I don't think this is out in the US for a while yet, but it seemed a good idea to get a thread going to localise the inevitable spoiler-loaded discussions for those that have seen it.

As far as the film itself goes: I loved it, for the first half at least. I was completely strung out by the end of the airlock set-piece, though. It reminded me of 2001 in the sense that the universe comes across as an insanely hostile place where small mistakes and risk-taking can be disasterous. The arrival of the slasher-film reject was a big downer. Although it was very well handled as far as generic horror stuff goes, it just didn't fit. Things got back on track a bit more as the film went on, and then it definitely went 2001 in the finale, where everything was incredibly symbolic and weird.

Good soundtrack, the sort of visuals that got me into science in the first place (one to watch in the cinema if you're going to bother at all) and no howling, Armageddon-style comic book madness. It was stylistically naturalistic, at least. And I really love the mechanical design on the ships and the space suits. I'm not sure whether it was on the "loving homage" or "painfully derivative" side when it came to classic SF though.

As far as the science goes, the only things which stuck out at me were the guy freezing in vacuum (because that one's been done to death) and the "time becomes space" talk regarding the bomb itself flying into the sun. Relativistic effects shouldn't be that significant, and they didn't need to be invoked to explain why his simulations break down. Everything else which bothered me was retrospective:

1) The transit of Mercury across the sun. Fast. As in, over in ten minutes. To be fair they were supposed to be heading in towards Mercury to do a slingshot but I don't think that explains its apparent speed in moving across the sun.

2) Their course. They were supposed to have gone into a low orbit over the sun before the bomb was dropped, but their course towards the sun was shown as a dotted line leading straight in to the surface! Splish.

3) The sunlight sweeping across the shield towards Kaneda. I guess this was meant to be solar wind or something, but it was a bit... potent. It's not clear whether there really was some sweeping wave of stuff going along there, or whether it was just a special effect to emphasise the brightness (and he just melted in place, without being swept away) but it raised an eyebrow. Something for more knowledgable people to look at.

4) Their hydroponic garden catches fire because it sweeps out past the shield. A couple of questions:

i) Why didn't the computer warn them that this was going to happen, as it did with the antennas?
ii) Why was it set up to recieve light directly from outside anyway? Surely they realised this was a risk?

5) As mentioned in another thread, we see the sun brighten in the finale, and then the newlight gradually spread over the ground. A howler, in retrospect, unless they're implying that the sun's surface lit up anisotropically and it just happened to give the impression of this wave of light hitting the ground.

Those are the only quibbles that occur to me just now. Frankly I'm willing to forgive them the failures in detail because it was so refreshing to see a sci-fi film where space is a dangerous place to be and mistakes are actually deadly, and not an excuse for a stunt. It was sensible enough that never going to be any deus ex machina waiting in the wings. The crispy man shouldn't have been in there though, no matter how well acted he was, and it would've benefitted from a different (or more than one) science advisor. The theoretical physics McGuffin isn't even mentioned in the film (for which they have my gratitude) and they make some worrisome goofs. An astronomer would've been a good addition.

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As I recall, that looked like just the terminator sweeping across the shield as it rotated back to be perfectly transverse to the sunlight. The shield was shaped like a broad mushroom cap, and had been tilted slightly to place one edge in shadow while the guys worked there. So what was you were seeing was the illuminated portion expanding back into the shadowed area as the shield rotated. One of the best sequences in the film, I thought.

There was some other reason offered for the fire in the hydroponics section: didn't a chunk of material fall off the cooked antenna?

There was a lot of other ropey science on offer, though: the slingshot orbit as portrayed in the graphics, the idea that the sun would even notice a fusion bomb the size of Manhattan, putting out fires by adding oxygen ...

But gad, it was a pretty thing to watch.

Grant Hutchison

Edit: I do wonder if there was some sort of problem or change at the editing stage involving the "slasher-flick" arrival of the mad Captain Pinbacker from Icarus I. Mark Strong (who played the flayed Pinbacker) is a good, well-known actor, and we only ever see him in shakey, blurry fractional views: it seems an odd part for him to have been offered (or accepted) if that was planned in the original screenplay. It all had the feel of a dodgy botch in post-production.
Odd choice of character name, too, especially given that we first encounter him in a series of clips from a video log: it inevitably conjures up the hapless Sergeant Pinback from Dark Star, which isn't a great dramatic effect.

The backstory gives an explaination for how the bomb could be effective, but yeah, the way they phrase it in the film ("a star within a star") isn't too good. I get the terminator sweeping back across the shield, and it was really cool, but I'm wondering about the "wave of fire" thing that comes with it. That explaination for the hydroponics thing makes sense, I figured I must've missed something.

Regarding Pinbacker, Garland (the screenwriter) is putting out a novelisation of the film some time soon so it'd be interesting to see if there are any major differences.

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Massive sunshine spoilers..... wouldn't those be called "clouds"?

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Given the amount of love this movie's been shown, I'd think the only real spoiler possible would be coming in and raving about how unbelievably realistic and scientifically accurate it was...were it that such was the case.

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Well, it's no Core 2, is it?

I dunno. Unlike The Core, goofs aren't major plot points, so it would be easier to make this into a "good science" movie, probably. (I'm assuming that they get away with their cosmic McGuffin: Arthur C. Clarke did the same "sun is dying early" thing in at least one short story.) They're mostly in the details.* And the tone couldn't be more different, of course. However like the Core it gets away with it because it's actually a good movie with characters you don't hate. It's not like Armageddon, put it that way.

*As an example, their Comms officer is lost in space during the vacuum jump. He's shown freezing solid before he passes beyond the edge of the shield and gets incinerated. Now, we all know you wouldn't freeze like that, but it doesn't exactly undermine the fact that he's had it because he's drifting off into space. Unlike finding a giant geode, or "stepping outside" into molten rock, which kind of have problems from the very premise.

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Well, I've seen Sunshine two days ago, and it was really good, the shield and Kaneda part was real eye-candy.
It has nothing on 2001 though. The drama in 2001 is much better, for example when the hibernated astronauts are dying or when HAL gets disconnected.

But could anyone please explain to me what were those lights when the physicist detonated the bomb? Or how could he walk on the wall?

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Didn't the ship flip around? Wasn't that why they were sliding around like no tomorrow?

Or maybe it's to do with that aforementioned 'intersection of space and time'. That was some pretty trippy visuals towards the end.

The lights were part of how the bomb* worked, apparently (he talked about it during the test earlier in the film). Although not raised in the film, apparently it's a combined fusion and dark matter bomb, which presumably read "ARTISTIC LICENCE HERE" to the special effects team.

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A bunch more quibbles with the film's science here.
http://dyllanne.livejournal.com/25660.html
oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

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Most of those aren't quibbles about science, though.

I have nothing against pedantry in principle, but that's taking it a bit too far, and quite a few are nonsensical. Some of them are fair, but there's a difference between having a problem with a film and setting out to hate it from the first instant.

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I'm afraid I agree with most of those gripes. It wasn't so much bad science - but very bad organisation. A couple of their points are unfair though:

• 25: There was a lock on both sides of the airlock - Capa locked sunburnt bloke out, then sunburnt bloke locked Capa in.
• 10: Perhaps the controls on the bomb were just backups.
• 30: I thought the observation deck was built into the shield, at the front.
• 31: The bomb was the mass of Manhattan, not the size. I was assuming that it was supposed to be so big that its own gravity was enough to allow Capa to walk on the side during the end sequence.

More problems I noticed:

• Lots of things are rotating on the ship, so it would be a trivial change for the filmmakers to have proper centrifugal gravity instead of the magic gravity they do have.
• It's a shame they couldn't repair the shield from behind - even the tilted segment would protect the astronaut while he or she worked on the hydraulics.
• Only one chap who knows how to work the bomb, yet everyone is trained in the much harder job of doing spacewalks.
• They say that bomb used up the world's entire supply of fissile material. Fusion, guys, fusion! (I suppose a big fusion bomb may still need a big fission bomb to set it off).
• Is it just me, or is uncoupling the entire living section of the ship to dock with Icarus I a stupid risk to take. Cross over in spacesuits. They weren't expecting to do any docking - I'm surprised the ship is even capable of recoupling to the bomb in flight. And yet they don't have shuttlepods or robots capable of in-flight repairs to the shield.
• When leaving Icarus I, Capa should have stayed behind in his suit, to open the airlock. Then, when the others have made their run for it, he can make the crossing in his own sweet time. On account of him having a spacesuit, and all.
• When Icarus II docked with Icarus I, II must have lost all its sunward momentum, and then had to blast off again onto its original course. That's a lot of extra fuel they must have been carrying, just on the offchance that they need to stop to pick up a hitchhiker.
• Just bad filmmaking this time: near the end of the film I was very confused as to who was alive still. I thought the woman had killed sunburnt guy in the holodeck thing. And one of the women locked herself in the bomb as well, how did sunburnt guy get in?

Sorry, I wasn't too keen on Sunshine. There was just too much arty-farty camerawork and slasher-horror for my taste. The science and common-sense blunders were just icing on the cake.

I'm not sure even the mass of Manhattan has any appreciable human-scale gravity. The oddness when they're sliding around the cube probably stayed in the script from early drafts where the bomb had the mass of the moon, which their science advisor picked up on. (The Bad Astronomer also raised this point, in the context of Space: 1999. The total binding energy of something like the moon is less than the energy required for it to break orbit, so you'd pulverise such a body before you ever got it away from the Earth).

I think a lot of it is down to ambiguity. For example, is Capa valued because he's the only one who can detonate the bomb, or because he's the only one in the crew who understands it properly in case something goes wrong? Likewise there's a good explaination for the bomb itself* which is absent from the screenplay. So technical minds are left to figure it out themselves, with dialogue like "sun within a sun" to lead them up the garden path to "oh my God do they really mean this?" land.

Basically there's a lot of stuff that's in the backstory (on the website) which solves these problems. I suspect it was gradually written out of the script to help the film's pace. I mean, you can get away with that sort of rich, plot-tightening technical detail in a sci-fi novel, but to a general film audience all technobabble is treknobabble. I'll get the novelisation this week and see how it stacks up.

*The problem with the sun is a "Q-ball" settled in the core which is cannibalising normal matter and turning the core into a mass of supersymmetric, unfusable matter. Analogous with using conventional explosives to set off a fission bomb, they use a massive fission bomb to *handwave* darkmatter creating a big enough explosion to reduce the Q-ball to its substituent quarks, which then decay to normal matter.

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I saw it yesterday, great movie. A cross between Alien, Event Horizon and 2001, If that makes any sense.

At times, almost a religious experience. Or then I'm just reading too much into it but for some reason it was a very thought provoking film for me. (I probably wouldn't be the best person to send on mission like that...)

I will be glad when it is released.

I saw the movie recently. I thought it was descent besides the sun-zombie - that guy destroys the whole movie. Still, the rest was quite stunning.

Here are my two quibbles:

When the two ships meet, you see the back of the Icarus I shield from the observation deck of Icarus II. You also see reflections on Icarus I - the sun is being reflected in Icarus II shield onto the back of Icarus I shield. I thought it was a nice detail but it creates some problems - wouldn't the reflected sun rays burn Icarus I? If not, then it would mean that the Icarus II shield actually absorbs most of the sun radiation. If this is true, wouldn't that require some absurd cooling mechanism?

In the Kaneda accident scene, the computer insists on rotating the shield back into the "normal" position. Why is that? Kaneda and Mace seem to agree that it is vital to "protect the payload". Protect from what? The fire? How would that stop the fire? I thought THAT was a juicy plot hole.

and one last thing:

The way Capa blows open the hatch does not make sense. The idea is that the pressure from inside the ship blows open the hatch. How is that possible, the hatch was especially made to withstand this kind of pressure? The pressure is not that great anyway - it should have been only around 1 bar which is half of the pressure in a normal car tire. That's no way enough to completly dislocate that massive door. I guess the trick is supposed to be the small hole he drills in the door but I don't get how that is supposed to help. That's a solid steel door, not a baloon - it won't blow when you puncture it. Not this way anyway...

I got a hold of the screenplay (there's no novelisation, alas) and it seems that there were a few changes. Pinbacker was more visually varied, for a start, which backs up rumours that the crazy visual effects towards the end were to hide failures in the mackup effects. There's no shining the sun onto the back of the Icarus to have a look at it, so that plot hole's closed. And the inner airlock door is made of some sort of armoured glass, so it shatters as a result of decompression after being weakened by the hole cut through it. And the payload is the same mass as the moon, which does explain away the gravity thing towards the end. There are some other details like the use of a spinning section for artifical gravity, so they have to board the Icarus 1 in zero-g. I imagine this whole idea was dumped for budget reasons.

Overall, the original screenplay is less scientifically plausable in some areas, but as a result more internally consistent. You can't really build a bomb the mass of the moon, even if it's constructed from dark matter and compressed to the size of "a football stadium", however this provides a reason for the gravity they feel there. Making an internal airlock door out of fragile glass is dubious, but it explains how it gets blown out. It's also more scientifically plausable in other areas by virtue of vaugeness. For example they're described as going into orbit briefly around Mercury to set up for the slingshot, then go into a low solar orbit in order to catch Icarus 1, as in the movie - however this isn't depicted as a dotted line perpendicular to the sun's surface! And there are some other details which don't come out in action, like use of reverse thrusters and such to explain their manouvering and how they would get away from the sun after dropping the bomb.

As a whole I reckon it would've worked out better as a novel than as a thriller, science-wise. I got the feeling that there was lots of justification for things going on in the film (the garden fire was caused by reflection off the mangled antenna, so they had to change angle to stop it dumping heat into that section of the ship) that they didn't have time to dwell on, for pacing reasons. Likewise a little more time is spent with the characters and a sense of who they are. Pinbacker even gives the opening narration, and it's quite different from Capa's.

Most interesting of all is the introduction from Garland:

Edit - Oh, and one other issue that the original version clears up - Capa is valued because he's the only person aside from the ship's computer who can arm and detonate the bomb, as he was involved in its design. Why you'd want that blatantly deranged, easily-distracted pile of uselessness launching the bomb in the first place is a problem for the interested reader.

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Aha! That explains a lot. Is there any chance I could get hold of that screenplay, too?

Bought it off Amazon (£6-ish, about $12 a these sort of exchange rates), not sure if there's an online equivalent. I'm sure not transcribing the whole thing.

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My friend and I were talking about this after watching the movie. I figured that he wouldn't freeze instantly like that, but what would happen, exactly?