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Reviews
Sunshine (2007)
Misses all the sci fi marks
For me, space horror has to either: innovatively express the shadow of cutting edge cosmology or... illuminate a penetrating insight into humanity given the extreme circumstances: and ideally do both.
And here's the problem: Sunshine does neither. Instead, it serves up a playbook of standard characters with predictable responses to contrived challenges. And perhaps more problematic for this kind of speculative fiction, the science is either ignored or is largely proposterous or unexplained.
And on the craft of movie making... I watched this on a small screen which exposed the over reliance on effects at the expense of story. There is gold, light, verdant garden (briefly) but there is also a spaceman floating as if drawn by a child.
To the director... most of us are not morons but I hope your new kitchen is nice.
Earthstorm (2022)
Classic lightweight Netflix documentary
The power of the experiences of people who lived through the events is diluted by the tedious and over dramatic stories of storm chasers and the like. It's light on information and science and heavy on meandering and contrived storytelling. Its laden with earnest voices and a ploddingly doom-laden soundtrack that leaves you thinking that the only point of this is some kind of voyeuristic peep show on all the ways the earth can kill people. There's a huge reliance on impressive footage but precious little explanation of anything except 'wow, this was astonishingly awful'. It's classic Netflix fare when it comes to factual programming, simply not worth the time to watch.