“You’re committing murder against the whole world!”

Justin’s rating: Crazy Jack Palance makes everything better!

Justin’s review: On occasion, you come across an unknown movie with some impressive credentials that makes you think, “What’s the catch?” That sort of thing really intrigues me.

Solar Crisis is a perfect example of this: Here we have a scifi thriller with a pretty decent budget for 1990 ($55M), a roster of highly recognizable actors (Tim Matheson, Charlton Heston, Peter Boyle, Jack Palance), Titanic’s director of photography, Ghostbusters‘ VFX supervisor, and a fairly interesting plot (astronauts proactively bombing the sun to save the world). There was even talk of making a theme park in Japan based on the filim.

So what gives here? Solar Crisis obviously never came to much, so what’s the catch?

It turns out that there are a lot of catches. This is a Japanese-produced film that underperformed in its home country and was extensively reworked to make it appeal to western audiences. The director got so fed up with this that he Alan Smithee’d the project, and by the time it arrived in the US in 1992, it got dumped into the forgotten bin of direct-to-video rejects. I couldn’t find any figures on revenue, but… seriously, have you heard anyone who saw this? Me neither.

It’s 2050, and the world is being ravaged by climate change thanks to a super-cranky sun. After three years of thrashing our planet, Earth’s star begins prepping a “mega flare” to finish the job. Thanks to not one, but two opening text scrolls, we’re told that humanity’s only hope is to take a newly created anti-matter bomb and nuke that puppy from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Oh, and the bomb talks because it’s got an A.I. named Freddy. Whenever a movie makes me think of Dark Star, I can’t really take it that seriously afterward.

As the Helios expedition tries to make it to its target before Sunshine could be filmed, a greedy corporation called IXL gambles that this solar flare isn’t going to happen and takes steps to capitalize on the situation on Earth and make a profit. Also, the lead astronaut’s son (Parker Lewis!) crash-lands on Earth in the midst of all the storms and struggles to find civilization. Also also, a human has to volunteer to pilot the bomb down onto the sun, even with the AI? There’s a lot going on here. Considering the runtime, there probably should’ve been less.

The core problem with Solar Crisis is its languid pacing, muddled characters, and a runtime that’s about 20 minutes more than it needs to be. Too many scenes grind to a halt so actors can ham-handedly deliver exposition and personal backstories when all we want is to see the sun getting a good chunk of it nuked to oblivion. And even with a completely unhinged Jack Palance, the B-story of a military brat making his way across a sun-blasted Earth feels like an ill-fitting Mad Max clone.

It’s also never fully explained to my satisfaction why the evil corporation doesn’t want the sun mission to succeed. Something about hoarding supplies to lord over the survivors. Nothing about its stance makes sense, unless the sun itself is paying these people off. It’s hard to watch this and not mentally stumble over this cosmic-sized plot point.

Yet for the starving scifi fan, it might be worth your patience to go through this. The model work, computer effects, and set design are all pretty good for the era — certainly a LOT better than I’ve seen in contemporaries. And Palance and Heston are a lot of fun to watch chomp through scenes with no shame whatsoever.

I did like the character of Noffe, the genetically enhanced scientist who gets mind-hacked by IXL for their purposes. She and the crew of the Helios deal with a number of crises just trying to get to the sun, offering a lot of opportunities for drama and sacrifice and whatnot. With the hard scifi angle, this journey reminded me a lot of the one we got in 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

It is utterly strange to me how Solar Crisis got tossed to the wayside considering its budget, star power, and rather fantastic world-building. It’s not awful or anything. After all, we certainly don’t see a lot of hard scifi on this scale. In another timeline and with a better editor, maybe this would’ve been an easy Blockbuster rental you’d have made when all the summer hits were checked out.

Intermission!

• TWO opening expository scrolls
• 500,000 kilometers from Earth isn’t “deep space”
• We’re already colonizing asteroids by 2050
• A THIRD expository scroll
• When you’re holding a tense mission briefing, it’s appropriate for everyone to provide unasked-for backstory for their lives
• Las Vegas has gone nutty in the apocalypse
• “You may be an authority on meteorology but you’re brain dead when it comes to handling a man like Teague.”
• Girls love to be squeezed and lifted up as object lessons
• The holographic display during the mission briefing is pretty cool for 1990
• Jack Palance as the crazed desert-dwelling, baseball-loving hermit is quite the trip
• Automated trucks in 2050 will yell at you when you’re blocking the road
• So they want the earth to get fried? How does a profit happen with that?
• Ooh it’s that creepy-looking dude who was in all those Star Trek episodes.
• “Is he sleeping now?” “He’s dead now.”
• Charlton Heston just going off on a punk made my day
• Just tossing Nostradamas into this, are we?
• Even bad guys love to take a beach day now and then
• Vasquez Rocks!
• Holograms and rocket launchers, that’s a fun day