Out Of This World

Holy crap, that was fantastic last night! The surprises came from way out of left field. The effects were simply staggering – although of course it was the human drama that came first and foremost. And the last line:

“I know where it is, and I’m going to take us there.”

left me exhausted by it’s sheer audacity.

Oh, I’m sorry... Did you think I was talking about the new series of Doctor Who?

Well I did catch it. But first I watched, Crossroads, Part Two, the third season finale of Battlestar Galactica again in preparation for the inevitable.

Also on last night and worth mentioning, BBC2’s The Culture Show saw film critic Mark Kermode catch up with Danny Boyle to talk about his new film Sunshine. Written by Alex Garland, the movie follows a team of astronauts as they attempt to reignite the dying sun with a massive nuclear bomb.


The pair were filmed in The Sun (oh, tee-hee) on Long Acre, which was one of my locals back when I was at The Esteemed School of Art. Over a game of pool, Kermode asked Boyle how, given the subject matter, he managed to avoid referencing the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Alien, Silent Running and even Event Horizon.

Boyle likened the genre to a narrow corridor filled with these earlier films. His job, as the director, was to negotiate a way down the corridor steadfastly avoiding some while gently brushing up against others in homage. Which explained everything. Watching the revived Doctor Who it's clearly apparent that the writing team found that exact same corridor and have been barrelling down it these past few years, gobbled up everything in sight to regurgitate into their scripts.

As an aside, one thing Kermode and Boyle didn’t discuss was the name of the spaceship in Sunshine, which The Governess brought up in a comment a couple of posts back.

Imagine a meeting with the spaceship designers, mission commanders, payload specialists and everyone else brought on board to reignite the sun. There they all are, sitting around the table planning the finer points of the mission when someone pipes up that the ship should be called Icarus.

Icarus? As in flew too close to the sun and died Icarus? Rather that decide that was an absolutely bonzer idea, wouldn’t they drag him outside and beat him with rocks before getting back to the job at hand?