Brian Cox is quite popular over here in the UK and he's had several TV series - Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe being the best ones. I'm a big fan, he's similar to Carl Sagan in the sense that he clearly loves science and relishes telling people about it.

I was listening to this track the other day and the Going to the Mansion thing came up and it reminded me a lot of the movie Hollow Man.  I thought that movie had a lot of potential to explore what it would do to your morality if you could no longer be seen.  The movie started out ok, although obviously the science was bullshit. The final 3rd of the movie totally went to the mansion.  The guy you couldn't see all of a sudden had super powers and couldn't be killed.  Not only that but he had the remarkable ability to never get dirty for more than a couple of seconds at a time.  Trey mentioned Hollow Man in another commentary that I forget, something about somebody that worked at a visual effects company asking him his opinion on taking on the project and his response.  They totally did there job but that movie seriously needed script work.  I've watched Hollow Man more times than I care to admit but I ended up with a decent Rifftrax-esque commentary for it.

I still have a soft-spot for Hollow Man. You have to approach it more as a slasher movie instead of a smart sci-fi movie. And a slasher movie where the slasher is an invisible guy, directed by Verhoeven is still pretty awesome. The FX work is really good too.

For Sunshine, the biggest problem is execution. Crazy psycho on a spaceship is a perfectly reasonable choice for a 3rd act, it's just executed really badly, with that awful editing where you can't tell what the hell is even going on. If you did that exact same 3rd act, but filmed it the way the Kitchen scene is done in Jurrasic Park, it would be amazing.

I don't think the problem is scientific. It's tonal. Sunshine turns into a completely different kind of movie in the last half-hour, and it's not nearly as good.

To your spoiler: I'm not sure what you're getting at. "well it was a good movie, but it didnt play by my film school textbook, so its no good, I give it 1 star" makes no sense. If it's a bad movie, it's a bad movie. Literally no one has ever said this.

The fact that it changes tones so rapidly and unexpectedly is a bad thing. It is a thing that good movies shouldn't do. You can enjoy it if you want, that's perfectly alright. But we're not talking about enjoyment. We're talking about quality. It's not about "playing by some rulebook." Sunshine does something in its third act that fundamentally changes the kind of movie it is, and what it becomes is dumber than what it was. For me, and the podcast hosts, that's a major mark against the film.

So when you say, "the movie was good, therefore, it shouldn't matter why it was good," I'm confused as to what your point is. If you don't care about what makes a movie good, then there's no point in arguing about exactly that, right? Maybe you could clarify? I'm genuinely confused and I want to understand what you're saying.