Sunshine...

I first heard about Sunshine from Wired Magazine. My sci-fi loving geeky heart was all a-flutter. Certainly, it is a good film. It's not a great film, but it could have been.

"Our Sun is dying." These are the opening words. And so it is. Our nearest star is dying and we have sent scientists up with a really big bomb (the size of Manhattan...why does everything in movies have to be the size of Manhattan?). The bomb is going to be flown into the sun to "restart it". They already had one mission go up, Icarus I, and it disappeared. So, a new group is sent up. Icarus II.

This film borrowed all the best from the best science fiction of the past. There is this ever present quiet that gives the sense of isolation. The claustrophobic interiors of a spaceship. The crew that slowly grows weary of each other. The ship looks freaking awesome. It's all there.

Along the way, they find Icarus I. In doing so, parts of their ship get broken, one crew member becomes suicidal because he blames himself for it, and they lose their only way of communicating with Earth. Then we get the mystery of what happened to the first crew. Psychological drama, ghost ships, science, space, a really cool holodeck thingy. This just keeps getting better and better!

Oh, but wait, let's throw the audience a curve ball.

Without going into a lot of detail, I'll just say that this appears to be another attempt at making two films for the price of one. I don't want to spoil the details, but I want you to be aware of it. It suddenly becomes some kind of mild slasher flick/whodunnit in space. They throw in a story line that adds nothing and detracts a lot. Characters die for no other reason than to kill them off. All the logic and psychology that has been building behind these characters gets deflated so that we can have some dude with a really bad sunburn run around with an X-acto knife (you'll have to see it).

I was really disappointed. The way they built up to it was still intriguing. If given it's own film, it would have been a really great concept. This film was already a great concept, but the two did not work together.

I still recommend this film just to experience the good parts. The good parts are very good. The effects work in the film without pushing it. The acting was okay. It could have been so much more than it was. I guess, perhaps, it just flew to close to the sun.

P.S. The first gripe that came to my mind was the fact that Cillian Murphy is Irish. And there is no way you send a man with the complexion of an Irishman to the sun. Not without a tube of SPF A Billion.