Saw a scene of this movie posted on twitter and it looked interesting so I decided to give it a watch. It’s pretty interesting overall and the premise creates some nice stakes and drama. It kinda loses me a bit nearing the end with a plot development that is intriguing but not nearly as interesting as some of the stuff the movie was doing beforehand.
My recommendation for this movie is to go in thinking of the Sun as an eldritch horror that needs to be appeased so that life on Earth can continue. There's a ritual circle to protect the ship (the solar shield), an arcane ritual for appeasing the Sun (the bomb), a wizard who knows how to perform the ritual to give it the best chance of working (Capa, played by Cillian Murphy), and at least one Sun-Cultist (and at least one other who seems to be heading that way).
Yes, the movie is set in a hard-SF setting, with excellent, if speculative, ship-design, but the overall feel? The Sun is absolutely an eldritch horror. Though since it is hard-SF, what about the physics? Well… at first I thought it was nonsense, but a bit of digging around the internet turned up that there is a theoretical particle that could result in the sun dimming, and it might be possible to dislodge it (I think?) with an explosion, but as none of this is actually explained in the movie, you're free to go with "magic ritual to appease the Sun."
Acting & Visual Effects: Excellent.
Writing: Quite good, so long as you're willing to accept the basic premise for the length of a movie.
Editing: Weirdly choppy, particularly in action sequences, which often makes them hard to follow. I think this was done deliberately, but I do not care for it.
Mothership themes:
Ghost ship
Unknowable eldritch horror
Space Madness
Magnus Fears (top 3):
The Desolation
The Vast
The Lonely (could argue for the spiral)
Last of the Chris evans movies from the library. And damn. I had seen this movie I guess shortly after it came out and enjoyed it but I never came across it again. I kinda thought I got a few different movies mixed up or something
I’m really glad I got to from the library. This is a good movie. Pretty cliche at parts but I enjoyed it
It’s got a great cast and this was the movie I knew Cillian Murphy from. So it’s really good timing for me to refund it with Oppenheimer coming out in a few days