JonnyRadar
The Living Force
the science in this film is ridiculous, however the scenery/imagery and a lot of the interactions between the characters are very interesting. basically a team of scientists is sent on a many-year trip to the sun (in a specially shielded craft) in order to drop a nuclear bomb (made of all the fissile material on the planet earth) into it - with the intent of "reviving" the sun's reactive processes... forget what that sounds like for a second, it made me cringe too. to the best of my knowledge the sun would instantly vaporize our entire planet without blinking. not to mention the fact that here's another film where we BOMB all of our problems into oblivion. (armageddon et al...)
what i found interesting is the perspective and sense of scale that's achieved in the film. at the outset, we see the craft at 36 million miles away from the sun, and it looks huge - twenty or thirty times the size of a harvest moon in comparison... cut to a breathtaking scene in which the astronauts watch as mercury passes in front between them and the sun and they slingshot themselves around mercury to continue their trajectory... (they do all this viewing of the sun through a specially filtered window that adjusts itself to prevent their retinas from being burned away...)
the movie is filled with tension (as you'd imagine) and is also quite reminiscent of "event horizon" in it's feel and presentation. the astronauts face death at every turn and are forced to become very cold and calculated in the way they approach their own mortality. their mission is to "save" the human race, and so all else falls behind that goal in priority... a couple of the characters willingly sacrifice themselves "for the mission" - and those scenes are done quite well, with an appropriate amount of contemplation and gravity in considering that they are about to die. i was expecting some crazy high drama but instead got what seemed like a realistic portrayal of how someone would feel about choosing to die. there is also a scene in which one of the crew members becomes suicidal and can no longer function, at which point the crew considers actually killing said crew member so they do not waste their oxygen (all in the interest of completing the mission, of course)
interesting examples of psychopathy and ponerology abound in these small interactions, where people place themselves in higher or lower positions than others, and yet other interesting examples of objective thinking are there as well, where at one point one of the astronauts says (paraphrasing) "this is not a democracy, we are scientists and rational thinkers - we are going to make the most informed decision possible." however, i am still on the fence as to how that statement effects me. it seems as though there are a lot of hidden (and not so hidden) references to the "ultimate purpose" as being the survival of the human race. self importance? futility?
all in all it was an interesting film to watch, though a bit mindless at times, it prompted me to think about the issue of death and how i would face it if it stared me in the face - as well as the complexities of "sacrifice" when taking STS motives into account and not to mention the utter stupidity of thinking that nuking the sun would save it from dying...
(alert! spoiler below)
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my favorite bit though was the end - at the point where the nuke must be launched into a specific range of the sun's magnetic field so it achieves maximum effect. the character of the film who is the physicist on the crew had previously stated that there's a point at which the calculations can no longer be made to project what will happen. he states that the gravitational pull of the sun will distort time and space to the point where the possible variables are infinite, so they have no idea if it will even "hit" the sun. (again, never mind that this thing would have been vaporized like, 10 million miles ago...) well, the physicist is the last one left along with another crew member, and they essentially end up "riding" the nuke down dr. strangelove-style. however when they reach this point of "infinite variables" time essentially stops and they are able to see the surface of the sun directly in front of them as a roaring yet placid lake of fire. other things happen as well which i'll leave out of this spoiler, i think i may have given away too much already...
*********** END SPOILER ALERT ***********
