has been attempting to be the “new version” of those movies. And each time I hope they will be, because that would be awesome. But usually within ten or twenty pages my hopes are dashed, because all they’ve done is take the concept, plot, characters and major action sequences of Alien(s) and/or Predator and dropped in some new nouns, adjectives and character names, reducing my Nicene Creed to little more than a Madlib.

She even helpfully provides an example of what she's talking about:

Deep in the [name an uninhabited jungle or galaxy] in an abandoned [name an additionally isolated location such as an oil rig or a logging station], a crack team of [name a division of the U.S. army] special ops is sent to rescue a missing detachment of [name a group of innocent civilians (ie nuns, orphans, the blind, blind orphan nuns, etc)], only to come up against a force that is [sub/super] human. After brutally murdering [Brick Wall/Slate/2×4], the tough [black/latino] member of the team, and maiming [Hard Drive/Motherboard/microChip], the group’s geeky operations strategist, the entity shows itself to be a terrifying [alien/science experiment] shaped like a huge, grotesque version of a [name a species of reptile, crustacean or mollusk] with a [name a sharp and/or slimy noun]-like mouth. The team’s fearless leader, [Wolf/Bear/Panther], quickly realizes that if he doesn’t stop the creature, no one will, and that perhaps this battle, in addition to saving the human race, will help him [atone for/work through some of lingering emotional issues from] his recent [divorce/wife’s death/brother’s drug overdose].

The sad thing? I would still potentially watch that movie, if the special effects were good enough.

I can't help but wonder this, however; do people try to make these ripoff movies because they think that they're actually good, or because they think that they'll actually get made? Audiences don't really flock to see more cerebral SF movies like Sunshine, after all, but something like Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem can easily make $41 million domestically (Sunshine, by comparison, made just over $3.6 million in the US). Is bad SF the fault of the filmmakers or the people who go to see the movies?

Aliens, Predators, Snails? oh my! Or: How I got a bad feelin’ about this drop. [The Script Reader]

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:

• 
  
• 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.
• 
  
• 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.
• 
  
• 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.
• 
  
• 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.
• 
  
• 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.
• 
  
• 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.
• 
  
• 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.
• 
  

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.