Much debate rages over whether solar warming actually exists, but in the not-too-distant, not-too-expensive-looking future of Solar Crisis, the issue is a matter of measurable historical record. "For over a thousand days, the sun's enormous power has ravaged the Earth's atmosphere," an opening scrawl explains. The predictable results: "Violence... chaos... torment." (Unmentioned: sunburns and sticky car seats.) But there's a solution to this problem, the kind of solution that only Animal House alum Tim Matheson can deliver. The captain of a dimly lit spaceship, Matheson heads a crew that includes a genial computer named Freddy and a shapely genetic experiment played by Annabel Schofield. Together, they devise a plan to stop the "greatest explosive force in the history of mankind," a process the film explains in the most incomprehensible manner possible. "I don't give a Martian's ass about anything except the performance of my ship," Matheson says early in the film. But the looming crisis proves him wrong, as he begins to fret about the two most important men in his life: his beret-sporting officer dad Charlton Heston, and his son Corin Nemec, a military-school kid gone AWOL to be with his family while the sun explodes. As Nemec makes his way home with the help of grizzled desert-rat Jack Palance, evil presents itself, as it so often does, in the form of Peter Boyle, a multi-jillionaire who seeks to profit from the solar crisis. "I've invested my ass in food, seeds, water," Boyle says, explaining a long-term, idiotic business plan he plans to implement via, among other means, mind control. After an evil scientist puts the beautiful-but-impressionable Schofield under Boyle's spell, the earth looks more imperiled than ever. As the crisis mounts, Nemec and Palance battle Boyle's henchmen, Heston closes in on the madman himself, sirens and blinking lights put everyone on edge, and Schofield sabotages the plan to control the sun. More violence, chaos, and torment seems inevitable— until, snapping out of her mesmeric chains, Schofield and the affable, self-sacrificing Freddy head into the sun itself. As special effects seemingly left over from 2001 fill the screen, Schofield can only say, "I wish you could see what I'm seeing," a sentiment unlikely to be shared by anyone else.
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