Supernova - Wenn die Sonne explodiert

Everything in this movie is absolutely shocking. Ridiculous scenarios, stupid characters, mundane dialogue, if it's bad, this movie has it. But the funniest thing in this movie has to be the massive errors in geography. As has already been pointed out, no one in Sydney seems to have an Australian accent; they're all British, American or badly pseudo-Australian. One viewer pointed out that Australia doesn't have the death penalty; not quite true. You can still be executed for treason in Australia, but that's it; mass murderers spend the rest of their lives in prison. Also, the term "recitles" is never used in Australia to denote a musical or drama performance done by school kids (at least not in Adelaide, where I come from). This is an Amreican term that the American makers of this film clearly assumed would be used everywhere else in the world. However, there was another howler that had me in stitches. A section of the film is supposedly set in the Maldives. The Maldives lie no more than six metres above sea level, yet there are gigantic mountains covered in lush rain-forests. Obviously, no research went into these geographic aspects of the movie.

Oh where to begin? Leaving the incredibly bad science out of it (and believe me, as a former astronomer I gotta say the science was so bad!), the people who made this movie did obviously NO research on what Australia is supposed to look like.

Not only did just about everyone have an American accent (and most of those who affected an Aussie accent need to fire their dialect coach), but just about every detail was way, way off. I could handle some of the small stuff (i.e. phone numbers here have 8 digits, not 7), but they got some pretty major stuff wrong too.

Whlle the cars were at least driving on the left, they all had the wrong kind (possibly European) of licence plates. Aussie plates don't look anything like what they had. Imagine a movie set in New York where all the cars had bright pink tags.

But the BIGGEST blunder that anyone who had ever set foot on this continent would recognise: Australia doesn't have the death penalty. Like in most civilised nations, it was abolished years ago. This was a major plot point in the movie, and if they had bothered to do a lick of research, they would have known they needed a major rewrite.

Sloppy

Why, oh why, do I keep getting suckered by promotional trailers for DVDs? Anyway, if you have seen the promo trailers for this film, be warned: they are clearly concerning another film never made, brief clips of which showing up in this one for no discernible reason whatsoever.

The principle problem here is a script that thinks it's a remake of "The Day After" but which would fit just about any daytime soap-opera. Since the premise of the film derives from astro-physics, the finale - a typically empty 'happy ending', having absolutely no grounding in any science whatsoever - makes no sense whatsoever.

Although the film actually avoids religion, let's put the matter in religious terms for clarification: Imagine Judgment Day; and God is really pee-ed off and decides no one is worth saving. Suddenly, Peter Pan's Tinkerbell pops up and reminds God that if he really really believes, creation can be saved. God smiles down on a half-dozen soap-opera stars (no, they haven't repented, what's to repent?), and suddenly we're all back in Eden.... - Scientifically speaking, that's "Supernova".

What brilliant con-artist convinced anybody this film could be made? And who are the emotionally troubled people who would like this garbage? By the way, if you're wondering whether one could watch this turkey all the way through, the answer is no; after giving it some 20 minutes, sheer boredom demanded I started skipping scenes sequentially trying to find something interesting to watch. I didn't. But I did watch the whole of the finale to see if there was anything important I'd missed. There wasn't.

And there wouldn't be anything important missed if you skipped the whole film.

What can I say about this? Well, firstly, there is no need for me to give a summary of this mini-series when people can just easily refer to the standard disaster film formula: smart guy with all the answers, pretty but tough woman, cute kid, corrupt government agent/politician/business man who is only interested in some greedy proposition and some CGI effects. There isn't a sweet little dog that, of course, survives deadly situations but the script writer does toss in a serial killer who escapes. There are also destruction by meteors that seem to be intelligent with the way they just know how to land on structures of significance ('Oh look, there's the Taj Mahal- let's blow it up. There's the Sydney Opera House- get it! Look the scientist who can set everyone straight; he has to go!').

Basically, 'Supernova' has been done many times before and the previous efforts have been much superior. The science behind the concept is so ridiculous that they resort to techno-babble in the hopes the audience won't notice. Although the story is supposedly set in Australia, the director and the actors don't seem to know this and are confused whether the location should be America, Australia, the UK or South Africa (the shift in scenery and accents just gets irritating after the first half-hour). While one can't blame the CGI effects for being far from great given the lower budget of the series, this could have been avoided if it hadn't bothered to show off.

What could have save 'Supernova' was if the plot was solid and the characters were interesting but it didn't even have that. The characters were so flat and uninspiring that they just left the audience praying that sun would just swallow these people up, and the plot was tedious and too drawn-out.

If you want a disaster film, stick with 'The Day After Tomorrow' or 'Independence Day'. They too may be predictable but they know it and do it well!

This movie is full of holes. It's the middle of the day in Sydney at the same time as the Sahara, India and what I presume to be Central America, when they're all meant to be in Australia they keep changing the side of the road that they're driving on, the number plates are not Australian (the cars either), half the street signs don't even exist here, waitresses in cafés don't wear uniforms (except at Starbucks), the only Australian accents are terrible, the desert scenes are definitely more like 14 than 4 hours drive from Sydney - everything about Australia in particular is just wrong! And that's because clearly none of it was shot in Australia. Oh and incidentally - we don't have the death penalty in Australia.

Extend that analysis to pretty much every other aspect of the movie and the only conclusion you can draw is that whoever wrote the script lives on a desert island without so much as an Internet connection. Even the Sun manages to explode on only one lateral plane (that which includes the orbit of Earth), and when the city's burning, the riot police waste their water on looters.

It's really difficult to tell what's going on where (and when) because of all these obvious inconsistencies. It wasn't until Luke Perry says "St Louis is half way around the other side of the world" that I really became convinced that they were meant to be in Australia. Couple all of that with a triumvirate of bad special effects, flat acting and a recycled doomsday premise and you've got a real stinker. A complete waste of time if you ask me.

Still, it wasn't as bad as The Perfect Storm.