So far, everything we’ve discussed is firmly in our Solar System. Time for a change. Supernova is more of a thriller that happens to be set in space, but with a name like Supernova I think it’s still fair game. The story begins on a medical rescue vessel–a space ambulance. They hang out in space waiting for distress calls, presumably using some kind of Star Trek-like subspace communication to circumvent the whole speed of light thing.
They get a distress call from a mining colony on a “rogue moon”, presumably a planetary body that got ejected from its system. That’s certainly possible and indeed likely in some scenarios, so we’re off to a good start… and come to a grinding halt with the line “There is a lot of gravitational instability in that sector.” What does that mean? Gravity is a force induced by something with mass, so gravitational instability would mean something is changing mass. If you have two incredibly massive objects spinning around one another very quickly in an eccentric orbit, and you happen to be very close to them, the gravitational attraction you experience could certainly be variable, but it would be predictable, not unstable.
Well, regardless, it’s 3432 light years away, so we’re about to have our first encounter with faster-than-light travel. Here that’s called dimension jump, and it requires everyone to take off their clothes and get into clear tubes (dimensional stabilization units). Luckily everyone on the ship is a perfect physical specimen except the captain who dies in the jump.
In a theme we’ll see again, they have to fold up the solar panels to dimension jump. This is important because of… drag in dimensionless space? The ship creates some sort of wormhole for itself in a scene that’s… not too bad, actually. One of the keys to believable soft sci-fi is not to explain too much. If you casually drop a term like “dimension jump” and then don’t even attempt to explain it, you leave it to the viewer to fill in the blanks. Once you start throwing around numbers, equations, or technobabble, you just get yourself in trouble.
“Blue giant. That’s gotta be 10 times the gravity of our Sun. We’ve jumped into a high-grav field right in the path of that moon’s debris cloud.” See? That’s exactly the sort of technobabble I was just talking about. Also, their navigational computer sucks. Blue giants are amongst the brightest stars in the universe, so it should’ve been well visible from 3000 light years away. From the visuals, it appears that the blue giant star is in a binary, though they never actually mention that in the film. It’s a beautiful depiction of a Roche lobe overflow binary, but it’s just thrown away.
On the rogue moon, the crew finds a mystery object which, after computer analysis, they discover is composed of 9th dimensional matter. I once attended a talk by a mathematician about 5- and 6-dimensional polygons. In attempting to explain what that meant, the speaker said, “Imagine a 4-dimensional polygon,” and my brain exploded. In astrophysics, we usually refer to time as the 4th dimension, so for a 4D polygon, all I could imagine was a regular 3D polygon changing in time. That’s not what mathematicians mean when they talk about this stuff though–all they mean is that you add another term in your equation. X + Y + Z gives you 3D, so you just need X + Y + Z + W. Voila! 4D polygon. You want 9 dimensions? Just add another 5 variables. I have no idea what this movie means by 9th dimensional matter, but whatever it is, it’s highly unstable and makes everyone homicidal and/or horny. There is a lot of inexplicable partial nudity in this film.
There isn’t even really a supernova either, despite the title. The 9th dimensional matter is going to explode, but our heroes jump away in time and we don’t actually see the outcome. Did the explosion of the 9th dimensional matter cause the star to explode or was the explosion of the 9D the supernova? I don’t think it’s asking too much for a film called Supernova to at least mention a supernova at some point.