According to the director, Boyle, the film is about "what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe." (The Guardian) I read that interview of Boyle's after I had seen the film, and I thought, what??? The Sun is the creator of all things in the universe? That's a distortion of the fact that the Sun makes life possible on Earth.
The story was written by Alex Garland, who also wrote The Island. I don't believe the film was ultimately well thought out in terms of theology or physics. It really came across as a try-hard sci-fi spirituality film, despite Boyle's attempt at presenting the sun as the "giver of life" and "source of all knowledge" (from The Guardian also). The main problem was that this premise is not a widely accepted cultural idea in our world today. Given that fact, you would need to present this idea very well in the film. And that was definitely not achieved - the sun was a potentially dangerous but predictable and passive (in the sense that its state did not change without impetus from human intervention) power. Even the final scene of "awakening" of Capa character was more like an MTV moment than a spiritual vision. All of a sudden, because a HUMAN BEING created a bomb that reignited the sun, the subsequent surge in power of the Sun is suddenly supposed to be spiritual and godly? The comparisons to 2001 were quite offensive. Where was the acknowledgement of the human's intelligence and technological efforts in making it happen? Because that factor was pretty much the ENTIRE story of the film.
Also, being an avid sci-fi fan, a lot of things about this film just did not make sense. If ICARUS II was short on oxygen, what was the engineer and rose byrne's character doing in the penultimate scene, running around inside the massive bomb container without oxygen masks? Looks like they had plenty of oxygen to spare to me.
And why send only one person who could set off the bomb? They "mined the earth" for the resources to make the bomb but out of a crew of eight, only one person was trained to set it off/manage it? Totally implausible.
In short, lots of holes and ultimately not very well thought-out.
The story was written by Alex Garland, who also wrote The Island. I don't believe the film was ultimately well thought out in terms of theology or physics. It really came across as a try-hard sci-fi spirituality film, despite Boyle's attempt at presenting the sun as the "giver of life" and "source of all knowledge" (from The Guardian also). The main problem was that this premise is not a widely accepted cultural idea in our world today. Given that fact, you would need to present this idea very well in the film. And that was definitely not achieved - the sun was a potentially dangerous but predictable and passive (in the sense that its state did not change without impetus from human intervention) power. Even the final scene of "awakening" of Capa character was more like an MTV moment than a spiritual vision. All of a sudden, because a HUMAN BEING created a bomb that reignited the sun, the subsequent surge in power of the Sun is suddenly supposed to be spiritual and godly? The comparisons to 2001 were quite offensive. Where was the acknowledgement of the human's intelligence and technological efforts in making it happen? Because that factor was pretty much the ENTIRE story of the film.
Also, being an avid sci-fi fan, a lot of things about this film just did not make sense. If ICARUS II was short on oxygen, what was the engineer and rose byrne's character doing in the penultimate scene, running around inside the massive bomb container without oxygen masks? Looks like they had plenty of oxygen to spare to me.
And why send only one person who could set off the bomb? They "mined the earth" for the resources to make the bomb but out of a crew of eight, only one person was trained to set it off/manage it? Totally implausible.
In short, lots of holes and ultimately not very well thought-out.
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