Sunshine – Stupidest Movie Ever

Blurt Alert: if you haven’t seen Sunshine yet, and want to, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.

The film is deeply stupid, possibly one of the worst ever science-fiction movies, one that doesn’t even have the benefit of being hilariously bad. It’s just stupid. Not the concept, that’s fine. They wanted to make a global warming film, they turn it around by having that global cooling, and an irony of fixing global cooling is they have to fly to the sun, turning the film warm again. That’s fine. That humans could build a nuclear bomb that would re-ignite the sun, fine. No, really, I don’t mind that at all, that’s all part of high-concept, no worries. Here’s the plot: Icarus 2 flies to the sun, finds a drifting Icarus 1 on the way. The crew of the Icrarus 2 decided to take a detour to visit Icarus 1. They don’t check their calculations, leaving them to one guy, an expert, who apparently forgets to rotate the craft as well as fly it. Stupid. Stupid they’d fly off-course. Stupid they’d leave it to one guy to navigate (as everyone else minces around the holodeck pontificating). Stupid he’d get something so basic so wrong. So the flying off-course damages the ship, dooming them all. They get to the drifting ship and they board it without security precautions so a crispy lunatic from the first mission comes aboard and bumps them all off one-by-one in the style of Friday the 13th Part VI.

The stupidness of the movie exists only to pad-out an otherwise inexistent movie. Without being stupid, and without lots of button pushing and average special effects shots of the sun, this movie would struggle to make the length of a Fast Show sketch.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. A monster-movie in space, without good monsters. Grrr.

Steaming

Easter isn’t of much interest to a rationalist, other than to wonder why a fictional zombified radical should hold so much sway over the bottom-feeders. Still, if nothing else it gives sane people a well-deserved short holiday. I took a day-trip with Em to Loch Katrine for a surf on the Steamship Sir Walter Scott, a wonderful old 110-footer. Built 1900 she still has the original 3-cylinder triple expansion engine and has two locomotive-type boilers; she is the only surviving screw steamer in regular passenger service in Scotland.

They had a small bar on board (black coffee and a wee dram for me). Later in the nearby town of Callander I picked up a Star Trek Next-Gen Board Game, and a classic-series Role Playing Game, for the princely sum of £3.