1990s SF film

[peteryoung]

Solar Crisis, 1990, Japan/USA   DIRECTED BY ALAN SMITHEE ( RICHARD C. SARAFIAN )
On release in 1990 Solar Crisis sank pretty much without a trace – people by then recognised what the director's credit 'Alan Smithee' indicated, but a cast that includes Charlton Heston and Jack Palance ought to garner at least some attention, even though Heston and Palance never get to act against each other as they each inhabit separate threads of the story. A journey to the sun is required by a bunch of space jockeys to avert a solar flare that threatens to destroy all life on Earth, while civilisation is breaking down and Stereotypical Evil Capitalist Corp. is seeking to profit from the crisis. But there's clearly another crisis going on here, one of identity: some of the space scenes, while decent enough, try to imitate on the cheap the realism of 2001 (and the spacecraft somehow recall the clean lines of a Vincent DiFate illustration), but then the CGI deteriorates rapidly as the bomb-laden spacecraft nears the sun. These are then interspersed with incoherent Earth-bound scenes that directly rip off Mad Max – nothing seems to come together as maybe the director hoped it would, and halfway through the viewer realises that only one of the three story threads was ever worth following and even that isn't original enough to give the film a unique identity. Jack Palance is entertaining in his scenes but as for Charlton Heston you kinda feel sorry for him – everything, including Heston himself, is just so average, and so much of the movie looks far too cheap considering its huge $55m budget. The tension that builds toward the end is really the film's only decent stretch, but these days Solar Crisis is all but forgotten and in theme has been completely eclipsed by Danny Boyle's brilliant Sunshine, which did everything – especially the sun itself – so much better.