By: C Icart, Staff Writer
The Burnaby campus at Simon Fraser University is home to more than just asbestos, raccoons, and the avocado-egg. It’s also used as a movie set. But the true cultured people like me already knew that. Actually, I know so much about the movies filmed on this mountain, I have a fan theory: all the films shot on the Burnaby campus coexist in what I call the PCU (Peakflix Cinematic Universe).
So, instead of studying for finals, I have completed the deepest of dives into the PCU. It’s time to show y’all what I discovered (and also fully made up. What? Theorizing requires imagination!)
The doctors
The PCU is full of high achieving scholars. At least eight movies filmed on the mountain have at least one character who’s a doctor. Coincidence? I think not! For all we know, they’re all colleagues. You cannot convince me that Dr. Connors from Agent Cody Banks and Dr. Lane from Underworld: Awakening have never run into each other at a conference.
He’s a 6 but used SFU as a filming location
Another key piece of evidence that connects various films in the PCU is their mediocre IMDb ratings. With a combined average rating of 5.6/10, it’s clear as day that I Still Dream of Jeannie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The 6th Day all share a universe. Hear me out: the space mission that Colonel Nelson is on in I Still Dream of Jeannie is probably to investigate the aliens responsible for the spaceship landing in The Day the Earth Stood Still. On top of that, the cloning technology used in The 6th Day is probably the exact same used by the alien in The Day the Earth Stood Still. I have no evidence of this, but how many cloning methods can actually exist?
Change-makers
The PCU is full of fearless activists. For example, in Antitrust, Milo and Lisa pump their own gas in Oregon. That’s a crime. No, seriously, that’s a felony. But thanks to their unwavering commitment to standing up for what they believe in (the right to pump your own gas), on March 20 of this year, 22 years after the film was released, The Oregon House “overwhelmingly approved a bill to allow self-service options at every gas station in Oregon.”
Honorable mention
If you squint real good while watching the car chase in The 6th Day, you can see people running. They aren’t running from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reckless driving through the reflection pond, over the stairs, and across Convocation Mall (this part is true. Check it out here) — they’re running towards Nickelback. True story (or not).
