Anybody Else Notice it was daylight at midnight?

Actually, he says, "It's times like this that I miss the night."

its a good question and though its obviously there throughout the film, its not noticed by many.

ive written three essays on this film (it has got to be one of my favorite canadian films and fav overall as well), one on the moving camera aesthetics and the amount of shots in the film, one on the characters relationships with themselves and their surroundinngs and one on the religion.

this film was commioned for under the millennium project (but i dont think thats the real name of it) allowing select directors from select countries to show an interpretation of armagedon. this was canada's entry and don mckellars brilliant film.

in it it has already been understood by everyone in the film that the world is ending, theyve known about for a while now, which is why they dont talk about what caused it, in the films time and temporality this topic has been exhausted, its been accepted, no need to talk about it anymore. mckeller gives credit to his audience by allowing them to speculate on their own, unlike most hollywood films. thats a major difference between canadian and american film: trust in the audience.

i can only guess at the reason but it has something to do with the sun, it never goes down, its always light (though does that mean that in india its always dark?) out, you cant escape it...but check out david cronenberg's scene in his house before he dies, how he slips into complete darkness, an hommage to the man as a filmmaker and the general tone of his films.

the sun becomes a character in the film, it sits at the dinner table (and haunts sarah polleys breasts, to name but one instance), it rides in the passenger seat, its helps to loot and kill...it is the central character in the film and one of the best abstract, most unique villans since hal...and it wins in the end, noting that the film fades to white instead of black.

this only scratches the surface of the subject of the sun in last night...in my opinion this film only gets better with subsequent viewing, there is a lot to catch and kudos to mckeller for lighting my world, no pun intended...oh wait, yeah what the hell, lets intend it here for once.




space pan: what was once a great camera shot is now just a toilet for lazy astronauts

Yes, thank you for saying that, it's very true..there's a lot of crap coming out of Hollywood, but also a lot of great small films (and some bigger ones) that a lot of people don't take note of.

Besides the light, I think there's something else.

I noticed, in the gas corp building when the end was seconds away, that the instruments were lighting up like wildfire, and generally making a lot of noise.

Could this have something to do with the reason for the end, or is it just a sign that the lady let the gas flow go . . . wrong when she left the building?

I wonder . . .

I don't think it's a supernova (or whatever equivalent catastrope will happen to a star of our sun's size). When the sun dies, life on the planet will probably be long gone due to climate change well before the official "explosion." The balance of forces that keeps us alive in our atmosphere is just too delicate.

So in terms of "natural" phenomena, I subscribe to the asteroid/comet theory. Under certain astrophysical conditions this could create the lack of darkness we see in the film (I mean, we already get something close to that in the North: see St. Petersburg's "White Nights" in June). So that's plausible.

As far as it being midnight, I'd always generally assumed that when "they" said the world was going to end, the governments decided to standardize on a single time zone.

All that said, why does everyone automatically discount the possibility of "divine" intervention? This is, after all, a work of fiction.

One thing I would have loved to know: what exactly was visible from Space Stations, etc.?

I'm pretty sure that at the end of the film the sun is exploding.
When the sun will eventually blow up it will be similar to what happened in the end of the film so basically it's a supernova.
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Not that HOW it happens matters much, but I thought it was the Earth and the sun coming into contact. If it were a supernova, how could they know the time that it would explode? If the sun and the Earth were on a collision course, they could approximate at what point in time the heat from the sun would incinerate the Earth. There's even a line by Patrick's over-sexed buddy about how they'll all soon be vaporized. And there's that ending scene with the sun coming closer. Now, I'm no scientist so I don't even know if it were possible for such a thing to occur or what other side effects would happen prior to this impact, but that's what I assumed was happening.