Behold:
1) It looks gorgeous. The last shot seems to show a planet – presumably the Earth-like planet – in orbit around what I’m guessing is a black hole or neutron star with an accretion disk.
2) It looks fricken’ depressing. They’re not going out into space for adventure, or to make money, or to expand human civilization, or even to save the world, but apparently to drop off some seeds on another world so that some tiny remnant of terrestrial life will survive the Doom That Came To Earth (dust storms, apparently).
3) Saturn V. Launched from a silo. In Kansas (or thereabouts). Shrug.
A planet orbiting a black hole w/accretion disk is certainly an interesting idea, but I’m dubious about its long term viability. Sure, it’s entirely possible to locate the orbit so that the light falling on the planet from the disk is the rough equivalent to that falling on Earth from the Sun, but this light will be *highly* slanted into X-rays.
Also: The depressing nature of the movie gave me an idea for a short story of my own. Oddly for me, the goal here is to be *anti* depressing in terms of reasons for going into space. Not to stop the sun from exploding, or to restart the sun, or to escape the nuclear holocaust, or to fight the aliens. There are actually *uplifting* reasons why one might wish to go, and I’ve got the rough outline for such a yarn figured out. Even got the tentative title: “Mockingbird.” I’ll leave it to y’all to puzzle that one out.
Still: based purely on the imagery, and on some of the narration…
