Exploding Sun

Exploding Sun is a 2013 Canadian made-for-TV sci-fi film directed by Michael Robison and starring Julia Ormond, David James Elliott, Natalie Brown and Anthony Lemke. The film is broadcast both as a stand-alone film and in two parts with various durations.

Plot

A privately owned spaceship with passengers, among them the president's wife, is on its maiden flight around the Moon and back to Earth. When a massive solar storm blows the rocket off course, the ship moves forward out of control on a direct path toward the Sun, and eventually burns up. The quantum scalar drive powering the ship, which is engineered to withstand extreme temperatures, survives solar impact and puts the Sun into a hyperactive phase, causing massive bursts of radiation that have a devastating effect on Earth. The second half of the movie depicts these effects and peoples' struggles to find shelter and survive.

It is revealed that the US military has copied and militarized the quantum scalar drive, and built a spaceship powered by nuclear pulse propulsion to propel the weapon into orbit. The creator of the scalar drive teams up with a NASA astronaut to reconfigure the weapon so as to counteract the effects of the first one as it drops into the Sun. The Sun cools down and the Earth is saved from destruction.

The film contains a number of scientific inaccuracies. The quantum scalar drive and the nuclear pulse propulsion system are, while not presently in existence, reasonable devices used in a science-fiction setting. But having the spacecraft make an external whooshing sound as it passes in airless space is not. The ship, while out of control and not under power, makes a slingshot orbit of the moon. In the absence of thrust the passengers of the craft would be weightless; they are shown as feeling a nine-gravity force during this orbit, when in reality they would share the orbit of the ship and feel no gravitational effects at all. Furthermore, while light-speed is mentioned within the dialogue of the film, the delay in radio contact between the Earth and lunar orbit, some two and a half seconds, does not occur, conversation between the two being continuous. The lag which would occur between Earth and a ship nearing the Sun, which would approach sixteen minutes, is also not featured. Whether the radiation from the sun, both of heat and short wave radiation, and which increases with approach in an inverse square ratio, would be tolerated by the ship is not explained.

TV release

The film was first shown by Swedish Kanal 5 in a 116 minute version on February 8, 2013.^[1] It was first shown in the US by Reelz on September 9, 2013.^[2] Exploding Sun was dubbed into Spanish for the first time on January 12, 2014 by UniMás.

Home media

A 120 minute version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray in USA on October 15, 2013.^[3]

References

External links

• Exploding Sun at the Internet Movie Database
• Exploding Sun at Rotten Tomatoes