Lab Notes
Sunshine Up Our Skirts

Do you want the bad news first, or the good? Veteran director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and writer Alex Garland—the team that brought us the kick-arse Britthriller 28 Days Later—have joined forces again to bring us a movie that gets basically all of its science wrong. What a disappointment!

Sunshine is visually stunning, well cast and well acted, and it has a decent plot that, for the most part, makes logical sense. There's no doubt that Boyle is a great director, and Garland at least a very capable writer. So how hard could it be to, you know, take rewrite advice from someone knowledgeable before committing 20 million English pounds to production? The usual argument here is that these geek things don't matter, because most people can't tell the difference. What a load of baloney.

First of all, there are millions of geeks—engineers, scientists and armchair technology buffs—around the world who understand at least the basics of spaceflight and solar physics. Secondly, for a movie with such hard-tech visuals, people like this are actually the core audience. Would Alex Garland write a movie about dancing that ignored the wisdom of professional dancers? Would he give short shrift to horses, or drag racing, or emergency medicine, or anything else? The third thing, and possibly the most important, is that even a lay audience can usually tell the difference between authentic jargon and spur-of-the-moment bullplop. In fact, it's mainly the right brain, not the left, that detects lies and B.S. in our daily lives, so non-geeks may actually hold an advantage here.

Anyway, there actually was a physicist consulting on the project, but on the film's official Web site Boyle admitted that "in the end you have to abandon certain elements and just go for what is dramatically effective." This may be true up to a point, and in all fairness there were probably even more egregious errors that actually did get fixed. But it seems foolish to employ half-measures when the story could be just as dramatic and entertaining—and a lot less irritating—with its facts straight. It must also take a weird combination of arrogance and laziness to assume the science-fiction audience is that stupid, so shame on you, Danny and Alex. In fact, shame on the movie business in general. Listen to your science advisors! Unfortunately, Sunshine's poor showing at the box office will likely convince the studios that outer-space movies aren't popular anymore, when in fact it's bullplop that people don't like. Sigh.

The death of stars is in the details

Specifics? Well, all right.

Stars do not run on "fissionable material," and even a uranium bomb the size of Manhattan wouldn't have a measurable effect on the sun's temperature or energy output. A load of hydrogen would make more sense, but even there you'd need a trillion trillion tons of it (the mass of 10,000,000,000,000 Manhattans) to increase the sun's brightness by 0.1 percent. It would be much better to say the payload was full of antimatter, or better yet, to say nothing at all about how it was supposed to cure the sun's ills. Less is often more, and in science fiction there's always room for unspecified future technology.

For that matter, stars don't die in the manner described by protagonist Capa (Cillian Murphy), who is supposedly an astrophysicist. They don't get dimmer and smaller over time. Rather, as they use up their hydrogen fuel, they switch to helium, which "burns" at a higher temperature. This causes the star to expand to a thousand times its previous volume, and while its total energy output rises sharply, its surface temperature actually drops, causing its color to shift from yellow to red. Unless our understanding of nuclear physics is totally wrong, this is the fate of our sun, to become a "red giant" that swallows and incinerates the inner planets of our solar system. But don't worry: This isn't scheduled to happen for another 4 or 5 billion years. Meanwhile, our biggest worry is that the sun might go nova, i.e., that instabilities or cosmic collisions could trigger a massive explosion and throw off a shell of hot plasma that would boil Earth's oceans and kill off its biosphere. But this is also unlikely. In fairness to Alex Garland, it sounds as though some better explanations were actually written and filmed, but were edited out by Boyle.

But what about those space suits? The gold color means they're designed to absorb infrared light—a poor choice indeed, since half the sun's output is in that part of the spectrum. And what's up with that narrow eye slit? It limits the astronauts' vision while also allowing enough sunlight in to blind and incinerate them if they aren't careful. If it were up to me, the space suits would be made of the same tough, highly reflective material as the solar shield—probably aluminized tungsten, backed with silica aerogel and cooled with tubes of circulating fluid hooked up to a heat exchanger, not unlike the radiator in your car engine. Too, instead of a window or visor they'd have specially designed cameras on the outside of the helmet and video displays on the inside. Wrapped in this sort of silvery, man-shaped cocoon, the astronauts could easily withstand temperatures of several thousand degrees for at least a few minutes. You'd need a heat-resistant airlock, too, because the suits might be red-hot when they came back inside, but that's OK. That's doable. Conversely, people do dot freeze instantly when exposed to the vacuum of space!

Musing over a matter of gravity

Don't get me started about artificial gravity. Traditionally, movies have employed this crutch because fake zero-gravity effects are never very convincing, and because filming in actual zero gravity has required the help of NASA, whose cooperation has been difficult to arrange and has carried a hefty price tag. However, since 2004 Zero Gravity Corporation has been offering parabolic flights in the style of NASA's "Vomit Comet," each arc serving up 30 seconds of stomach-fluttery weightlessness in the spacious padded cabin of a Boeing 727. Like a baseball thrown really hard, the plane follows a 100-mile parabolic arc between 25,000 and 35,000 feet. Since the trajectory is perfectly ballistic, anything inside the plane is flying (or falling) right along with it, resulting in a flawless—because real—sensation of zero gravity. The retail cost—without any prior negotiation—is less than $4,000 per person per day, and the aircraft is specifically set up to accommodate movie sets. James Cameron spent $41 million filming The Abyss underwater—actually underwater—and while the actors hated it, the box office loved it. For a mere million or so, Danny Boyle could have filmed his entire movie in actual weightlessness.

For even less money, DNA Films could have designed the sets and CGI models such that the crew quarters were in rotating sections of the ship, which would easily generate enough centrifugal force to mimic the effects of gravity. This is a no-brainer, people. Instead, Sunshine presents us with a very long, very skinny spaceship—like a submarine on steroids—with a completely Earthlike sense of up and down that persists even when the power fails, the life support dies, the mainframe computer shuts down and overstressed crew members start running amok with sharp objects. This could have been cured with just a few minutes of weightless filming, for less money than a day of on-set catering. Here at the dawn of commercial human spaceflight, there's really no excuse.

Speaking of the mainframe, what kind of idiot designs a mission to save the world in which the critical payload can be activated only by a single big, fragile, somewhat snooty-minded computer? If I were building this thing, there'd be a hundred failsafe mechanisms throughout the ship, and a big red button every 50 feet that said LAUNCH BOMB INTO SUN. It's too bad. Sunshine could have been a truly great movie, about human frailty and squabbling in the face of overwhelming cosmic forces. In fact, it is a great movie—just a deeply, badly flawed one.

Now for the good news.

These flaws are fixable in post. Most of the problems exist purely in the dialogue, and none of them are actually central to the plot. So when the DVD is released, it could include not only the deleted scenes, but an alternate soundtrack or subtitle track in the "language" of correct science, and an "alternate camera angle" where a few minutes of offending visuals have been reshot, re-created in computer graphics or simply left blank. We could even hope for—nay, demand!—a complete Release 2.0 of this movie, where the problems are fixed, the promise is lived up to and the audience—you and I and everyone else who ever loved science fiction—can add another treasure to our short, short list of movies that dare to get it right.

Hey, I can dream.

Sources:
Keighren, Jon: "Manchester scientist helps bring Sunshine to the big screen", Innovations Report, March 27, 2007
Zero Gravity Corporation web site: www.gozerog.com
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): Red Giant, The Abyss
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): Sunshine
Glover, Thomas J.: Pocket Ref 3rd edition, Sequoia Publishing, 1989