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Supernova:
Dr Shepard, a famed astrophysicist discovers - all too late - that the sun's age has been miscalculated and that it will supernova in a matter of only days destroying the Earth and everything else in our solar system. When Dr Shepard disappears, his prophecy materialises as enormous solar particles start to land on Earth. Amongst the panic, a group of scientists begin the desperate search for Dr Shepard, while the government scheme to help a small group of civilians escape the coming disaster by furnishing underground bunkers to shield and protect them.
Now, we could say everything in this movie works fine because if they are positing an error in one aspect of our astronomical knowledge for the premise of this film, why not more errors to cover up everything else? But that would not be fun.
They included a shot of Sydney being destroyed. I thought that was nice, the film-makers remembered Australia and decided to include it in the destruction. Then I looked up some material on the film and discovered it was supposedly set in Australia. I'd been confused by the lack of Australian accents, locations, set dressings, demographics, or indeed anything which looked other than American. I mean, excepting shots of places like the Taj Mahal or Korea. Apparently it was actually shot in South Africa using South African actors (and a lot of Americans), which I suppose gives an indication of the attention to detail and consistency here.
...
We, uh, we don't execute people either. Better stop there before I run out of space.
Now, the disaster? Maybe it is not fair to criticise it since... No, we will get there the long way. Let's admit the premise of the disaster, and that alone, say maybe we have the age of the sun wrong. Unfortunately that is still not going to get us a supernova, because our sun has far too little mass for such an event to be part of its undisturbed existence.
If they wanted to be more realistic we might have to worry about an imminent expansion to red giant but perhaps most film-makers have difficulty sustaining tension over thousands of years of story time. They'd have to have that before we would be having a supernova anyway.
Then there were those... solar meteors. They looked a lot like meteorites from Armageddon destroying cities except these supposedly were ejected from the sun. Back before I realised this was supposed to be set in Australia I thought we had a bit of a 'flat world' effect when there appeared to be simultaneous strikes in India, Australia and the United States... but that might have been meant to be Australia too. After a while of that falling the scientist figures pronounced that they'd induce a nuclear winter and render humans extinct even before the supernova.
Bunkers seem a pretty pitiful way to attempt preservation of the species. Even if the planet weren't effectively destroyed by the explosion, humans remain ultimately dependant on sunlight to survive. It would be condemning them to a slow death rather than a swift one.
But we needn't have worried, because it turns out there was a mathematical operator substitution in the equation predicting the sun's revised lifespan and therefore no disaster impending after all. The solar meteors obligingly stopped at this point, and then the nuclear winter was rained out of the sky but not before a family had to fight off a serial killer (awful lot of handguns for Australia, btw).
In conclusion: o.O
I think the most saddening aspect was looking it up on IMDB and finding a couple of posts insisting on the movie's plausibility, one from someone claiming to have an interest in science. At least it is followed by Conan the Barbarian, which has the advantage of being set in a fictional time in a fictional place and not giving me any cause to think it might have been meant to be taken seriously.
Now, we could say everything in this movie works fine because if they are positing an error in one aspect of our astronomical knowledge for the premise of this film, why not more errors to cover up everything else? But that would not be fun.
They included a shot of Sydney being destroyed. I thought that was nice, the film-makers remembered Australia and decided to include it in the destruction. Then I looked up some material on the film and discovered it was supposedly set in Australia. I'd been confused by the lack of Australian accents, locations, set dressings, demographics, or indeed anything which looked other than American. I mean, excepting shots of places like the Taj Mahal or Korea. Apparently it was actually shot in South Africa using South African actors (and a lot of Americans), which I suppose gives an indication of the attention to detail and consistency here.
"We watched for a while before we realised that it wasn't Sydney, it was Capetown and the movie was actually set there. That explains why there were so many black people in 'Sydney', why the paper money was not Australian, why the number plates on all the vehicles were not Aussie and why one of the bad guys had such a weird accent.
Other clues - a quick glimpse of a building with a Dutch name and several long shots over the blasted city showing Table Mountain clearly as a background. "
...
"Negro house maids??? Negro?? Housemaids?? And not just one but two, one for each house"
We, uh, we don't execute people either. Better stop there before I run out of space.
Now, the disaster? Maybe it is not fair to criticise it since... No, we will get there the long way. Let's admit the premise of the disaster, and that alone, say maybe we have the age of the sun wrong. Unfortunately that is still not going to get us a supernova, because our sun has far too little mass for such an event to be part of its undisturbed existence.
If they wanted to be more realistic we might have to worry about an imminent expansion to red giant but perhaps most film-makers have difficulty sustaining tension over thousands of years of story time. They'd have to have that before we would be having a supernova anyway.
Then there were those... solar meteors. They looked a lot like meteorites from Armageddon destroying cities except these supposedly were ejected from the sun. Back before I realised this was supposed to be set in Australia I thought we had a bit of a 'flat world' effect when there appeared to be simultaneous strikes in India, Australia and the United States... but that might have been meant to be Australia too. After a while of that falling the scientist figures pronounced that they'd induce a nuclear winter and render humans extinct even before the supernova.
Bunkers seem a pretty pitiful way to attempt preservation of the species. Even if the planet weren't effectively destroyed by the explosion, humans remain ultimately dependant on sunlight to survive. It would be condemning them to a slow death rather than a swift one.
But we needn't have worried, because it turns out there was a mathematical operator substitution in the equation predicting the sun's revised lifespan and therefore no disaster impending after all. The solar meteors obligingly stopped at this point, and then the nuclear winter was rained out of the sky but not before a family had to fight off a serial killer (awful lot of handguns for Australia, btw).
In conclusion: o.O
I think the most saddening aspect was looking it up on IMDB and finding a couple of posts insisting on the movie's plausibility, one from someone claiming to have an interest in science. At least it is followed by Conan the Barbarian, which has the advantage of being set in a fictional time in a fictional place and not giving me any cause to think it might have been meant to be taken seriously.
