Sunshine (Major Spoilers)

I am one of the few major film lovers who maintains that director Danny Boyle is overrated. Frankly speaking, Shallow Grave is his only great movie. Trainspotting and 28 days later had some interesting visuals but neither were particularly entertaining movies and The Beach is a colossal disaster, especially for a filmmaker who is loved the way Boyle is. However, Sunshine looked like it could be a fun, odd little Science Fiction movie but I missed it when it was in theaters for a week (not a good sign), and now that it is on DVD, I got the chance to watch it.

50 years in the future, the sun is dying and a team of scientists and presumably astronauts are sent on a mission to reignite it by dropping a "payload" on it and birthing a new star in the dying star. The team is staying in a giant space craft that has enough food and oxygen to last the way the there and the way way. Everything is figured out perfectly, but we find out this is not the first mission to the sun, and that the first mission failed and no one knows what happened. They appear to be nearing the sun when they pick up a distress signal that appears to be from the first ship. Unsure of what happened to the ship and the people in it, the crew is split on whether or not to go to the ship. The decision ultimately lies with Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy) because he is in charge of the "payload." He is the only one who knows how it works and he will make the decision whether they might need the "payload" from the first ship, just in case. He makes the decision to go after the first ship and from here all hell breaks loose. The guy in charge of steering and what not forgets to change the direction of their shield and so the heat from the sun burns some holes in the ship and they lose most of their oxygen. He goes crazy and ends up drugged up to keep him from killing himself. When they finally get to the first ship, there is no one left and the ship is immobile, so it turned out to be for naught. And then, the movie takes a bizarre turn into some awful slasher flick.


I don't like to bring spoilers into my reviews but in order to express why I hated this movie so much, I felt it necessary here. Visually this movie ranges from strikingly gorgeous to painfully corny and everywhere in between. The acting is among some of the worst I have seen in years and Cillian Murphy's decision to whisper speak everything gets more annoying as the movie goes on. Maybe Jodie Foster was his acting coach. Chris Evans is his normal hot head acting self, but he doesn't really have much to do here and a lot of the people don't even seem like actors to me. It feels as if Boyle hired some random people walking down the street to read this garbage dialogue because Boyle believes anything can be good if it is shot correctly. Let me tell you, this is the opposite of good. Even the cool visual effects and interesting camera angles, while all excellent at times, cannot save this disastrous mess of a movie. It incorporates elements of the disaster flick genre- The plot is very much The Core. Murphy even describes the bomb as being the size of Manhattan Island, compared to the Asteroid in Armageddon being "The size of Texas."

However, this movie wanted to be more than a bad disaster flick because it also wanted to be a bad slasher flick. After the crew leaves the first ship, people start to die. The reason being, the captain from the first ship has some how managed to survive and he speaks to God and God says to let the Earth die. Naturally the God hearing captain must start killing everyone. Oh and this captain is crispy from the sun, yet, while the rest of his crew died from the sun, he survived. He is some weird super human, sun burnt, killing machine who is never shot with a steady camera presumably to make us more afraid of this seemingly impossible person. Logic be damned!! If it wasn't bad enough that this guy some how survived 7 years of being alone, burned to a crisp, he also some how makes it on the new ship without anyone knowing and without a space suit. Meaning, he had to deal with a temperature below freezing while burned to a crisp. It is possible he can fly as well. Who knows, anything is possible in the world of a lame ass Danny Boyle film!

Speaking of the space suits, they are certainly something to behold. They look like Elton John's fashion sense from the 80's made love to The Rocketeer, they had a baby and let Liberace raise it. Bright gold, with glitter flying off of them, the space suits don't seem to fit really, except to let Danny Boyle use some god awful slow motion shots of the glitter escaping the suits like they knew it was gaudy looking and wanted to go somewhere less flashy. Before the slasher aspect of the film, I was not entertained as much as kind of intrigued by a lot of the camera shots and special effects, but the goodwill of those burned up quickly. With bad writing, bad acting, a horrible third act and a plot fit for a disaster flick, all the good visuals could not save this from being a movie that could have easily been on the bottom 10 of 2007 list.


Final Grade: D+