Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it.
A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne!
Highly recommended, despite never satisfactorily explaining why they require a manned spacecraft to do the job rather than sending a robotic drone ship. Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.
> Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.
We spent the last few years watching robots with state of the art 21st century technology and software crash on the moon repeatedly, and yet, in the 1960s a few hot shot test pilots could stick a landing on their first try. Given the choice between robots and humans, I’ll take the humans.
Counter point: first unmanned US soft landing attempt succeeded 3 years before first manned attempt.
Surveyor 1 - 1966
Apollo 11 - 1969. I bet that NASA learned a lot from 7 unmanned Surveyor missions and that contributed to the success of Apollo 11.
Human ingenuity aside, I wonder if sending humans on missions can offer higher success rates due to higher stakes for all involved (the cost of human life). When we send humans to the Moon, the pressure to get things right is higher and consequences of failure are very dire. Sadly, of course, not a guarantee of success.
The risk vs reward calculation for human-involved missions is necessarily higher than robotic missions.
Is that additional cost an order of magnitude higher? IE, we can afford one and only one human mission, but three robotic missions? Does the math work out in favor of the single high-success mission, or the three slightly lower success missions? Obviously depends on the expected success rate and cost of each.
But, probably why we haven't done a lot with human missions since the 60s.
I am not sure such utilitarian math is the true solution, attempts to put a number on the value of human life seem all silly. I would rather say that the failure of a robotic mission costs an amount X, while the failure of a human mission intuitively has infinite price.
Conversely setting human life to infinity cost quickly breaks down with the trolley problem. Any problem where groups a or b are going to die then whatever group is bigger lives, even if it doesn't make sense, such as group b is all very old and group a is very young but slightly smaller.
Trolley problems are an exercise in utilitarianism and maybe generally consequentialism. If those are your views, then you can probably put a number on it. Other views are available, however. (See sibling mentioning deontology.)
To be fair, it's not really a breakdown of the trolley problem. It's the point of the trolley problem. Setting the value of a human life to infinity basically gives you deontology, in that both outcomes are approximately equally bad, and thus your choosing to get involved at all is unethical.
> in the 1960s a few hot shot test pilots could stick a landing on their first try.
Ha you mean the most costly, engineering first and politicized science and engineering endeavor ever attempted, and even though it was some kind of little miracle ?
Read about missions like gemini 9. Its a sheer stroke of luck the moon mission worked, it could have easily failed and there would have been no rescue.
I didn’t want to pipe up right when it happened with my non-expertise but seriously, that Odysseus lander seemed liked a pretty dumb design. Of course it tipped over. Come on
I am also an armchair expert but I've played enough KSP to know that their design could have worked, but they would have needed to really stick the landing. Or add enough reaction wheels so it could self-right.
> that Odysseus lander seemed liked a pretty dumb design
It was built thin and tall to fit within the Falcon 9 fairing. It didn't have extending legs because these would have become possible points of failure. The crash happened because the altimeter wasn't working, which IIRC was due to a pre-launch assembly error. As a result Odysseus landed outside the safe operating parameters of the landing legs.
> despite never satisfactorily explaining why they require a manned spacecraft to do the job rather than sending a robotic drone ship. Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.
As a software engineer, this statement baffles my mind. like how could anyone in right mind trust software to make right choices in prod on first try?
No, but manned mission can override software if unexpected scenarios are encountered. You can't expect software team on earth to account for all possibilities for a first time mission.
Software can be tested for individual operation. But can't be relied for end to end co-ordination.
All the controls they have use software to do work. Its not like a car you can’t rebuild your engine or jerry rig a solution yourself in outer space. If things don’t go as planned usually people just die, heroic MacGyverism is for hollywood.
Every now and then I listen to the music for Capa's jump, then I have to watch the video, then I get all emotional. And the ending never fails to bring a tear to my eye. Amazing film.
Somehow knowing the secret to Murphy's acting in that scene (Boyle secretly got a crew member to sit on his back) and having that objectively hilarious image in mind while watching it doesn't diminish the effect appreciably, which is remarkable!
"adding humans to the mix" is not the most unrealistic thing by far, in that uneven film. The basic premise (suns do not forget to shine one day) and proposed fix (any human efforts would be of insignificant scale compared to a sun) take that honour. The third act of the film is a runner-up.
Most sci-fi films (heck, most films) require some level of suspension of disbelief. If you're unable to do that you'll find it hard to enjoy much at all. Do Marvel films seem realistic to you? Star Wars? Star Trek? Cartoons?
I watch a lot of sci-fi films and read a lot of sci-fi books - because I enjoy it when it's any good, so I don't need suspension of disbelief explained to me at all, thanks.
I personally found this specific film not deserving of being called a "great example" of anything. It's at best a plodding, uneven, middling example of something, IDK what. Yes, I know that your milage may vary, but this film's status baffles me and others https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39917027
If anything, calling parts of it "good" and other parts "original" is generous. Most of it is neither. Perhaps if you just haven't seen or read that much, then some of it appears novel and good?
It is not trying to be the same genre at all as Marvel or Star Wars fantasy films - some of which succeed on their own terms. Unlike "Sunshine". So that straw man distraction question is irrelevant.
These two articles in American Cinematographer (1 and 2) give some interesting background on the movie; concerning the ship they write:
> When it first appears onscreen, the Event Horizon craft itself resembles a giant crucifix hovering over the surface of Neptune. "The spaceship was built on a cruciform, like all cathedrals are," Anderson explains. "We began the design process by literally scanning [photos of] the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the computer and then constructing the Event Horizon out of those Gothic elements. For example, the big thruster engines are an adaptation of the Notre Dame towers, repositioned on their sides. A lot of the iron and steel work of the superstructure is based on the cathedral's stained-glass windows. The ship also has a lot of triptych windows and big recessed crosses.
> "When Adrian and I first sat down, we said, 'Let's do something completely different,"' says Anderson. "Since we were going into outer space, I felt we had to have a really strong design concept; otherwise Event Horizon would have ended up looking like [a bunch of] other movies cobbled together. We spent a lot of time coming up with a design concept, which we called 'techno-Medieval.' When the lights are on, everything looks very technological and very spaceship-like. But when the lights go off and the haunting begins, you start looking at the shapes, and the architecture is actually very medieval. We extended that techno-Medieval design idea into as many aspects of the picture's look as possible, without rubbing the audience's nose in it."
TL;DR — I agree wholeheartedly and thanks for the chance to blather about a fictional universe I really enjoy, also a huge wall of text about Event Horizon as a ‘prequel’ showing an interesting division within the 40K fandom.
I agree so hard that I would upvote your comment a thousand times if I could. This fan originated ‘prequel’ to the 40k universe is absolutely perfect in both aesthetic and tone.
But I think, despite the wide support this concept has, it displays a really interesting view into some large tonal changes in the fandom and published materials and attitudes. Within the 40k fandom I think there are a group of fans (mostly older now and less involved in the hobby) that disagree with Event Horizon as a ‘prequel’. It is an interesting dichotomy between what 40k has been since the late 90’s and what it was at its start and during its early editions.
Early fans, in the discourse I have seen online and in older GW periodicals, really focused on the political satire and the somewhat eclectic humorous undertones (and often overtones). The tongue-in-cheek demonization of the human faction, via making them so crazily over-the-top authoritarian, WWII-type theocratic fascists, is clearly pitched as a caricature of the then super powerful right wing party, under Thatcher and her ilk. The other factions had less direct satirical targets, but, as an example, the Orcs power of ‘be stupid but believe and results will follow’ can be seen as a critique of the apparent lack of intellectual curiosity and focus on conformity present in the UK, or as a statement on the semi-‘Cargo Cult’ mentality around the rising hyper-consumerism that was beginning to be pushed on the public by plutocrats. There are plenty of other broad and specific satirical or openly political commentary throughout the 80’s material, especially in White Dwarf supplemental writing.
However, then there are the fans that came into the hobby in the late-middle and late 90’s and up til present day. 40k has been a cornerstone, forerunner, and standard bearer for Grimdark(tm) for nearly the last 30 years. This block of fans (by far those most active in the hobby, particularly the lore/fluff/art creation and discussion) absolutely sees Event Horizon as being a perfect fit for 40K. The days of satire are long past, now the factions and characters in the setting are nearly played straight as examples of their respective stereotypes and associated tropes in genre fiction. Granted, 40k established a good portion of the grimdark tropes, but it has remained steadfast in utilizing and somewhat revising those trappings of the genre without apology.
Where 80’s 40K would have by now been lampshading everything in the setting and potentially altering fluff to better satirize the current global political and societal milieu, the current fandom and GW itself are committing to playing the universe out.
I love 40K and think both perspectives have merit, but at the end of the day 40K is still my vibe no matter which side of this divide I may find myself.
To me the silliness of Event Horizon fits the tone of 40K well. People who decided it's supposed to be taken seriously seem the same as those who don't realise Batman isn't a serious way to attack crime or that Judge Dredd isn't an endorsement of militarised police.
This is why I'll pay Relic but not Talisman, the Talisman game is very silly, but Relic sets it in the 40K universe where it makes sense. Or rather, it makes no less sense than everything else.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
I thought Don't Look Up was pretty solid satire. It's not quite so obvious at first, but by the time of the post-credits scenes they really hammer the point home and I found it very funny.
Don’t look up is in position 3 on my ‘to-be-watched’. I’m holding out hope that it is good. I know it is supposed to be a comedy, but I haven’t seen someone fully commit to it being hard satire.
“We began designing the spaceship by scanning the Notre-Dame Cathedral” is an example of exactly the right kind of non-spoiler spoiler, one that doesn’t ruin the film but only makes me interested in watching it.
Yes! And then I'd follow up Event Horizon with Pandorum. Perhaps not quite as good or as well-known as the other two, but still clever and worth watching.
"Beyond the Sea" (the Black Mirror episode) had a similar problem: 2 astronauts are working in a spaceship and they can regularly go back to their families using some very advanced technology (VR, humanoid robots, etc.). Why are they not using that technology to "work from home"?
Let me just say that I fully disagree, the movie was plodding and preachy and boring up until the "twist" when it got TERRIBLE.
I cannot believe the number of people who have said that its a good movie, the entire movie required a suspension of disbelief far and away of what I am willing to give.
I remember seeing reddit users recommend it as a great scifi film in 2012. I watched it and was horribly disappointed - it’s “the core” in space with a space zombie.
I guess people like sucking down wet farts for 2 hours. Who am I to stop them?
Agreed. The premise was astoundingly silly, and the plot was "both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good". I really do not know why some people rate this film so highly.
A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne!
Highly recommended, despite never satisfactorily explaining why they require a manned spacecraft to do the job rather than sending a robotic drone ship. Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.