Post by kaliszewski on Dec 14, 2008 13:13:01 GMT -5
... it's 2010.
Sunshine leans more heavily on the sequel than the original.
A word up-front: I'm one of maybe four people on the planet who admit to liking 2010. I like it plenty. Sure, the mystical stuff with Bowman (Keir Dullyea, back in a sweetly eerie cameo) gets a little mid-eighties cloying, but anyone who can watch Our Angelic Mr. Murphy play kissy-face with the wall of solar plasma at the the end of Sunshine without snickering can shush the heck up right now.
So let the ramble begin. Parallels and whatnot:
A multi-month space mission coordinated between two Earth superpowers. Only here those powers are the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union. And the coordination actually plays into the drama in the story as the relationship between the United States and the U.S.S.R. crumbles back on Earth. What 2010 explores that Sunshine does not: how the mission will impact the life of Roy Scheider's (Dr. Heywood Floyd's) family on Earth. He has a wife and son who love him; we sense his reluctance and sadness in having to leave them. I love the scene in which he answers questions about the mission for his little boy. Floyd and the crew will need to hibernate on the way to rendezvous with the Discovery, the ship from 2001, now in orbit around Io: "I'll be asleep for a long time," Floyd tells his son. "Will you die...?" the boy asks. "No--!" Floyd replies, affectionately shocked. "Why do you say that?" It turns out that the grandfather of one of his boy's classmates died, and the classmate was told that "Grandpa was going to sleep for a very long time." Grounding is a good thing.
A dicey rendezvous with a supposedly derelict spaceship. Only this time, no one fudges the calculations. But the rendezvous maneuver is highly dangerous anyway. Drama that's not based on a bad judgment call followed by a royal screw-up-- and Arthur C. Clarke dared to call himself a writer...?
A sentient supercomputer that may-- or may not-- be as friendly as s/he seems. Hello, HAL. Nice to see you again!
New-sun-foo. Before the eye-rolling begins, re-read the "wall of solar plasma" reminder up above. It's pretty. It's hopeful. It's groovy, cats. And the idea that an alien intelligence may be involved is-- in my tiny mind, anyway-- just as easy to swallow as "Gosh golly, there's a one-in-one-hundred-billion chance that something called a 'Q-ball' will sucker-punch our sun-- not that we'll explain that in the movie: that's what the Internet and the DVD commentary are for." (Heavens, what did scriptwriters do before blogs were there to fill in the gaps...?)
Eggheads versus astronauts. Only this time, the whole Brainiac routine isn't dumped on one scrawny pair of shoulders. Dr. Floyd has friends, and the tense working relationship between his gang of American scientists and the Russian military personnel flying the ship is one of the highlights of the show. The fact that Helen Mirren (HELEN. THE QUEEN. MIRREN.) is the captain of this Soviet tub doesn't hurt, either.
A nail-biting spacewalk sequence. The difference being, here, this time, the "right" people-- engineers John Lithgow and Oleg Rudnik-- are doing the walking. Yes, the effects are twenty years old. But, honest to God, I feel dizzy with vertigo when I watch this scene. Lithgow's character is panicky and hyperventilating (hmm-- that sounds familiar), and it's contagious. What I want to know is this: if they could account for gravity in 1984 (the crew quarters of the Soviet ship rotate, Lithgow notes the increasing gravity as he and Rudnik climb along the hull of the spinning Discovery, etc.), then why were we back to "gravity is magic-- just accept it" in 2007...?
Well, that should be enough to open the can and jiggle the worms. Watch this thing if you get the chance. It's cheap as hell, the tightwads at MGM were kind enough to make it available in widescreen, and it's got some good stuff in it. Heck, if nothing else, it makes for a nice break from finding parallels between Sunshine and Event Horizon....
Sunshine leans more heavily on the sequel than the original.
A word up-front: I'm one of maybe four people on the planet who admit to liking 2010. I like it plenty. Sure, the mystical stuff with Bowman (Keir Dullyea, back in a sweetly eerie cameo) gets a little mid-eighties cloying, but anyone who can watch Our Angelic Mr. Murphy play kissy-face with the wall of solar plasma at the the end of Sunshine without snickering can shush the heck up right now.
So let the ramble begin. Parallels and whatnot:
A multi-month space mission coordinated between two Earth superpowers. Only here those powers are the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union. And the coordination actually plays into the drama in the story as the relationship between the United States and the U.S.S.R. crumbles back on Earth. What 2010 explores that Sunshine does not: how the mission will impact the life of Roy Scheider's (Dr. Heywood Floyd's) family on Earth. He has a wife and son who love him; we sense his reluctance and sadness in having to leave them. I love the scene in which he answers questions about the mission for his little boy. Floyd and the crew will need to hibernate on the way to rendezvous with the Discovery, the ship from 2001, now in orbit around Io: "I'll be asleep for a long time," Floyd tells his son. "Will you die...?" the boy asks. "No--!" Floyd replies, affectionately shocked. "Why do you say that?" It turns out that the grandfather of one of his boy's classmates died, and the classmate was told that "Grandpa was going to sleep for a very long time." Grounding is a good thing.
A dicey rendezvous with a supposedly derelict spaceship. Only this time, no one fudges the calculations. But the rendezvous maneuver is highly dangerous anyway. Drama that's not based on a bad judgment call followed by a royal screw-up-- and Arthur C. Clarke dared to call himself a writer...?
A sentient supercomputer that may-- or may not-- be as friendly as s/he seems. Hello, HAL. Nice to see you again!
New-sun-foo. Before the eye-rolling begins, re-read the "wall of solar plasma" reminder up above. It's pretty. It's hopeful. It's groovy, cats. And the idea that an alien intelligence may be involved is-- in my tiny mind, anyway-- just as easy to swallow as "Gosh golly, there's a one-in-one-hundred-billion chance that something called a 'Q-ball' will sucker-punch our sun-- not that we'll explain that in the movie: that's what the Internet and the DVD commentary are for." (Heavens, what did scriptwriters do before blogs were there to fill in the gaps...?)
Eggheads versus astronauts. Only this time, the whole Brainiac routine isn't dumped on one scrawny pair of shoulders. Dr. Floyd has friends, and the tense working relationship between his gang of American scientists and the Russian military personnel flying the ship is one of the highlights of the show. The fact that Helen Mirren (HELEN. THE QUEEN. MIRREN.) is the captain of this Soviet tub doesn't hurt, either.
A nail-biting spacewalk sequence. The difference being, here, this time, the "right" people-- engineers John Lithgow and Oleg Rudnik-- are doing the walking. Yes, the effects are twenty years old. But, honest to God, I feel dizzy with vertigo when I watch this scene. Lithgow's character is panicky and hyperventilating (hmm-- that sounds familiar), and it's contagious. What I want to know is this: if they could account for gravity in 1984 (the crew quarters of the Soviet ship rotate, Lithgow notes the increasing gravity as he and Rudnik climb along the hull of the spinning Discovery, etc.), then why were we back to "gravity is magic-- just accept it" in 2007...?
Well, that should be enough to open the can and jiggle the worms. Watch this thing if you get the chance. It's cheap as hell, the tightwads at MGM were kind enough to make it available in widescreen, and it's got some good stuff in it. Heck, if nothing else, it makes for a nice break from finding parallels between Sunshine and Event Horizon....