Z/Web

This was great! I had no idea what to expect. The TV episodes are so scattered they hardly have a plot, a technique that I didn’t think would work well in a film. Fortunately the film does have a main plot to serve as a backbone, but it also skips around for lots of hilarious jokes and gags. The writers did a fantastic job of incorporating almost all our favorite characters from the decades the show has been on the air, and I adored the great self-deprecating humor. Right at the beginning there’s a great scene with the family at the theatre watching the “Itcy and Scratchy Movie” and Homer saying, “I can’t believe we’re payig to see something we can get on TV for free!” And then, just to make sure we get it, he turns and points right at us, the movie audience, and says, “That means YOU!” Great stuff. Like on the show, the plot’s almost irrelevant: something about Springfield being the most poluted town in the USA and so the EPA encloses the city in a giant dome so nobody can leave and Homer must save the city at the end. But the gags are great. If you like the TV show, you’ll like the movie.

Director: Danny Boyle

Wow, this is some fantastic, dramatic science fiction film. It’s far, far better than 99% of the scifi films out there. Unfortunately, its predictability — at least as far as the inevitable ending is concerned — weakens it a little. But it’s still good. The plot is simple: the earth’s sun is dying so a small group of astronauts and scientists are in a unique vessel carrying a special bomb that needs to be detonated inside the sun to restart it and save the solar system. The space ship is amazing: it’s not all Star Trek polish and gleam, but industrial and fragile, like something humans would actually create. It consists of a sort of huge satellite-dish that points to the sun and shields the actual ship from the sun’s intense light. What liked is that when the problems start, they are genuine scientific problems, yet they are explained in such a way that we actually understand what is going on. Complicated tragectory calculations, limited oxygen, shields that must be rotated at just the precise angle to the sun, communications failure because of the sun’s magnetism, etc. This isn’t the first attempt by humans to restart the sun: this is the Icarus II, the second ship sent 7 years after the first failed, and when they discover that the first ship is near their flight path, they have a decision to make: change their course in the hopes that the original ship might have needed resources they could use? Unfortunately, all this great drama is dappered a little toward the end by a “crazy psycho” plotline that gets inserted, turning the ending into too much of a slasher movie for me. Until that point everything was awesome. The acting is fantastic, the drama palatable, and the scientific aspects of flying into the sun are fascinating. This really is an excellent film, harrowing and exciting, and I recommend you check it out.

Author: Ben Bova

This is the third book of the trilogy and they just keep getting better. I liked the second one better than the first, and I liked this one even more than the second, perhaps. This one combines exciting plot and our hero’s superhuman abilities with thoughtful projection of what technology can mean to humanity. We learn the scientific secrets behind the hero’s superhuman abilities (which now make total sense), but our main characters from the other books now must fight new enemies who seek the alien technology in a quest for power. The plot’s gripping and interesting, though it still moves at the slow pace Bova’s committed to for this series which makes it come across a little more heavy-handed than it should. But overall this is an excellent book and a great conclusion to the original storyline.