Plot:
In the year 2022, Earth is encircled by satellites armed with nuclear missiles. Manned, private spaceships rendezvous with them for regular maintenance and repair. The film centers around one such ship, named Spacecore 1, as its mission takes it around the dark side of the Moon.
A mysterious malfunction cripples Spacecore 1’s systems, leaving it adrift and with only enough oxygen for 24 hours. Unable to summon help with distress calls, the crew faces certain death. Luckily, the vintage Space Shuttle Endeavor appears from nowhere and docks itself with Spacecore 1, sharing its power and oxygen. Though the Shuttle’s behavior shows it is under intelligent control, it is strangely uncommunicative.
After docking, two of Spacecore 1′s crewmen enter Endeavor to find out who is piloting it. The craft is disheveled and is carrying rock samples mined from the dark side of the Moon. Chillingly, they discover the mutilated corpse of an astronaut, which they bring back to Spacecore 1’s infirmary for examination. This proves to be a terrible mistake, as it turns out the dead astronaut’s body hosts an evil force that can attack other people and transfer its essence to them. One by one, the crew are corrupted and killed.
Dark Side of the Moon was a bad, low-budget movie that clearly tried to copy better sci-fi films that came in the decade before it (Alien and The Thing). The acting and dialog were wooden, and the second half of the film went in circles as members of the crew were infested with the evil spirit, died, and became paranoid of each other, repeat, repeat. The special effects and set design were unimpressive, and many scenes were so dimly lit that it was hard to tell what was going on.
The movie also had some ridiculous elements, like people smoking cigarettes inside spaceships, the crew having several assault rifles even though their mission only involved fixing unmanned satellites, egregious sexual harassment, and the interior of the Endeavor being several times larger than it is in real life (secret rooms, very high ceiling, takes a long time to search).
The film’s premise, that a mysterious evil force is stalking the crew of a stranded spaceship and making them paranoid, was interesting and thus its only bright spot. It was executed vastly better seven years later in the movie Event Horizon.
If you value your scarce time on Earth even a little bit, then reading this review should be the closest you ever get to watching Dark Side of the Moon.
Analysis:
There are large, manned spaceships. Spacecore 1 is, by our standards, an enormous spaceship. None of the characters ever mention its dimensions, but in special effects shots where it is docked with the Shuttle Discovery, it looks roughly ten times bigger than the latter. That would make Spacecore 1 significantly larger than even the International Space Station, which is the largest object humans have so far put into space.
Spacecore 1‘s exterior is also not streamlined, suggesting it is not designed to land on Earth or any other planet with an atmosphere. It was assembled in space and is meant to stay there. Again, the ISS and the Chinese space station are the only two craft in existence that meet those criteria. However, because they can’t leave Earth’s low orbit, they don’t qualify as “spaceships.”
Spaceships like Spacecore 1 haven’t been built yet, though our failure to do so owes to a lack of political will rather than technology falling short. If the U.S. or a group of advanced countries had dedicated itself towards building something like Spacecore 1 starting in the 1990s, it could be flying out to lunar orbit by now.
I predict the first relatively large, manned spaceship that is designed to stay in space could exist as early as the 2030s, in the form of a reusable ferry that moves people between Earth and Mars. At both ends of its repeating journey, smaller craft designed to transfer passengers and cargo from orbit to the surface and vice versa would dock with the spaceship.
Also, if we ever built a spaceship meant to repair and refuel satellites, it wouldn’t need to be nearly as big as Spacecore 1, and probably wouldn’t need a human crew. Our largest unmanned satellites orbiting Earth are about as big as buses, so a craft designed to refuel one of them and even replace several of its components would need even less interior space of its own to store the necessary cargo. There’s no reason a repair ship needs to be bigger than the thing it is meant to repair.
The new X-37 space plane is said to be able to service satellites in orbit. It is much smaller than even the Space Shuttles, is unmanned and remotely controlled from Earth.
There are satellites that launch nuclear missiles. Spacecore 1′s mission is to fix and maintain military satellites that are armed with nuclear missiles. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 banned all countries from putting nuclear weapons in space, and to the best of our knowledge, no one has ever violated it. This largely owes to the fact that, in spite of how menacing the idea of a nuclear missile in space is, it’s impractical and brings little military benefit. Missiles stationed on the Earth’s surface are much cheaper, can hit any target on the planet, and can be hidden from enemies.
Space-based nuclear missiles would cost a fortune to put into orbit, would not be able to strike targets that ground-based missiles couldn’t, and would be impossible to hide from any enemy nation that had telescopes. Expensive nuclear weapon satellites could be destroyed by much cheaper space rockets designed to enter their well-known orbital paths and collide with them.
Manned spaceships travel beyond the orbit of the Moon. As the film’s title implies, it is set on the dark side of the Moon, or more precisely, on two spaceships that are several hundred or thousand miles above the dark side of the Moon. The last time humans ever went that far into space was 50 years ago when the astronauts of Apollo 17 orbited the Moon. At that moment, they were about 200,000 miles from Earth. Since the end of the Apollo Program, no human has ventured more than a few hundred miles into space.
Humans will probably match our old distance record this decade when astronauts return to the Moon. Fittingly, at this moment, NASA’s first “Orion” space capsule is orbiting the Moon as the first step in a multi-year plan to send humans back in one of the capsules. NASA’s program for accomplishing this has suffered years of delays, and in an alternate universe where the agency worked more efficiently, got more money, or somehow got a little lucky, the program’s timetable could be more advanced, and in 2022, an Orion capsule carrying the first humans would be going around the dark side of the Moon now (right now, the target date for that is in 2024).
Moreover, as early as the 2030s, we could shatter our space distance record by sending people to Mars. Depending on where the two planets are in their orbital cycles, the distance between them varies from 33.9 million to 249 million miles.
That said, I don’t think manned space ships will ever be needed to fix and maintain nuclear-armed satellites or ANY kind of satellites that are as far from the Earth as the Moon. This is because nearly all satellites are within 36,000 miles of Earth, while the Moon is 200,000 miles away. Satellites intended to fire nuclear missiles at Earth would also need to be close to strike targets in a timely fashion–if a satellite at Moon’s distance fired a nuclear missile at Earth, it might take days to reach its target (the Apollo spacecraft took three days), giving the enemy time to see the launch, determine its trajectory, and send its own intercept rockets into space.
There are androids that can carry on conversations. Spacecore 1’s main computer is embodied by a female android called “Lesli.” She is always seated in a chair in a special room, and she can answer questions about the ship’s systems and many other subjects. As is typical of sci fi films, she speaks in an emotionless voice. This level of AI technology exists: chatbots using GPT-3 technology can converse almost as intelligently and as fluidly with people as Lesli, and speech synthesizer technology exemplified by Amazon Alexa sounds as realistic as Lesli’s voice.
Moreover, we can build androids that are almost as lifelike as Lesli. “Ameca” is a crude android with “Smooth, lifelike motion and advanced facial expression capabilities” as well as the ability to move its arms to make human-like gestures. In this demonstration video, Ameca is paired with GPT-3 and a high-quality speech synthesizer to carry on conversations with humans surprisingly well:
“Sophia” is another android, but with artificial skin and colored eyes to make it look more lifelike than Ameca:
Combining Ameca’s superior range of physical movement and facial expression with Sophia’s human-like skin and eyes would result in an android that approximated a human’s appearance reasonably well. It wouldn’t look as real as Lesli from the film, but that’s an unfair comparison since the android was played by a real human actress, and either due to the filmmakers lacking imagination or lacking money, they didn’t give her any makeup or costuming to make her look more robotic.
Our androids also match Lesli’s level of mobility, which is to say they have none. Lesli has legs, but as stated, she never gets up from her chair, even during a film scene where the evil being attacks and presumably kills her. This indicates that Lesli’s legs are non-functional and are probably just there for show. Ameca also has non-working legs, and Sophia has nothing.
Though the movie’s depiction of the state of android technology is 2022 is accurate, there are no androids inside any of our spacecraft. This is because space mission budgets don’t allow for wasting money on several hundred pounds of dead weight in the form of a human-sized robot that stays fixed to a chair. Whenever astronauts need to talk to their craft’s central computer, they do so through keyboards and screen displays. All the same intelligence is still embodied in the ship, but without need to a bulky physical manifestation of itself.
There will be artificial gravity. There’s no scene in the film where anyone is weightless (again, this is surely due to a lack of money during production), and Spacecore 1 and Discovery have gravity. In special effects shots of the ships, we never see them rotating, so they weren’t using centrifugal force to create gravity, meaning it was being “generated” from some device in the floor. As I’ve said in previous reviews, this technology is impossible since the laws of physics don’t allow for the creation of gravity this way.
Astronauts smoke cigarettes inside spaceships. In several scenes, crewmen smoke cigarettes inside Spacecore 1. In reality, this has always been forbidden due to safety concerns (for one, spacecraft have more oxygen-rich atmosphere mixtures than Earth’s, so a lit cigarette is a much worse fire hazard), and there is no record of any person smoking inside any spaceship or space station. Even the Soviets, who were known to be more risk-taking than anyone else, never smoked in space.
However, in the far future, there will be spaceships that are larger, more advanced, and more luxurious than even Spacecore 1, and they could have small “smoking lounges” that would be sealed off from the rest of the vessel and have design features to filter the smoke from the air and prevent lit cigarettes from sparking fires. At some point in the future, people will smoke cigarettes in space.
There are guns in space ships for astronauts to use. In the film, there’s a gun rack on Spacecore 1 full of five or six assault rifles. Once things take a turn for the worse, the weapons are distributed and the crewmen start spraying bullets at each other. Ridiculously, the ship’s hull is never punctured.
There actually have long been guns in space. Soviet/Russian Soyuz space capsules have emergency kits for the cosmonauts to use if they accidentally land in remote parts of Earth and have to wait for rescue. The kits contain semi-auto pistols for defense against wild animals. A Soyuz is permanently docked at the ISS, so there is a gun in space right now that any crewman could grab and use against the others.
Part of the reason why there has never been a shooting incident in space is that it might be suicidal for the attacker since the bullet could put a hole in the hull, causing the oxygen to leak out, or it could destroy an important system like a pressurized fuel tank or central computer. The more powerful the gun, the higher the risk of such a disaster gets, making an assault rifle a particularly bad choice to put in a spaceship. Even if the shooter hits his human target, a rifle bullet could pass through them and drill through whatever is behind them.
A small pistol is actually the best choice for any conceivable type of space combat. Its small size makes it ideal for the tight confines of a spaceship or space station, and its weaker bullets 1) minimize recoil forces on the shooter, which is important in the weightlessness of space, 2) are well-suited against people since no one has body armor, and 3) carry less risk of causing collateral damage like hull punctures.
The Space Shuttles are retired. In the film, it is said that the Space Shuttles were retired in 1992 after the Endeavor’s disappearance. They were actually retired in 2011, due to high operating costs and safety problems.
In conclusion, as bad as Dark Side of the Moon was, it depicted several aspects of 2022 technology accurately. And where reality did fall short of the filmmakers’ expectations, it was mostly due to us choosing to allocate our money in more sensible directions, and not due to the technology staying fundamentally out of reach for us. We COULD HAVE put nuclear-armed satellites in orbit. We COULD HAVE built a large, manned spaceship to service those satellites. We COULD HAVE put an immobile android in the spaceship to interact with the astronauts. We COULD HAVE also put assault rifles in the ship.
Thank God we didn’t.