welcome, infidel!

Sunshine is a disaster in three acts.

It starts off as the most promising sci-fi film I have seen in a long time, something to rival 2001 and Solaris (the original Soviet film, not the Clooneyized one of a few years ago). It degenerates in its second act into a psychological thriller set in space, and then somehow, inexplicably, becomes a slasher film in its third.

This should not stop you from seeing it.

The premise of the movie is that the sun is dying. It's not explained why, but we meet a bunch of scientists who are flying to the sun to drop a giant bomb into it, which will re-ignite the sun. They are not the first crew to attempt this; an earlier voyage resulted in, well, nothing. No one knows what happened to them.

Along the way there is some squabbling, and a fair amount of physicality between people who would have (one assumes) been carefully chosen for this sort of thing. But some terrible things happen (somewhat plausibly), and the mission is suddenly in jeopardy. Difficult decisions are made, and it looks like everything will turn out ok after all, for some value of "ok".

But then, something ridiculous happens. I won't reveal what. I really think the film would have worked a lot better if the last third of it was excised and the rest expanded, but the movie is what it is.

In the end, everything gets resolved, and the impression we're left with is a deeply flawed but beautiful movie, tense and at times almost psychedelic. This is a good movie that could have been great. It's still worth renting.

Children should not see this. No sex, but plenty of violence.