Stardust

Hi everyone,

and welcome back to the Faculty of Horror

podcasting from

the horrid halls of academia.

I'm Alex West with

Andrea Subizadi

And we are back this month,

and this month we are reaching out to

the farthest limitations of our known

universe with two really epic sci-fi

horror

films.

They are really epic. They

are like the cream of sci-fi horror,

I dare

say, with the exception of maybe Alien,

which we've already covered.

But these movies attack the sci-fi/horror

mashup genre in a very specific way,

and there's similarities and there's

differences,

but I think they're a great pairing to

watch

together and talk about together.

And I think they're an interesting thing

to do a couple months after we

tackled John Carpenter's The Thing,

which is of course one of the

big horror films from the 1980s.

And then going ahead to, uh, the

first film we're gonna talk about,

Event Horizon, which is in 1997, and

then the next film we're gonna talk about,

Sunshine, which is in 2007.

So we're kind of leaping over the decades

with science fiction

horror and what it has to offer,

and I think that's really cool, especially

where The Thing was so situated on Earth

and

embroiled in men's dilemma,

and now we're going into this kind

of larger dilemma of humanity-

Mm-hmm

... and what it means to be human

and what it doesn't mean to be human.

Yeah.

So I feel like to get into this

discussion, a

conversation about these terms

and these genres is

in order.

I think it's actually kind of a hot button

topic right now.

I'm seeing a lot of stuff on social media

about what is and what isn't

horror, and it seems to me that horror

is doing very well right

now,

and what always tends to come along with

that is as soon as a

movie does really well in the genre,

there's discussion about whether or not

it's even horror.

And it's a ridiculous debate as

far as I'm concerned.

I find these lines between genres really

arbitrary for the most part. But

when it comes to science fiction and

horror and fantasy,

the lines aren't all that arbitrary,

and the more I dug into it,

I actually found

it kind of interesting.

So science fiction is defined

as being based on an environment that

is similar to ours,

understandable by us,

but with significant technological

or environmental elements that

are different.

And it needn't always be set in the

future.

It needn't always be set in space

or even a high-tech world.

Science fiction can be dystopian

or post-apocalyptic.

But it often involves space

or time travel, as these are great

unknowns.

But what's really important to science

fiction is it has to be sort

of plausible, and a great example of

that is

Frankenstein. You know,

bringing a body to life with electricity

has never been done as far as we know,

but we know what electricity is.

We know what life and death are. Uh,

we know that electricity's happening

in the body in some capacity, so,

so it's a scientific

stretch that we can kind of get behind.

Now,

sci-fi needs to be internally coherent

while having

some continuity with the real world,

as I was just saying.

Fantasy isn't restrained by that.

It only needs to be internally coherent,

and it can be as implausible

as it wants to be,

as long as it makes sense within its own

universe.

And then horror is situated in the

plausible before something

disrupts that order from within,

driving the terror.

So it can be either the technology

that fails us or human beings

faltering amidst all this technology,

which I'm sure we're going to get

into. Horror and sci-fi

are a favorite mashup of mine

because I really like the thoughtfulness

of speculative fiction, and it really...

I feel like it chases the shadows

that science tries to

illuminate.

Mm.

And both of these films suggest

that even if we were to conquer space

and time,

there's so much darkness beyond

that still needs to be reckoned

with. Now, I don't know

if we've ever talked about Star Trek

between the two

of us. Have we?

I don't think so.

Uh, do you watch it?

Um,

I probably watched Next Generation a bit

when I was a kid.

I watched Next Generation a ton when I

was a kid.

It was on at 6:30 PM every single

weeknight, and it

so happened that the first episode

that I gave a chance,

and Trekkies listening

are gonna love this,

is it's the episode where Tasha Yar dies,

and

when she dies she has a... She

was a pretty major character, so it was,

like,

felt within the show,

and she has this elaborate funeral scene

where

she has recorded a hologram of herself

saying goodbye to everybody.

And so she goes through the crew one by

one and kind of introduces them.

It, it was in-

introducing them to me very much as a

first-time viewer, and I was

like, "Okay, here we go," and I

was obsessed.

And I kind of dropped off at Deep Space

Nine because it was a very

political drama that I couldn't really get

into, but it's all on Netflix right

now, so I've recently revisited it,

and I plowed through Deep Space Nine,

and I'm in the middle of Voyager right

now, and I just love

science fiction narratives.

I love how speculative they are,

and I've actually done some research on

the sociology of science

fiction and how sociology

is kind of informed by science fiction

narratives,

as it forces us to think of things

that we're not

dealing with right now because we

couldn't, but they're bridges that we'd

necessarily have to cross should this

technology come to pass.

That's interesting because I did a bit of

research for this episode looking

into nihilism in science fiction,

because between the thing

that we just recently talked about

and these two films,

there's so much nihilism in them.

Super nihilism.

And it's dark, and it's unrepenting,

and it

feels really suffocating at some points,

which I kinda like.

Like, I like things that are

that boldly dark.

So I was reading this article, and it

was in the Smithsonian Magazine, so we can

link this in the show notes, and

it was talking about the kind of

nihilistic downturn

of science fiction and how at its best,

it's something like Star Trek, which is

about exploring new worlds,

making allegiances,

learning things, bettering ourselves-

Mm-hmm

... through the notion of exploration

and discovery.

But how we lost the will to inspire a next

generation, so to

speak, of scientists and STEM learning

and all

of these things when we just produce

nihilistic elements.

Mm-hmm.

And it didn't really kinda come down on

one side or the other.

It was probably kind of leaning towards

nihilism is maybe not so great for our

overall psyche. But I, I, I just think

there's so many great things about shows

like Star Trek,

even things like Star Wars

or what have you, that deal with the

hopefulness. But I think

if you're a realist, like I'm

sure a lot of you

are out there because you love horror

films [laughs] , there's

also so much darkness in this world.

So you kind of have to temper the two.

Mm-hmm.

It's not all gonna be like, I don't know,

Worf hanging out with Deanna Troi.

Yeah.

[laughs] God.

Even though they were a great couple-

No they weren't

... from what I remember. They weren't?

I don't think so.

Oh, then I remembered incorrectly.

Ah, man.

Was she meant to be with Riker?

No. She was meant to be alone forever.

No-

... it, it's, it's not her. It, it's,

it's Worf getting all these hotties and

having them, "Oh, come on, Worf,

experience a single emotion other than

toxic masculinity." And him being like,

"No."

He really drives me nuts.

And I hear what you're saying.

Like, The Next Generation

is so almost cloyingly

optimistic. Like,

no matter how brutal the storyline is,

it always

ends with a nice bow. Deep Space Nine

was more political, so

there was more kind of difficult

decisions.

And then Voyager right now,

which I'm watching, and

if you're not familiar with the

setup, they are lost in space. They

are lost in the deepest reaches of

space,

and they are having to make impossible,

horrible

decisions. And amid all this,

there's the first TV Star Trek

captain who is female,

and so she has to deal with kind of

people undermining her

and asserting herself as a female

leader. It's fascinating,

and I have a feeling I'm gonna [laughs]

bring up an

episode or two when we get into these

things.

But, uh, let's get into them.

All right. Well,

the first film we're gonna talk about

is Paul W.

S. Anderson's Event Horizon.

So he had just come right off of Mortal

Kombat. It was pre-Resident Evil.

Let's get into it. 1997's Event Horizon.

At 03:00 this morning,

TDRS picked up an automated navigation

beacon

broadcasting at two-minute intervals in

Neptune orbit.

In Neptune orbit.

[ominous music] This is incredible.

It's the Event Horizon.

She's come back.

The Event Horizon

was the culmination of a secret government

project to create a

spacecraft capable of faster than light

flight.

The ship doesn't really go faster than

light.

What it does is it creates a dimensional

gateway that allows it to

jump instantaneously from one point of the

universe to another light-years away.

Where's she been for the last seven years,

Doctor?

That's what we're here to find out.

After seven years in deep space.

There were 18 people

on board this ship when it disappeared.

I want them all accounted for.

Opening outer door. [door opening]

It came back abandoned. Any crew?

Negative.

This place is a tomb.

But it didn't come back

alone. [gasps]

Captain Miller,

I've got some problems here.

[lasers firing] This ship has been beyond

the boundaries of our

universe.

Who knows where it's been

and what it's brought back with it.

What was that? What is it? This ship

is reacting to us, and the reactions are

getting stronger.

What are you telling me, that this ship

is alive?

[grunts] And I have such wonderful things

to show you. Oh my God.

[screech] It knows my secrets.

Here, here, here, here, here.

It knows my fears.

[lasers firing] No. [yells] Vacate.

I want off this ship.

She won't let you. [explosion] God

help us.

When a distress signal

is received from the Event Horizon,

a ship that disappeared

seven years before, it

is up to the crew of the Lewis

and Clark ship and

Dr. Weir,

who has joined them for this particular

mission, to investigate

what has happened to this ship in the

intervening years.

Weir reveals that he

is the architect of the Event Horizon

and tells the crew about

its experimental gravity drive, which

was meant to revolutionize space

travel by condensing the space between two

points.

The crew boards the Event Horizon

and things become increasingly odd with

crew members having violent

and realistic visions.

The crew soon discovers that

when attempting its initial jump,

the Event

Horizon somehow passed through a hell

dimension and has become sentient,

destroying the Event Horizon's initial

crew, and now is determined to

destroy the crew of the Lewis and Clark,

claiming it as its new crew.

The crew decides to blow up the hyperdrive

and escape.

The visions take control of Weir,

who becomes bent on taking the crew to

hell with the Event Horizon

while killing them off one by one.

The Lewis and Clark's captain, Miller,

sacrifices himself,

allowing the few remaining crew members to

escape in the lifeboat

part of the Event Horizon,

although who knows how much they actually

escaped.

So this is a weird, pulpy,

strange, out there film. It is

kind of big and bombastic and Hollywood,

but it is

also much more cerebral than you would

expect, I think, in a

lot of these situations, and I like

that it has that,

that dichotomy of being really over the

top in so many

ways,

but dealing with really deep personal

trauma-

Mm-hmm

... in a lot of other ways.

Mm-hmm. And full disclosure, Alex

and I recently did

a gig.

Yeah.

Let's call it a gig.

We had a gig at Queen's University,

where a listener of

ours is a PhD candidate

and a graduate student, and his name is

Dan,

and he invited us out to talk to his film

studies class.

He teaches a course on horror

and contemporary horror, and

so we decided to talk about Event Horizon.

We knew that we were gonna be covering it

in an upcoming episode.

We knew that it's the kind of film

that the younger generation

might not be aware of,

'cause I don't know about you,

I only saw this

film for the first time within the past

five years, I think.

I place the timeline in the last five

years because I was bartending at Nocturne

on

Queen Street West at the time,

and the party was called Event Horizon,

and there

was, like, big monitors behind me.

So I'm bartending away,

and every so often I would glance behind

me and I would

see Weir with his eyes cut out,

and I would see this space

travel, and I would see Julie Richardson,

and I'd be like, "What is this film

and how have I not seen it?"

And I checked it out right away and I

was like, "Wow,

how did this get past me?"

I think I saw it pretty soon after it came

out.

Like, I feel like, um,

the TBS SuperStation that we got here in

Toronto showed a really cut-down version

of it.

Okay.

Um,

so I probably caught it on TV several

times, eventually rented it, so I

saw as much of the final cut as exists-

Mm-hmm

... the theatrical release. And, um,

I've always kind of harbored a soft spot

for it, and it's one of those films that

the older I got,

the more into the community I got, I

was really heartened to

know that it has such a big cult

following-

Mm-hmm

... and that it has a lot of love for it.

Um,

and that's kind of one of the things

that was interesting about doing this

Queen's

talk, when I kinda said to this, you know,

group of, I think they were third-

and fourth-year students, like, "Hey,

so it's cool to watch a contemporary

horror

film," and then realize

that I don't think any of them had been

born in 1997.

No. No,

they definitely didn't consider it

contemporary.

That, that was a sobering moment.

Uh-huh.

Um, and I think it was also...

I'm glad we showed that

because they had been watching in this

horror course a lot of

great horror classics like Carrie, Get

Out, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, uh,

Silence of the Lambs, all of these

things because they

were really focusing on gender

and race and a kind of

intersectional approach to horror-

Mm-hmm

... uh, which is super, super cool.

So rad.

So then to show them Event Horizon

and be like, "This is also part of the

canon."

Yeah.

"This is also part of it." You can go as

highbrow as, you know,

Carrie and Get Out,

but we also live in a space where it is

pulpy, populous fun.

Mm-hmm.

And we can pull just as interesting

insights out of it, and they were

totally on board. They

were such a bright group-

Mm

... and they really charged my brain,

so to speak.

Mm.

Like, oh yeah, it

was cool to dip into that world again.

Yeah. So I think it's interesting that,

um,

Paul W. S. Anderson,

he talks quite openly about how much

freedom he had with this

film.

Mm-hmm.

And that he had just come off of Mortal

Kombat,

and which was his second film after his

first film, Shopping.

And Mortal Kombat was a huge success.

Mm-hmm.

It did really, really well, and he was

looking for something quite dark.

He and his producing partner,

they wanted to do something dark

and fucked up and

really kinda change the tone,

because Mortal Kombat

is really like a kids'

film-

Mm

... essentially. And so what they did

was they kind of put a call out.

They eventually found this script called

Event Horizon, and it

had some similarities to what we see on

screen, but it was about this

ship that traveled through a dimension

and came back, and the crew that went

to go to save them, they

were having visions and things were going

wrong, and they couldn't quite explain it.

And then in the end, it

was this big tentacled alien

monster-

Mm-hmm

... that was doing all of it.

And what Paul W. S.

Anderson wanted to do

was strip it back and create something

along the lines of The Shining

or The Haunting,

and create that kind of terror in space,

but really make it a haunted

house film-

Mm-hmm

... in space. And what I like about

that is it really ratchets

up that tension, you know?

There's always that sense of, um,

if you're in a haunted

house film, just run out of the house.

Mm-hmm.

And a lot of haunted house films

and ghost films tackle that by, you know,

making

the ghost omnipresent

or however they wanna do it.

But here it's...

You know,

they really explore the tension of space.

Yeah.

Inside you are safe.

In a space suit you are safe.

But don't let yourself get out of

that airlock, Justin.

Oh, yeah. Justin. [laughs]

Hang on, baby bear.

So it's... I actually thought it

was quite a smart decision to take a

lot of the themes and tropes

that they were appreciating from other

subgenres-

Mm-hmm

... and mold them into something new,

and by doing so- I think

that's why Event Horizon still feels quite

fresh and unexpected-

Mm-hmm

... in a lot of ways,

because there isn't a clear-cut answer-

Right

... in the end of what this thing is.

No, indeed. I mean,

you could call them plot holes.

You could definitely call them plot holes,

and I- I've only identified them at,

looking at this film as deeply as I have,

both for that Queens talk and for this

episode.

It doesn't really subscribe to the rules

of science fiction that I was

talking about.

It doesn't really follow its own rules

that it lays out, which

we're gonna get into in a little bit.

But at the same time, it is so watchable,

it is so much fun.

There's very interesting themes going on,

and I think in stripping away

the monster,

it just really lended so much emphasis to

the

atmosphere and the architecture of the

ship, which

are unparalleled. The Lewis and Clark

and the Event

Horizon have really Gothic,

crazy architecture, a- and

yet you go along with it. You're like,

"Okay, that's science that I don't

understand, so that exists there,

and it looks like that,

and that's just fine."

Yeah, and even in the set design,

you know, Paul W.S.

Anderson worked with a young production

designer, and they really wanted

that Gothic feel. I mean,

the Event Horizon is designed very similar

to, uh, Notre Dame Cathedral.

Yeah, those vaulted ceilings.

The vaulted ceilings, but even, like,

the long body and the-

Mm

... pods and-

Mm-hmm

... the way it's all laid out.

And what's great about that is visually,

even if you don't have

that knowledge of it's Notre Dame

Cathedral, um, it

does look like an inverted cross.

Mm-hmm.

Or a regular cross, depending on

which angle it's shot from.

Yeah.

And it's, it's just a nice visual cue

that you

get.

Yeah.

And even, um,

throughout the sloped ceilings

of the, of the spaceship and, um,

even that window, like the kind of

clear glass that looks like a cross.

Mm-hmm.

And that's one of the opening images,

is this lifeless body.

You don't quite know what it is yet,

like floating in air and, like,

it looks like

Jesus on a cross.

Mm-hmm.

So I think the themes,

which we'll get into soon,

of Catholicism and

Catholic guilt are so at the forefront of

this film.

Yes.

And it's, to me, a film about guilt

and regret

and figuring out how to make amends.

Yeah. Which is kind of hilarious,

because this film, again, similarly

to The Thing, was a huge box office flop,

was a huge

production nightmare.

The story behind this is it's the, it's

the same studio that was making Titanic,

and Titanic was its own

production nightmare. James Cameron

was James Cameroning out all over

everything, and it was delayed.

And so they had this budget, but Event

Horizon had a very abbreviated timeframe

with which to

shoot and edit. And

when we're talking about a science fiction

film where there's

space and some pretty, I don't know,

some pretty high-tech special

effects stuff going on at the time,

that time was

really crunched, and it shows. It's,

it's part of the

reason why this film feels a little bit

uneven.

It, it's one of the imperfections that in,

in my opinion, is easily

overlooked for the overall creativity of

the film, but they're there.

We should also mention

that the original cut of the film

was 130 minutes long, and

that screened for test audiences

who hated it.

The test audiences saw a version that

had...

The visual effects weren't all finished.

The music wasn't all finished,

but that's not what drove them nuts.

It was the gore. It was the violent, sexy,

Hellraisery

sequences that they didn't like.

And so the final cut that we

know was cut down from 130 minutes to 95

minutes,

which excised not only some of the gore,

but also a bunch of the story and

tension. And Anderson himself,

if you hear him talk about this

film,

he expresses great regret at the fact

that he was

promised that this excised footage would

wind up on the DVD,

and it was lost.

It's interesting to hear Anderson talk

about this film in particular

because overall he's quite an eloquent

guy.

He speaks quite passionately

and fondly about almost any of his films

that he's

involved in, which is frankly, I think,

what you want from a director.

But in this one, um, when I

was watching all the making ofs

and the amount he

divulged about this-

Mm-hmm

...

he still speaks about the film with great

affection.

Mm-hmm.

It's not the film he necessarily wanted in

the end,

but he still really likes this film.

Mm-hmm.

And he's still proud to put his name

and his effort and time behind it.

Yeah.

And another thing he mentioned was, um,

even though the time got crunched,

particularly in post-production,

even though it was overall kind of a hard

shoot,

he talked about how amazing the atmosphere

was on set, how everyone

really got along. They had a good time.

There was a real camaraderie,

that everyone wanted to come together

and make this

the best film they could.

Mm-hmm.

Which I think you feel.

You feel like these people

are really interacting with

each other.

Mm-hmm.

And I think it helps

when you have particularly really strong

performances from Laurence Fishburne

and Sam Neill.

Mm-hmm.

Um, you know,

and Sam Neill had kind of had a bit of a

North American...

I don't even know if you can say

renaissance,

'cause I don't know how big he was

before that truly.

Right.

Um,

he was kind of a cult actor in my mind,

but after Jurassic Park, he was

kind of the lead in that, and he, um,

he really sells

this, like, sad,

tortured man who becomes a dark and

demented pinhead hell priest.

Yeah. Well,

they sell a really pulpy script, and

when we were showing

it to that third-year class, there

were titters.

There were giggles-

Mm-hmm

... that I was kind of...

I'm always a little bit defensive.

Yeah.

Every time I program a screening

and there are laughs where I don't expect,

I'm

like, "Ah, fuck. They hate this. This

is the worst.

They don't appreciate," blah, blah, blah,

blah. But the, the script is bad.

Justin.

Mama bear.

I will also say this

is probably my favorite film, um,

predicated on a

lack of basic knowledge of Latin grammar.

Uh, is that a long list-

Yeah

... of all the films that

are predicated on a lack of-

Yep.

Okay.

Yep.

Is the Latin incorrect? Is

that why you're saying that?

Yeah.

Is it really?

Well, no, he, uh, JD fucks it up.

Oh, yes, his initial interpretation, yeah.

But-

Which I don't know how he pulled

that out of that clip, let me just say.

Oh, he's got those great Jason Isaac ears.

So speaking of everyone's favorite dead

language, Latin,

as some of you might know, it

is the liturgy of mass in the

Catholic religion.

Mm-hmm.

Now, that, I think,

speaks a lot into some of the overall

Catholic themes, as I

was mentioning before with them,

not only the visual

imagery, but also the themes of guilt.

Now,

the themes of guilt come through most

strongly in three characters.

There's Captain Miller,

played by Laurence Fishburne,

and he confesses

at one point during the film

that he had to leave a crew member behind

to die in order to save the rest of his

crew in a past mission.

Then of course, there is Peters,

who's played by Kathleen Quinlan,

and she's the kinda mother figure on the

ship.

She's one of the doctors,

and she constantly has

these flashes and visions of her sick

child, who she cannot

go back to Earth to see because she

was called up for this mission-

Mm-hmm

...

even though Miller tried to get her out of

it.

And then of course, the big one is Weir.

This is something we see right off the top

in this film.

His wife committed suicide,

and as it's kind of revealed through the

film,

she committed suicide, it's hinted at,

strongly hinted at, because he

was paying more attention to his work,

we can assume on the event horizon-

Mm-hmm

... which he was the architect of,

rather than to her.

Mm-hmm.

And so she ended her own life.

The visions of her, she appears naked

because she slit her wrists in the

bathtub, and, you know, she appears to

him saying, "I'm cold. I'm so alone."

And this is really

interesting because she's speaking in the

present tense to him.

Mm-hmm.

And so it's that her suffering has not

ended.

Mm-hmm.

Not, "I was so cold."

Mm-hmm.

"I was so alone." It's, "I am."

Mm-hmm.

Again, these verbs, these tenses,

so important in this film.

Now,

I'm kind of utilizing the phrase Catholic

guilt not only

because certainly in white North

American Western culture,

it's kind of a big de facto saying.

You know,

you're plagued with Catholic guilt.

I happen to know a lot of lapsed

Catholics. My father is one.

And that's the notion

that Jesus died for the sins of man,

yet because we continue to sin, we

are betraying his mercy and

absolution. So that is why we, you know,

go to confession.

That is why we go to church. That

is whatever, whatever.

Essentially,

we're constantly trying to make amends for

the things that we do, big,

small, in between.

Mm-hmm.

Now, what's interesting is that Weir can't

overcome his guilt.

The wife constantly returns to him again

and again throughout

the film, and it culminates in, like,

one of the most horrifying scenes

in the film when she's behind the glass

and it all explodes.

Mm-hmm.

And it all goes really haywire at

that point,

and the event horizon becomes really

powerful and really begins to take over.

And that is the point

when Weir succumbs to the event

horizon, in my opinion.

He does not overcome it.

He becomes part of it,

essentially becoming its mouthpiece in

a lot of ways, kind of like Pinhead.

Right.

And this we can see in

that the wife kind of goes for his

eyes,

and it cuts to him ripping his own eyes

out.

Mm-hmm.

To me,

that harkened a bit back to Greek

mythology, which I

studied in particular when I

was in theater school because, you know,

so many, so

many Greek plays.

Hmm.

And, um,

really bringing it back to the myth of

Oedipus, and of course,

we all know Oedipus

is the guy who fucks his mom, blah, blah,

blah.

But Oedipus actually plucks out his own

eyes over

guilt and succumbing to his own fate.

He, at this point in the play,

in the story, he thinks he's

overcome it. He thinks he's beat fate,

but it comes

known to him that he's not. And his, um,

mother/wife finds out,

and she goes off and kills herself.

He goes and finds her.

He's wracked with guilt,

and he plucks his own eyes out with

her brooch.

Hmm.

And it has to do with guilt.

It has to do with succumbing to his fate-

Mm-hmm

... and giving up

and not wanting to see and becoming,

you know, this kind of blind

beggar that exists in this world and, uh,

uh,

honestly taking away a lot of agency.

And that, for me,

is Weir giving himself over to the event

horizon.

Miller, on the other hand,

outwardly confesses what happened.

Mm-hmm.

He sees this fallen crew member in

Corrick, this, uh, vision that appears

to him, and he's so upset,

he actually confesses it to a fellow crew

member, Smith. He feels horrible.

He's guilt-ridden,

and he seems to try to kinda take some

responsibility.

"I could have done something.

I could have changed it, but I didn't."

Mm-hmm.

And what I think is really important in

the flip side to what Weir

does is Miller ultimately sacrifices

himself.

Mm-hmm.

He takes on that place.

He sees through the visions of the event

horizon and says, you know, essentially,

"Not this time, fucker."

Mm-hmm.

And then when you have...

It's a more traumatic experience of

guilt,

and I think it seems in a lot of ways a

kind of guilt without meaning,

especially when Weir

and Miller have such deep meanings with

guilt.

Mm-hmm.

They represent two sides of a coin.

So if they represent two sides of a coin,

then maybe we can look at Peters

representing the in between.

She is the way that guilt distracts us.

Hmm.

You know, because she's on her way out.

She's like,

"I'm gonna fucking get out of this ship,"

and then she sees her son.

Right.

And it leads her down a corridor,

so it leads her off her path, and she

just dies.

Right.

She does not get reborn. She does not,

you know, become, you know, Lady Cenobite

of Event Horizon. She is just dead.

Right. Yeah, I,

I found it kind of weird because,

like you, I looked at

Weir and Miller as opposite sides of the

same coin, and they've got their

personal backstory, and that's included.

Then Peters gets this backstory,

which feels to me kind of

incomplete. Like, you get the sense

that her son is

paraplegic.

Mm-hmm.

And then when she has visions,

she's seeing her son with his legs

rotting-

Yeah

... and infested with maggots and stuff.

So she has this history,

and then it doesn't really come to a head,

and none of the

other crew has their kind of personal back

history dragged into it.

So yeah, that, that's,

that's interesting

that you position her as kind of an in

between. That makes sense.

Well,

and I think if also you look at the

character of Justin, AKA

Baby Bear-

Mm-hmm

... uh, the crew,

the young crew member who first gets

subsumed by the event

horizon hyperdrive.

Mm-hmm.

And then he, they pull him out,

and he's just gone. He's gone.

He's in a state of shock.

They don't know if he's ever gonna come

out of it.

Then you have the terrifying scene with

the airlock-

Mm-hmm

... which again is just, oh, God.

It's really effective.

It's so effective. It's...

I truly think that's such a great scene.

The timing, the pacing, the editing of it,

it really comes together quite well

He says, you know,

when he kind of comes to at one

point that the event horizon,

the hyperdrive, showed him

the dark place inside.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that kind of signals

that even if there wasn't an overt one for

him or some of the other crew members like

J.D., Smith, Starck,

somewhere in there we all have darkness.

In everyone, yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

I did manage to come across a script for

Event Horizon, and

I found this link

and I'll share it in the course notes

'cause I was just like,

"Holy shit,

is this going to fill in all of these plot

holes?

Is this gonna make everything make sense?"

And it, there wasn't a whole lot.

There was an extra scene with Weir meeting

with an admiral to dispatch the

mission where Weir insists on going

himself even though

everyone recognizes he shouldn't.

A couple of admirals talk about it.

"Well, he's too close to the material,

and plus there was

that horrible thing with

his wife. But eh,

let's send him anyway."

But with regard to what you

were saying, it's interesting

that Miller comes to Smith as a

confessional because another deleted scene

involved a

conversation between Smith

and Miller about how Event Horizon's

technology is wrong

and how it goes too far.

Mm.

And then later Smith has a conversation

with Cooper where he mentions the Tower of

Babel. So Smith was depicted,

in this version of the script

anyway, as kind of a, a, a confessional,

a kind of a spiritual

hub that-

Mm

... people come to

and then he's the one who lets out these

interesting

religious insights into everything that's

going on.

And the only other interesting takeaway I

had from that particular version of the

script, and again, I'll link to it so

that you can check it out yourself,

but there

was, uh, there was details on the orgy.

Ooh.

So if you'll permit me a little bit of

sci-fi porn in this here

episode, I will read an excerpt. "One man

dislocates his shoulder with a wet popping

sound," wet popping is in caps,

"as he shoves his arm down his own throat.

Blood bubbles from his nose.

With a shucking sound, he pulls his

stomach out of his mouth. Behind him,

a man and woman fuck,"

man and woman are in caps 'cause they're

roles, you know.

Mm.

"Covered with blood.

She bites through his neck.

His head lolls to the other side.

She buries her face in the

torn flesh as he thrusts into her again

and again and

again." That's what we missed, guys.

Sorry about it.

Well, we do see some of that stuff.

Yeah, snippets of it. There

was also a snippet of, uh,

of Starck getting tied

up naked-

Yeah

... with barbed wire.

Yeah.

Which was interesting 'cause she didn't...

I don't know.

I feel like she, out of all of them,

she kind of got out easy.

Or she got out at all, first of all.

But she's also the one that's kind of

infected with the madness at the end.

That's true.

Because Cooper's kind of been outside of

the event horizon for a lot of the

plot.

Mm-hmm.

And then just kind of comes back in at the

end.

But there is a sense I get at the end

that somehow the event horizon, the

life ship, whatever they're in,

has sunk its teeth especially into Starck.

Mm-hmm. It's interesting

that they're the two to survive because

they had

not sexual tension, but there was, like,

sexual banter-

Mm-hmm

... in the beginning. So it would almost,

like... I don't know.

If they were the last two to be trapped

somewhere to repopulate the Earth or

whatever,

it would've been a hilarious Adam

and Eve setup.

I feel like the inclusion of sex in the

violence, the inclusion of

sex in this movie at all really once again

prays back to the

classic Christian guilt where sex

is something that is dirty and

repressed and just as loathsome as

violence.

I always feel like that's a thing

when you set up a sci-fi film,

a sci-fi horror

film. You're gonna have a mixed crew,

hopefully.

Yeah. [laughs]

Um, you want a diverse crew,

especially to represent our world and our

population.

And there always has to be some kind of

address of how do you

handle that sexual tension.

Mm-hmm.

You know, even in most of our workplaces,

you know, we have

sexual harassment suits and laws

and all kinds of things

to protect people, and I thought it was a

really intense depiction of this kind

of sexual wildness-

Mm-hmm

... that just overtakes them.

Mm-hmm.

Like,

it's almost the first thing they go to

is sex and violence.

At the same time.

Yeah, yeah. But it's consensual. I mean,

they're possessed, but it's consensual,

so.

Consenting to being bitten in the neck

while you're-

Well, he's still thrusting.

So, you know.

While we're on the topic of Christianity,

it's so

interesting the way this film deals with

the topic of

hell.

And I wrote a paper on hell as it pertains

to

Hellraiser not that long ago,

and so hell was kind of fresh

in my mind as a lapsed Catholic

that I am as well.

And the hell that we're seeing in Event

Horizon isn't a

particularly Christian version of hell in

that there's no

judgment and there's no reckoning of any

sort.

You're in the wrong place at the wrong

time. Welcome to hell.

It's the fucking event horizon.

Even Hellraiser has some kind of, like,

murky

politic with you called us and we came,

and even if you didn't mean it,

well,

then maybe there's some negotiation to

happen.

But there's no sparing of the good

or the innocent.

There's no pearly gates to be dealt with

first.

And there's also no real redemption to be

had.

Uh,

I feel like Event Horizon kind of uses

hell as, uh, like a vague

descriptor of a place where terrible

things happen without any

real point to it. I think it was utilized,

again, a- as the

counterpoint to the Christian guilt thing.

Mm.

So it made sense. But in the same vein,

there are no demons

or beings. There's just possession

and manipulation and

visions more akin to The Shining.

And you don't even really get a sense

of what the event horizon wants, you know?

Like,

some haunted houses want to be solved like

a Rubik's Cube.

They want to be satisfied.

They want their mysteries discovered.

Weir kind of mentions as he, uh,

succumbs to the event horizon,

he mentions that

she wants a new crew.

A new crew, yeah.

And it's like, oh,

did she wear the crew out

because the sex was too rough?

Yeah.

You know? Like-

It was.

It, you know, that-

And wallpapered the walls with their

flesh.

Yeah.

It's... And it- that is.

That's an interesting idea, that there

is this kind

of nonlinear, nonspecific hell, and I feel

like as much as this film kind of apes

towards an

understanding of Catholic guilt

and Catholicism in very certain ways,

it kind of just places hell as, like,

evil.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Evil. It doesn't have that, you know,

notion of hell is

this and it's not that, but it is this

and this and this.

Mm-hmm. Yeah,

and I think you made a really interesting

point when we were at

Queen's, is that hell

is often conceived of as something deep in

the

earth, something underground,

a place that's hot.

Yeah.

And so it's really interesting to posit it

as an outer space.

Outer, outer space, the coldest,

most inaccessible region.

Yeah. Well, I mean, for so long, you know,

even in our most

early days as a human society,

through medieval times, through like...

Which was, like,

dark [laughs] Catholic times,

like Christian

warfare times, heaven

was a place among the stars.

Mm-hmm.

That is where God is. Even

when you're a little kid, oftentimes you,

you get

told that's where you go.

You're up in the clouds.

Mm-hmm.

It's beautiful. And hell is hot and deep

and dark and earthy

and all of these things, with

pitchforks.

And so for hell to be very placed within a

dimension in outer space feels quite

subversive-

Mm-hmm

... and quite different.

And I think that's what makes it kind of

unexpected and keeps the film fresh.

Even if it doesn't fully articulate

and explore what hell is, it is a

very interesting idea to me.

Oh, yeah. And it is...

It's congruent within itself.

Like,

hell is a place where you cut yourself

and you fuck yourself to death and you

gouge out your eyes. Like, there

are [laughs] consistencies within these

people's

experience of hell.

So in between heaven and hell and

medieval times and all of this stuff

that's going on in Event Horizon-

Medieval.

[laughs] You know,

like fucking Monty Python

and the Holy Grail.

We have to deal with something

that Andrea has kind of alluded to already

in some

of the stuff she's brought up, which

is the science of it,

and who creates science but a scientist.

And to me, Dr. Weir in this film

is a really interesting

example of the, quote-unquote,

"mad scientist," which we are

so privy to in the horror film,

and very privy to in the

kind of 1950s atomic-age schlocky B

movies that were really popular in

America.

And mad scientists have existed since the

inception of

science fiction. Of course,

most notably with the, uh, character

of Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein.

They've gone on and on.

There are so many different examples,

some really amazing examples in film,

and there's so much suspicion around

science and scientists

because they are reshaping life. They are

changing it. Yes,

they're doing it for the better, but do we

really know that?

And especially in the 20th century,

kind of the atomic age

and beyond, there

was so much fear around nuclear

weapons, the Cold War,

and then even localized into,

um, government instability, things

that were used in warfare.

Like, scientists

were developing things that

were meant to keep us safe but hurting

people, just in a different country.

Yeah.

And that is super problematic

and scary and

terrifying. So

you're dealing with a lot of those things

and, and those themes kind of come out,

again, in the films I mentioned before.

Also in things like 2001: Space Odyssey,

The Andromeda Strain,

all of these things that kind of,

you know, go through the '70s, even

in something like, uh, The Fly,

with a scientist kind of experimenting

on himself and the body horror of that,

particularly in the Cronenberg version.

And then we get to the '90s,

and I found this book called Mad, Bad, and

Dangerous: The Scientist in the Cinema.

And I'll link that in the show notes.

And in this book,

the author talks about the Einstein

paradox:

nice man, nasty applications.

Mm-hmm.

So good guy with good ideas, but they

were all used for

terrifying outcomes-

Mm-hmm

... in a lot of ways. And so

that kind of speaks to the inadvertent

evil that I was mentioning just before,

as scientists strive to

create things that will make our lives

better, make them easier,

faster.

And while they're well-intentioned,

the application

can fault them. So, um,

they use the example of, again,

Jurassic Park, where it

is the entrepreneurial

science-

Mm

... and the scientist that

is using something to create

business.

Mm-hmm.

So it's not the notion

that the Frankenstein monster

is bad and an abomination

and creates all these moral

complex issues. It's that, oh,

we can box and

sell Frankenstein monsters wholesale.

We can create monstrosity to sell it.

Mm.

And I think that's really interesting

when applied to Event Horizon and Dr.

Weir.

He was simply creating something to help

space travel-

Mm-hmm

...

as he so helpfully points out with the

piece of paper and the pencil.

Still trying to bend my head around that.

[laughs] But in doing something

to solve a major issue in space travel,

which

apparently is 30-odd years out from in

2047, as this film takes place in,

it all goes horribly

wrong,

and it goes horribly wrong because of

business.

And I think you even see a little bit of

that in the...

Actually, you see quite a bit of

that in the Alien franchise-

Mm

...

where they're trying to harvest the

xenomorphs-

Mm-hmm

... as a kind of weaponized entity.

And in this one, you have something

that is well-intentioned, but it almost

works too well.

And it falls apart in the unknown,

the one thing

you can't account for.

And I think that's really interesting,

and I

think the commodification of science

is something really fascinating because,

again,

as we were talking about Star Trek

and the wanting to go to the stars and

learn more and explore

and all of these noble, rich ideas-

Mm-hmm

... there is always a bottom line.

Mm-hmm.

And you don't ever really, certainly

that I remember, talk about the

financial bottom line of this Star Trek

Federation or whatever it

is.

Right. Yeah. That's, that's one thing

that they really did away with-

Yeah

... in the Star Trek universe, was money.

And it came back a little bit in Deep

Space Nine,

'cause there's different cultures

involved. But yeah, without money,

there's a lot less conflict in the

universe. So the idea of the noble

endeavor of space

and how space can help humanity and

how a mission, the most noble of missions,

can go completely

awry dovetails nicely into the next film

that we're gonna

talk about. But before we get there,

I had a couple of questions for you,

'cause

sometimes you pick up on things

that I don't pick up on, and I know our

listeners probably have some questions

about this film.

Maybe they scratched their head at some of

the same things I did.

Maybe there are no answers to these

questions, and that's okay.

But I'm going to ask them.

The warp core, it turns itself off and on

Mm-hmm

Is there

any point to it being off or on? Like,

it seems to me that the

apparitions appear all the time.

They're intensified when it's turned

on, but ...

Um, my sense of it was that it

was activating itself when it had

human bodies to deal with

and human memories-

Okay

... and things that it could feed off of.

So-

So it was mostly just like,

"I'm activated because I'm hungry."

Oh, I, I sense trauma.

Oh, okay. All right.

"Oh, here's something I can fuck with.

Otherwise, like, I'ma take a nap."

All right. I'll accept that.

I feel like it, it had

visual cue... Like, you know,

the rings would line up,

and it would flash, and it

would be like, "Oh, it's turning on."

And every single time I watch it, I try

to figure out what exactly prompted

that moment.

And I have to say, like,

I know there's a lot of post-production

issues on this

film, as we've talked about, and,

you know, especially some of

that eye CGI is

especially dodgy.

It is.

But that kind of warp core thing, like,

it's, it's

impressive.

Yeah, it looked cool.

That whole room looked really fucking

cool.

Still, yeah. Like, still very impressive.

So the warp core itself,

did you understand it as a

portal or an engine? Because

it's weird that it is technology

that can pull the

ship through a black hole,

but it's also kind of a black hole

itself in that Justin travels through it-

Mm-hmm

... to the other dimension

and comes back all fucked up.

Yeah, my sense was that it

was supposed to create kind of a

pull that the whole ship could go through-

Mm

... and go to, like,

three million light-years away,

whatever it is.

But that also it's evil, so it can just do

whatever the fuck it wants now.

Okay.

Okay, last question.

The crew of the Lewis and Clark,

some of them get these personalized

visions to torment them.

I feel like you already answered this.

Were the crew of the Event Horizon

obsessed with orgy guilt and

ocular trauma, or was

that just a Catholic guilt blanket

thing?

Well, I... You know,

it's hard to say because [laughs] you

don't ever get to see

the crew of the Lewis and Clark reach

that extent.

Mm-hmm.

But the original crew of the Event Horizon

did, so they got to the kind of the most

extreme place,

the place where Weir kind of was, I

felt.

Right.

So they were all in it, and they

were all just, like,

fucking each other and going

crazy. But the crew of the Lewis

and Clark had enough

kind of humanity or wherewithal

or fear of what was

going on to kind of hold back-

Mm

... and not give in to it.

So I don't know.

Maybe they were just more complex,

better-written characters.

All right.

Well,

I think we need to make a second podcast

called Alex Explains Movies.

I really like this game. This is fun.

[laughs] I wish I came up with more 'cause

there's probably more plot holes.

But you know, like, again, all this to say

when I say plot hole, they're not flaws.

When I say plot hole, you say good.

Plot hole.

Good.

Plot hole.

Good. You know, and I will say this,

slightly off topic. I... You know what?

I don't hate a plot hole.

No.

Occasionally there are some

when I'm watching a movie

and I'm watching it for the

first time and I see them,

and they don't get addressed,

and it's just that

grates me.

Mm-hmm.

But then there are ones like this where I

can kind of think back and I'm like,

"Yeah, that's not quite explained," and,

like, those are all great questions, and

I can kind of come up with an answer,

but who fucking knows if they're right or

not. I'm just-

Well, yeah. Uh,

sometimes there'll be a plot hole,

and the answer to it

will be a missing piece that'll illuminate

a bunch of things.

Yeah.

I don't think that's the case here.

Although I do think that there is a loose

thread in a pendant

that Miller wears around his

neck,

and you brought this up in Kingston as

well.

And it wasn't in the script draft

that I read.

I wasn't able to find any information on

it.

And I actually,

I didn't see it expressly addressed in

the stuff I watched to prep for this

episode.

So it appears that Miller's wearing, like,

an African flag.

Mm-hmm.

Um, as kind of a pendant or, um,

something.

And I was like, "Huh,

that's really interesting."

And he clutches it sometimes-

Yeah

... in times of stress.

Yeah. And it's,

it feels quite powerful because

when you're looking for those

little things in a film to kind of analyze

it and take it apart, those little

things start, like,

really screaming to you.

And, um,

there was something in one of the

interviews Paul W.S.

Anderson did, and he

was talking about how he felt a lot of

freedom to make this

film,

and he could kind of cast who he wanted.

Mm-hmm.

So you know, he had British actors.

He had American actors.

He had a New Zealand actor in Sam Neil.

And the studio was fine with his

idea and instinct to just let them all

speak in their normal accents.

Right.

So I think it was just the sense of

having...

You know,

if we're gonna have a diverse crew,

let's not make them all American.

Let's... You know, this is the future.

This is countries collaborating for this

kind of mission.

Mm-hmm.

And that's how it has to be.

Mm-hmm.

So that's, uh,

kind of the closest I got to it,

and I kind of like that

reading, that that's who Miller is.

Mm-hmm.

He's, you know, a Black American man

and has ties to his

heritage.

Yeah.

And I think just to kind of wrap up the

discussion of this film, uh,

we should just

kind of call out some of the name of the

ship and what

and who they are. So the Event Horizon

is actually a scientific

term, uh,

which means essentially in layman's terms

point of

no return. And I know

that because I looked up what it meant,

and there was a whole

scientific explanation,

and then it just said in layman's terms.

And I was like, boom.

I'll take those. [laughs]

Done.

Sold.

Which is great 'cause that's kind of the

point of no return.

And, uh,

seems like a fucked up thing to name your

ship.

Uh-

Yes

... and then of course there

is the rescue ship and the rescue crew,

and they are

on the Lewis and Clark. And Lewis

and Clark were two very famous

explorers who scouted the western

frontier of America during the terrible

and violent

nation-building that was done there

but has been largely

sanitized. So there's that. And, uh,

speaking of

space and a point of no return-

And very unfortunate ship names

... we're gonna hop onto another ship

and check out Danny Boyle's

2007 film Sunshine

Our sun is dying.

Mankind faces extinction.

16 months ago, I, Robert Capa,

and a crew of

seven left Earth frozen in a solar winter.

Our mission:

reignite the sun

before it's too late.

Welcome to Icarus II.

So if you wake up one morning

and it's a particularly beautiful day,

you'll know we made it.

It's the year 2057 and the sun

is dying out, so a crew of

eight are sent to detonate a nuclear bomb

in the sun to reignite

it. The crew of the Icarus II

are well underway when they receive a

distress beacon from the Icarus I,

a ship that set off for the same

mission seven years earlier

and never returned.

They decide to alter their course to

rendezvous with the Icarus I in the hopes

of

doubling their chance of success with two

nukes instead of one.

In so doing, their navigator, Trey,

makes an error in realigning their

solar shield,

causing a depletion of the ship's oxygen

reserves and

the death of their captain

while he makes repairs.

Once aboard the Icarus I,

the crew discovers

that the ship's captain,

Pinbacker, aborted their mission

and sabotaged their ship's ability to

deliver the bomb, believing

that God intended to end the human

race and they shouldn't go against His

will.

They recover the bomb,

losing several crew members in the

process, and resume their

mission for the sun, aware

that they don't have enough oxygen for all

the

remaining crew members to complete the

mission, much less get back home.

When the ship's computer informs them

that there's an unidentified person aboard

the ship, they discover

that a heavily burned Pinbacker has

boarded the

Icarus II and is intent on making sure

they don't dispatch

the bomb. So I didn't name names in the

synopsis,

but I feel like it's really significant

that Sunshine

boasts a very diverse crew. And Event

Horizon had a crew along these same lines

where, you know, there was

a pilot, there was a doctor, there

was someone in charge of rescue, there

was a

commander. In this film,

we have a physicist named

Capa, played by Cillian Murphy; Mace,

the engineer;

Cassie, the pilot; Corazon, a biologist; a

doctor named Searle; Garrity, who

is second in command; Kaneda, the

captain; and Trey, the navigator.

And one of the most significant things

about Sunshine, I think, is the

inclusion of a biologist, first of all.

Mm-hmm.

As they have this lovely green room.

The ship is very self-sustaining in

that it's powered by

solar energy, which is abundant,

obviously, where they are.

The oxygen is being reproduced. Water

is being

recycled. And even their doctor has

psychoanalytic chops.

Mm-hmm.

You know,

they're very in tune with the mental

stresses-

Mm-hmm

... of this mission.

And I think it's also notable in the

diverse backgrounds of

the crew of this ship because both the

captain and

Trey, the navigator, are Asian.

And Danny Boyle, the

director,

has kind of gone on record to talk about

how if this mission were

gonna happen in the future,

it would have to be led particularly by

China-

Mm-hmm

... due to their resources

and what they have.

So it would have to be a kind of full

worldwide effort

but, again,

kind of centered within Asian countries.

Mm-hmm. And also,

I think it's interesting that i-

when we talked

about... We talked about this

when we talked about Alien.

Mm-hmm.

And this happens again with the Event

Horizon, is the crew has a

very grunt feeling to it.

It almost feels like a wrecking crew.

It almost feels like a group of truckers,

you know?

Mm.

They're rough around the edges. They

talk shit. They smoke. They drink.

Whereas in Sunshine,

you really get the sense that this

is humanity's best

and brightest.

Mm-hmm.

Indeed, it's humanity's last hope.

So it kind of makes sense, and it's,

it's more analogous to who we send into

space nowadays. Like, NASA is, you know,

the

absolutely most qualified people.

And so this crew looks very different from

sci-fi horror that we often

see.

And the camaraderie between the cast

is tremendous

once again,

and Danny Boyle employed a very kind of

method

acting scenario to this film where the

actors were assigned to live

together.

I think they lived together for over a

year.

They took space training classes together.

They took scuba diving classes together to

deal with the zero-gravity

scenes, and that camaraderie really shows.

And I think it's also important to note as

we get started on this conversation

that while this is a Danny Boyle film,

he was just coming off

of, um, 28 Days Later.

Mm-hmm.

The kind of...

One of the big kickoffs of the zombie

resurgence, uh, in the new

millennium. And this

was his second collaboration with the

writer Alex

Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later.

He wrote Sunshine.

And then he's gone on to have a pretty

prolific science fiction career on his

own with, um, Ex Machina

and now Annihilation-

Mm-hmm

... which is a pretty... I,

I don't even have words to describe

Annihilation

right now, having just seen it. It's, uh,

pretty epic.

It's pretty epic. It's pretty ambitious.

It was a production disaster

and a whole lot of

drama with the studio that-

Mm

... you know,

maybe it'll get an episode of its own one

day. Who knows?

We don't know.

Yeah.

We'll save it for there.

Again,

it's another collaboration between these

two, and Danny Boyle has talked

about how he feels like often a lot of

directors

will do one science fiction film,

and that's it, because it's

too hard.

So punishing.

It is so punishing from not only the

creation of it, the making of it, the

post-production of it,

to the marketing of it.

Mm-hmm.

And again, like Event Horizon,

this film was a

flop. This was a flop,

and I think there

was a lot of expectations on it

because there was such a genre resurgence

with 28 Days Later.

Mm-hmm.

And that film,

like I remember people talking about it.

I remember going to see it in theaters.

I remember going to see it in a packed

theater-

Mm-hmm

... in downtown Toronto when it came out.

And then I went to see Sunshine 'cause I

was like, ooh, it has an Event

Horizon-y vibe. This'll be cool.

And I remember going to see it with my

dad, and there were maybe three other

people-

Yeah

... in the cinema, and that was it.

Wow.

Yeah.

But you saw it on its original theatrical

run.

Yes. And I was pretty blown away by it.

I still am.

This film is like all of my anxieties

pushed into

one-

Mm-hmm

... film. It is so

white-knuckling to watch this film for me.

Mm-hmm.

It's, it's, um,

I think really successful in so many ways,

and I really do love this film top to

bottom.

Mm-hmm.

And I know a lot of people will say,

"I love Sunshine until..."

And it's always they get to the third act

when Pinbacker shows up.

Yeah.

And then they're like,

"Then it just turns into a fucking slasher

or Event Horizon,

and I don't give a shit anymore."

Yeah.

And I don't mind it. I don't know

if the third act is the

best done out of all of it.

Mm-hmm.

But I still really like it,

and I like the story and where it

goes.

Yeah.

I think my problem with the third act has

to do with the portrayal of Pinbacker-

Yeah

...

where it gets very haphazard as to where

he is, what he's doing,

uh, uh, and like his own...

Like the visual style of him.

It's like he's on fire, and it's crazy.

He's a human lens flare.

Yeah. And it,

it gets very disorienting to watch,

and not the good kind

of disorienting where you're like, oh,

this film has thrown me off-kilter.

The film has done that already.

I just lose where people are in a

scene.

Yeah. I, I felt like, uh,

the third act kind of suffered from maybe

a pacing

issue-

Mm-hmm

... where, like,

when you had glimpses of Pinbacker

and he was, again,

like, just kind of distorted, disfigured,

you definitely got the sense that he was

heavily burned all over. Um, I, I,

I think if they had of

shot him straight,

he would've looked weird

and Freddy Krueger-y, and it

ju-

Yeah

... wouldn't have worked.

So I get why they did that,

but they did kind of prolong

those sequences of him glimmering,

and yeah, it was kind of

disorienting.

And uh, uh, that's the other thing is,

like, Pinbacker is played by an amazing

actor, Mark Strong, a British actor-

Hmm

... who's gone on to do a lot more.

He was, um, I believe he

was the villain in

Kick Ass.

Oh, okay.

And so he's one of those guys that

if you look at his IMDb,

you've probably seen

him in some stuff.

Yeah.

And I've always seen him in, like,

BBC dramas and British films, and he

does have presence through this kind of

nonsense of what's going on around

him.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So I always just feel like, ah, you had,

like, almost the perfect actor to do it.

Yeah.

So if you just kind of centered it a bit

more-

Mm-hmm

... then it would've been a even more...

It would've landed that ending more.

Right.

And, uh, then of course there

are these strange theories

that I read online.

And, uh, someone posited a theory

which pretty much got picked apart in the

comments or on Reddit

or wherever I read this, that Pinbacker

didn't exist when he came back. It

was actually Capa who'd

lost his mind and

was destroying everything.

Whoa.

But it kind of falls apart

when you actually put it all together.

Yeah, I don't like that.

Yeah, I don't like it either.

Now, for myself, this movie, uh,

completely missed it.

Once again, just like Event Horizon,

off my radar.

I didn't know,

and I even considered myself a fan of

Danny Boyle.

I'm very fond of 28 Days Later.

I'm also fond of his

more maligned output.

I really loved The Beach.

And then he also has a lot of other

amazing outputs.

Like after Sunshine,

he went on to win the Academy Award for

Best Picture

with Slumdog Millionaire. Uh,

he has another film

that I really love called

Millions, uh, which

is actually a really sweet little film.

And, uh, he's, you know,

still making films.

And of course, in the '90s he

was incredibly well-known

and made his mark with

Trainspotting.

Mm.

Uh, and then a film before that

which I really love called Shallow Grave.

And then even in 2017 he made

Trainspotting II.

Mm-hmm.

Which if you haven't seen it

and you like the first one, uh,

check it out, because

it is great. And he

was just announced as being the director

of the new

James Bond film.

Huh. But in looking at his IMDb

and considering myself a fan

of his, I saw Sunshine and-

Mm

... it,

it didn't sound like a horror [laughs]

movie, and I hadn't heard it buzzed

about within horror circles.

So it completely got past me, uh, until

earlier this year. My partner

was just like, "You haven't seen that?

We should watch it." And it blew me away.

And of course I mentioned it to Alex,

and then when we decided to do this

episode

it seemed like the perfect pairing, uh,

which I think it is.

I think the stories complement one

another.

I think the narratives compare

and contrast in really interesting

ways,

which I'm looking forward to getting into.

But I feel such tremendous poetry in

Sunshine, and i- it's something

that Danny Boyle is just able to do with

these

sequences and great use of music. And

basically here we have...

This crew has everything.

This ship has everything. Everything is so

glossy and perfect

and calculated for this very,

very important mission, so

when shit goes haywire, it goes haywire in

the absolute worst way. And they're never,

ever dealing with- Just one

thing or another.

It's always something catastrophic

that has no

simple solution. Like, what do you do

when you don't have enough air for

everyone?

And there's not a sense that, you know,

oh, there are space stations all around

them. You feel like they

are truly out on their own.

This is the last spaceship-

This is it

... that humanity has.

Mm-hmm.

They, they spend a lot on the first one.

Who knows what the fuck happened to that.

Yeah.

We're gonna find out,

but here's the last one.

So there's no one in between them

and Earth.

Mm-hmm.

So it feels truly alone,

and then they even kind of get into the

sun's

radius even earlier than they thought,

so they lose communication.

Mm-hmm.

And there is, um,

pretty devastating scene between

Capa and Mace when Capa takes his time to,

you know, talk to

his family and send

that last message back to Earth.

And then when he gets out,

they pass through that time

when they can send messages

back to Earth,

so Mace has lost his chance-

Yeah

... to send something back,

so he just starts beating the hell out of

Capa.

Yeah,

and I feel like the film sets it up

that they are going to be antagonists.

They are ideologically opposed.

Mm-hmm.

You know, one of them is a physicist,

and Mace is the engineer,

so they're already,

you know, uh,

in completely different disciplines

and completely different

outlooks.

And when you see them arguing about

whether or not to

intercept the Icarus I,

uh, both their sides

are completely reasonable and rational.

And I have no idea where I would land,

and I like that the film

sets it up so it gives you enough

information to kind of say, like,

what would you

choose?

Mm-hmm.

And then when Kaneda kind of puts it to

Capa to make that choice, kind of saying,

you know,

"You're the best person for this choice.

I need you to do this."

Yeah.

He does. Capa makes that choice,

but you can tell he's not certain of it

either.

No. He's making-

And then making the best call.

That's right. And then

when Mace throws it in his face later,

like you're angry,

but at the same time you know

that you'd do the same thing.

And for all of the amazing science that

is on board this ship

and the kind of intelligence

and the dialogue

that these characters have

about these very same things,

the margin for human

error is so great to even-

I love that

... the microscopic level.

That's so realistic, and

that again hearkens back to the

plausibility.

Like, so much of this technology is, like,

really?

Like, uh,

do you even want to explain to me how this

Earth room works?

It's kind of like the Star Trek holosuite.

Mm-hmm.

Can you even explain the weird background

that Capa has when he's sending that

message back home? Like,

you roll with that because then you've got

this

situation with Trey, who admits, like,

I was doing

100,000 things and I was off by

one-point-something millimeters

when it comes to the shield.

And in science,

those little tiny errors

are exactly what gets

you.

And as someone,

and Andrea I think you're the same way,

who beats themself up over

every tiny mistake,

you just felt that. You've ...

I felt like every part of Trey's

like, "I fucked up."

Yeah.

And it's not just me fucking up,

it's fucking up for the Earth.

Yeah.

And like, ugh, ugh.

And everything snowballed from there,

and it wasn't e- entirely his fault, but

I ... Y-

you could really feel the sense

that the weight of that was all

on him.

Yeah.

And culminated in him doing what he had to

do, which actually, to

be fair, kind of solved a problem:

the lack of oxygen.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah.

Yeah. There you go, Trey.

They had to draw straws and he,

he made that a little bit easier on them,

but-

Mm.

But at the same time, this crew,

like I said, absolutely devastating

odds. The knowledge

that they might not make it there,

much less come

back, they really take

that on the chin and it's

brutal to watch.

Well, there's that part when Cassie, um,

says I think to Capa, like, "I know we're

gonna die out here."

Mm-hmm.

And you're just like, yeah,

but they still keep doing their jobs.

They don't just lie down and give up.

It's like,

I need to do my job to the point where I

think we can do this.

That's right, and she asks him,

"Are you scared?"

And he kind of rattles off

all this, all this

psycho science babble and is just like,

"We're gonna do this and we're gonna do

this and we're gonna pull this crazy

fucking shit off.

And no, I'm not scared." And indeed,

you get the sense that this team,

insofar as they're going on a doomed

mission that may or may not work, the

whole of humanity is resting on their

shoulders.

But you get the sense that they

are so keen on science

and they are so excited

and they believe so much in what they're

doing.

I'm thinking of the scene where they all

go into the observation room to check out

Mercury.

Mm.

We're near Mercury, guys. Like-

Take a look

... to your left you will see ... Yeah.

And so they all ... They get so excited.

They go running up to the ...

They're so invested in it,

and in the science

of it and what they're doing. And again,

that's in stark contrast from the Lewis &

Clark crew who are just like,

"We're supposed to be on leave.

Let's get this the fuck over with."

And I like that the kind of amazing

advances that they

have in their science lead to a kind of

unnaturalness

within the film. So, um, obviously,

you know, the

ships' names,

again we're talking about dodgy ship

names.

So you've got the Icarus I

and the Icarus II.

Oh, God.

And Icarus is of course from the Greek

mythology of the guy who had the wax

wings and flew too close to the sun

and the wings melted and he fell.

That's that, and I don't know if that

was the best name for the mission.

I don't know if I would board a ship

called the Icarus heading to the sun, uh,

and

expect to get back home.

But the other thing it reminded me of

is the,

um, myth of Prometheus.

Not the terrible alien movie, but, uh, the

actual myth. And Prometheus was this,

you know, trickster, and he

stole fire from the gods

and brought it to Earth.

And now we have this group of amazing

scientists and pilots and

captains, you know, on this mini Earth.

They can make their own food.

They can make their own oxygen.

They can pilot this huge nuclear weapon

through

space and essentially bring fire back to

the gods.

Mm-hmm.

And it's this kind of incredible inverse-

Mm-hmm

... of what the initial mythology has.

So it's like a sense

that we've come full circle with the

stories we tell

ourselves to make sense of the world

around us.

Mm-hmm.

And now we have to continue the story

somehow.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I read like,

I completely agree with you.

I would not board Icarus,

but at the same time, I appreciated

that it was kind of

tongue in cheek-

Mm-hmm

... and it was kind of, it was kind of,

uh, fatalistic, right?

We're gonna do something that we know

is complete- we're gonna bomb the sun,

man.

Yeah.

Like [laughs] in any other context,

this would be a terrible idea, except now,

where it's humanity's last hope.

Yeah. So I think in talking about that

and mythology and all of that, I

think it's also important to talk about

something we touched on with Event

Horizon,

which is religion and the space film

or religion in science

fiction. And of course,

you have Pinbacker and his whole thing of

one man alone with God. But, uh,

I wanted to talk about some of

the stuff I watched and read, um,

from the British film critic Mark Kermode,

and he's quite a big fan of this film.

Mm-hmm.

He really posits it as one of Danny

Boyle's best films in a pretty

impressive oeuvre. And, um,

Kermode talks about

the scientific consultant on the film, Dr.

Brian Cox,

not Brian Cox of Autopsy of Jane

Doe, unfortunately, but another Dr.

Brian Cox.

And, uh, he works for CERN,

and they're a center

for European nuclear research,

and they talk about the Higgs

boson,

which is a missing piece of the current

particle

theory.

And often it's this Higgs boson thing

is known as the God particle.

Mm.

The one part of particle theory

that we can't explain.

And I think Boyle, through this film

and the film itself, kind of

reads this unknown element, this unknown

aspect of science and planning

and all of that as there's an

understanding that the spiritual dimension

is always

potentially at play within the narrative

and, a- a- potentially at play

within our lives.

And I think it's really interesting

that Alex Garland has gone

on to have this really deeply entrenched

science fiction career and, um,

hopefully after Annihilation,

he keeps getting to make films.

Um-

Hopefully he still wants to. [laughs]

Yeah. And, um, Danny Boyle

was actually gonna join the

seminary,

and then he saw Clockwork Orange.

Yeah.

And then he decided he wanted to make

films.

Wow.

But he has this kind of tie to religion,

and I think this film is

actually a really interesting balance

between forward-thinking,

forward-driven science and

spirituality and God and who we are.

And, you know,

to go back to someone who I also mentioned

in the Event

Horizon portion of this episode, Einstein,

he said essentially

something to the effect of,

"Science can measure and predict events,

but it cannot provide ethical guidance

and nurture the inherent good of

humanity." That's where religion factors

in.

And that's where you have this notion of

should humanity

continue to exist if we've depleted all

our natural resources?

That's right, and it's not that, you know,

we've depleted our resources using them

wisely and being very careful.

We fucked up. You know?

[laughs] Like if the sun dies,

it's probably our fault.

Yeah,

'cause they don't really go into

that in the film.

No.

It's just dying.

Although, although Dustin did say

when we were watching it, he's like,

"You know,

the sun is gonna die someday,"

and I don't know.

I remember... Okay,

I remember learning that fact when I was,

like, in

kindergarten.

Oh my God.

And I was beside myself.

I was apparently, like, inconsolable.

I was like,

"We're gonna die because the sun

is gonna die." And my mom is like,

"No,

it's gonna die in like 6 billion years."

And then I think I'd

also just learned about reincarnation

because my babysitter at the time was

Indian,

and that also really upset me to think

that I'd be reincarnated when the

sun died.

Oh. It upset you to think

that you'd be reincarnated when the sun-

Well, I don't wanna be around

when the sun dies.

What if you're something really cool

that doesn't need the sun?

Oh, well, that'd be fun. [laughs]

But yeah,

the lines around science obviously really

interest me, and I

was doing my research on, like, the

sociology of space,

which of course came up with all this

stuff about, you know,

like, habitus and, you know, it just-

What's habitus?

Jurgen Habermas did this whole thing about

how people have...

I don't fucking remember.

Someone has a name Jurgen Habermas?

Jurgen Habermas was the most contemporary

sociologist that I covered.

I make myself as a Jurgen Habermas.

[laughs] I think my blender is.

But I was able to find something called

astrosociology,

and it totally blew my wheels. I

was absolutely not aware

of this, but,

but the more I thought about it,

the more it kind of makes sense.

And, like, going to school for sociology,

it's, it's a social science.

It's a soft science.

It's something that the harder sciences

kind of scoff at.

But of course,

you can't have one without the other,

and there is

indeed a discipline looking at how science

exploration

impacts people socially and, uh,

most significantly how

people on Earth

live with the knowledge of what's going on

in

space. For example, like,

just the knowledge

that satellites exist and

what that did for communications,

what that did for weather

forecasting, commercial flight,

air travel, stu-

Cable TV.

Yeah, exactly. And then of course,

the discipline also studies

who gets to go to space. Like,

that's a very privileged position.

It, it's a very elite position.

Is there an age, race, class

factor?

Who gets the grants for space research?

Who gets to go?

Who gets to know? When they go into space,

you know, nobody really

owns that territory, so i- is

that information classified, and

if so, by whom?

All of these things

are factored into the social sciences to

the point where I

became aware of a simulation called the

Mars

500,

which was a 17-month simulation to study

the physical

and psychological effects of long-term

space travel.

And they found that the fluorescent

lighting wasn't bright enough to simulate

daylight,

and it made it hard for crew members to

discern night and day,

which made for sleep problems,

which made for cognitive problems, and,

like, all these things

that the softer sciences can contribute to

the harder

science of space travel.

And the thing with astrosociology is that,

like, it's, it's largely

speculative. It's not

that different from science fiction.

And I actually found a paper by a Simone

Caroti that

argues that science fiction can actually

serve to popularize space

in such a way that it makes people aware

of astrosociological

questions and quandaries, which

is again where Star Trek fits in.

And like now I'm gonna be watching it

completely differently because of

that. So once again,

Sunshine takes many of these factors into

consideration with their inclusion of the

Earth room to settle

nerves,

like the elaborate video communication,

the doctor,

the importance of hygiene

and mental health.

I thought it was really interesting

that they were like, "You, get a fucking

haircut."

Yeah.

"You'll feel so much better."

You're gonna look more like Captain

America.

Yeah. Yeah. And can I just say-

Hmm

... Chris Evans managed to out-dream me.

Cillian Murphy.

Can I, can I...

I'm gonna share something really personal

with our thousands of

listeners-

... and my friend Andrea right now.

Yep.

The only really good celebrity sex dream

I've ever had

involved Chris Evans.

Wow.

This was a few years ago,

and henceforth I've always had a soft spot

for him.

Yeah, [laughs] a soft and wet spot.

Now, the most interesting thing

that came out of all of this

research is a definition of science

fiction that came from the social

sciences.

Ooh.

And I'll read it to you,

and it's problematic,

and you'll hear why it's problematic

right away because I'm gonna read it word

for word as it appeared in

Aldiss and Wingrove 2001.

"Science fiction is a search for a

definition of mankind

and his status in the universe,

which will stand in our

advanced but confused state of knowledge

and is

characteristically cast in the Gothic

or post-Gothic mode."

Now, obviously in 2001,

I don't know why any academic

is saying stuff like

mankind and his and his. Like,

smarten the fuck up,

Aldiss and Wingrove.

But I do think it's an interesting

definition in that,

like,

it pinpoints the philosophical elements

that always

appear in science fiction,

once again nailing what it

is I love about Star

Trek.

And we have a pretty good grasp of

humanity's role on

Earth,

which is to say we're the reigning

species, for better or for

worse.

We're wiping out other species for our own

ends, and we're stratified in

several ways. But these rules change

when it comes to outer

space,

and both these movies present something of

a cautionary tale that

takes us into theological territory.

So for Event Horizon,

it's Weir's scientific zeal that made

him forget his soul,

and it not only killed his wife,

it killed him and

a bunch of other people. For Sunshine,

Pinbacker was really the

opposite side of that coin.

And although he was a hard scientist, he

had a weird fascination with the sun

that comes

into play with several members of the

Icarus II, to the point that it became

religious,

where he couldn't bear to fuck with God's

plan even if it meant

annihilation on Earth.

And so I still kind of have that callback,

you know, as we said with

Weir and Event Horizon, that Pinbacker

is kind of a bit like

a

pinhead-

Mm-hmm

... figure in this film.

And how could you not with Pinbacker?

Come on. But I should call out

that of course Alex

Garland and Danny Boyle have said

that Pinbacker was actually

inspired by a character in Dark Star

called Pinback.

Hmm.

So there is a parallel there.

And for any film sci-fi

nerds out there,

of course you will know

that Dan O'Bannon wrote Dark Star, and Dan

O'Bannon, of course,

was one of the writers on Alien.

Mm-hmm.

So you have that. And

I remember when I first saw Sunshine,

and there are so many moments

that stuck with

me from that film,

and I find this film really interesting

'cause the different

people you talk to who love this film,

there's always a different moment that

sticks out for them about it.

Mm-hmm.

My partner, for instance, he, uh,

was so affected by

Kaneda's death.

Yeah.

Like, he... when we,

we re-watched this together, and he was

visibly affected by it.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that, you know,

has to do with his empathic nature

and all of the

great things about him. And for me,

I just remember

Pinbacker saying, you know,

"It's one man alone with God." W-

that variation of that line and,

"It's one man alone with God," and then,

you

know, humanity becomes stardust.

I just thought that

was such a powerful notion because I

was always fascinated by religion,

I think as I've talked about on this

podcast.

Partially because it seems so omnipresent

in so many people's lives, but I never

participated in it because both my parents

are not

religious.

Mm-hmm.

And I just thought about, you know,

growing up and, you know, feeling

like everyone else had this communion with

something else that was above

them. And, um,

even though my own beliefs,

I didn't really believe in it.

I just thought that's, you know,

you're communing with something bigger

than

yourself. And to have

that kind of strict close

telephone line to this one thing

and be alone with it

is such an intimate thing.

Mm-hmm.

And, um, to me there

is nothing about religion

that I understood to be really

intimate.

Mm-hmm.

It felt, um, you know,

certainly as I grew up, to be very forced,

to be super

problematic in many ways-

Oh, yeah

... to be really personal. And,

and so this just felt it was

religious and not religious-

Yeah

... in so many ways,

and I still find it fascinating,

and it sits with me

in so many different ways.

Mm-hmm.

I remember feeling in the beginning

that these scientists

had a fascination with the sun

that bordered on religious.

And it's just like you were saying,

that there's a power that's so much bigger

and

greater. And you saw

that with the captain, but

you saw it most clearly with Searle-

Mm-hmm

... who is the doctor.

And the very beginning of the film has him

in the

observation room, and he's like,

"How much of the sun can I see, computer,

short of like completely fucking me over?"

And he flirts with that line, and

he flirts with that line 'cause he's

fascinated by it.

And it's a weird fatalistic fascination

where the sun

is what gives us life,

but it also can very easily destroy

us. It's so powerful. It's so dangerous.

It's so volatile. And I,

I actually kind of hoped

that later in the film

it might come back around to that.

It kind of did in Searle's death-

Mm-hmm

...

in that he kind of chose the way he wanted

to go, which was-

Yep

... again in the observation room.

And-

It kind of gave an,

a little bit of extra gravity to Kaneda's

death.

Mm-hmm.

It's just like, what do you s-

you're experiencing something so colossal

right now.

Like, sorry to see you go, but what a way.

And,

and especially for people like Kaneda

and Searle, they

fully go all in,

in the experience of the sun

and experience of

that, whatever that relationship is.

Whereas Pinbacker has kind of lived on the

outskirts of this thing for

seven years on his own-

Mm-hmm

...

going through whatever he's gone through.

And I,

I think what's interesting about Pinbacker

as a character is

that this is the first sense within the

film of something supernatural.

Because I,

I don't think you can explain him

scientifically, um, how

someone can exist in this empty desolate

ship for seven years.

Yeah.

And then have enough strength

and fortitude, um,

while being totally off their

rocker, to fuck with another ship.

Mm-hmm.

And understand how to fuck with that ship.

And like, holy shit, like I,

I still think the, um,

scene in Event Horizon with Justin in the

air lock is incredible, but that

scene when Capa's in the suit

and Mace and-

Ah

... um,

the second in command just tie them, ugh.

Fucking nerdy.

And the other guy goes off and ah.

You feel his fear and you, you-

'Cause he's the most fearful

...

you sympathize with his cowardice because

you could not

help not being scared.

And then of course what happens to him,

where he just kind

of gets bopped a little bit off course

just enough so that he

drifts through space to smash perpetually.

There are a lot of points in this film

that are just gutting and bleak

and nihilistic, and I love it.

I think what's interesting to me about

Pinbacker-

Mm-hmm

... is that he essentially yearns for the

destruction of mankind.

Mm-hmm.

Because he sees this as fate, this

is rote, this is what we are

doing. The sun is dying. We have lived our

accepted length of time in this universe.

Yeah. We had a good run.

Exactly.

He sees himself as a kind of prophet.

And that got me to thinking about one of

humanity's favorite

things,

which is killing in the name of God.

And, uh, gosh,

we have a big-ass long history of that.

Oh, yeah.

But I was thinking in particular kind of

bringing it to a more contemporary time,

also because I just finished the Netflix

series Wild Wild Country, but of

the notion of cults and new religions

and some of the mass suicides

that happened through there, um, like, uh,

the Jonestown Massacre,

uh, Waco, things like that,

which involved murder and suicide.

But, um,

there was a study by a website called

Thought Co., and I

can link to this in the show notes,

that suicidal cults often

have really strong apocalyptic theology.

So there is a sense that the world

is going to end, or their way of life

is going

to end,

so they're just gonna beat them to the

punch and have the way of life that

they choose to have in the way they want

it-

Mm-hmm

...

by getting out of it the way they choose

to.

Mm-hmm.

And

that actually resonated really strongly

with me when thinking about Pinbacker,

and they are in an apocalyptic situation.

Yep.

And he's like, "All right. I'm the leader,

and I choose this

because I've lived close to it,

and I understand what this is about."

Right.

So.

And of course, like, I mean,

the evil inherent in that

is he's trying to decide for

everybody else,

but in this situation where this crew has

the

weight of humanity upon them,

that's the risk you

run.

And I think there's something kind of very

Old Testament and, um,

a bit patriarchal about-

Mm

... God knows best, Father knows best.

Yes.

This is the way it is, so we accept it.

Yeah.

And, uh, you know,

I think there's not only the notion of

self-preservation,

but in the sense of just saying, "No,

I choose a different way.

I choose something different.

Let's look at different things

and ways to live."

Yeah.

And,

and that's to me why I found it quite

important that the final

moments of the film happen back on Earth.

Okay. So now that we're there,

my question for you-

... and like I saw a couple of... It,

it's, it's not a question like the Event

Horizon. It's not a plot hole per se,

but did you

interpret the ending as the mission's

success?

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, did you not?

Uh, I found it ambiguous.

It looked like the sun rose,

and I wasn't clear on if it

was especially bright 'cause that's kind

of a weird-

Yeah

... subjective thing.

Well, it, 'cause it looked dim.

It looked dim prior to that.

It looked dim, and they were outside

and playing.

Hmm.

You're not gonna be playing by the Sydney

Opera House in a nuclear winter at like

6:00 in the morning.

Okay.

Right? So then the sun actually rises

and begins to shine the

brightness that you would almost expect by

it. So.

Gotcha.

And I think that phrase

is actually really important.

If it seems especially bright,

you know we've succeeded.

Mm-hmm.

So it does seem particularly bright.

Gotcha.

And it's, you know, it's ...

The heartbreaking but also really

empowering because you,

you have these characters who you care

about, and they

sacrificed and they succeeded,

but they might never truly know.

They didn't truly know.

Right. I liked an ambiguous ending.

I would've li- I ...

This entire film is so harrowing

and so nihilistic that

I,

I would've liked it to be up to

interpretation, but that makes

sense.

Yeah. But I think Cillian Murphy

and his pretty blue eyes knew what they

were

doing.

He has excessively blue eyes to the point

of suspicious.

Yeah. [laughs]

I think they might have augmented

that a little bit.

That's okay.

So that's our science fiction horror

episode.

I'm sure it's not...

It's definitely not our first,

and I'm sure it won't be our

last. But these were two films

that really tackled the notion of being in

outer, outer space and the

ethical/theological quandaries

that emerge, and they

approach them in really different ways.

And I'm glad we talked about them together

like this.

Yeah.

And I love them both in very different

ways.

Yeah.

Uh, I hope you guys felt the same way.

I hope you guys enjoyed,

if you re-watched them for this episode,

watching

them together. I know it

was a very interesting experience for me

watching them

kind of within a week of each other.

Mm-hmm.

And sitting with them and, you know,

feeling this kind of weight of

responsibility

of humanity.

You felt it?

I felt it.

It's on you.

God help me if I ever get put on a fucking

space mission.

I'd just be catatonic the whole time.

Oh my God. That was another thing with,

with Sunshine, is as high-tech and

as glossy as that ship was,

their suits were so shitty and

clunky and agonizing.

Ugh.

Anyway, we could go on and on about that,

but life goes on,

and we have announcements. Class of 2018

T-shirts, they are here. They

are here early.

Surprise.

We usually save these for the summer.

We do them for one month.

It's super limited edition.

These are still gonna be limited edition,

but we constantly hear from people,

"I missed it.

I didn't know about it." So we

are running them from now, which

is April 2018, until September 2018.

And we are really pleased to partner with

Twisted Tees on this, and super

excited to have worked with Stacey Ponder

on the artwork.

She did a great job. And Stacey Ponder,

if you don't know, she

has the Final Girl blog, which was,

it still is, one of my favorite

things on the internet, and, uh, has the,

uh, Friday the 13th Death

Count book,

and we'll link those in the show notes,

'cause if you don't know her,

you should.

You wrote the forward to that, didn't you?

I did write the forward to that,

and she wrote the forward to my new book

on

'90s teen horror, which

is coming out this year.

Yeah.

So we'll have links to both of those

things.

We'd really love if you pick up a T-shirt,

but there's other ways to support the

Faculty of Horror.

Feel free to review us on iTunes.

I've also enabled the review mechanism on

Facebook, so if you wanna drop us a

review there,

we would really appreciate it.

And as for next episode,

we're going to time

travel a little bit into the past for

another couple of

classics.

Yeah.

We're gonna be talking about two pretty

epic movies,

one especially epic in the pop culture

psyche,

and one kind of a cult classic.

So we're gonna be talking about Alfred

Hitchcock's Psycho,

and Emeric Pressburger and Michael

Powell's Peeping Tom. So these are often

considered the origins of slasher films,

among some other films, but

these two in particular hold a lot of sway

and a lot of weight.

So I'm really excited to talk about them.

Yeah. It's gonna be a great episode.

But for now,

we are going to liberate for another

month, and

until next time-

Office hours are closed.

Ow. Ooh,

yeah.

I used to think maybe you love me, now,

baby,

I'm sure.

And I just can't wait till the day

when you knock

on my door.

Now, every time I go for the mailbox,

gotta hold

myself down.

'Cause I just can't wait till you write me

you're

coming around.

Now I'm walking on sunshine, whoa.

I'm walking on sunshine, whoa.

I'm walking on sunshine, whoa.

And don't it feel good. Hey,

all right now. And don't it feel good.

Hey, yeah.

I used to think maybe you love me,

now I know

that it's true.

And I don't wanna spend my whole life just

a-waiting for you.

Now,

I don't want you back for the weekend,

not back

for a day. No, no, no.

I said, baby, I just want you back,

and I want

you to stay.

Oh, yeah. I'm walking on sunshine,

whoa. I'm walking on sunshine,

whoa. I'm walking on sunshine,

whoa. And don't it feel good. Hey,

all right now. And don't it feel good.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And don't it feel good.

Walking on sunshine.

Walking on sunshine.

I feel the love, I feel the love.

I feel the love that's really

real. I feel the love, I feel the love.

I feel the love that's really real.

I'm on sunshine, baby,

oh. Oh, yeah. I'm on sunshine, baby, oh.

I'm walking on sunshine, whoa.

I'm walking on sunshine, whoa.

I'm walking on sunshine,

whoa. And don't it feel good. Hey,

all right now. And don't it feel good.

I say it, say it, say it again, now.

And don't it feel

good. Oh, yeah, now. And don't it

feel good. Now, don't it, don't it,

don't it, don't it, don't,

don't it feel good. Now say it, say it,

say it again, now.

And don't it feel good. Now, don't it,

don't it, don't it,

don't it, don't it, don't it feel good.

Now, tell me, tell me, tell me again, now.

And don't it feel good. Oh, yeah,

now. And don't it feel good. Oh,

don't it feel good, don't

it feel good. Now, don't it feel good. Oh,

yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh.

Yeah, yeah. Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh.

Yeah, yeah. Oh.