Review of Sunshine (2007) by Jeff H — 12 Feb 2012

Sunshine begins as your typical end of the world movie where it's set in the not so far future where the sun's energy has been depleted from a Q-ball, and all of Earth's resources are needed to band together with the best scientists in the world to basically restart the sun with a bomb. The story sounds pretty stupid I know but the story and tone handle it as well as it can with any far-fetched sci fi plot. Some of the actors don't seem like very intelligent people (I'm looking at you Chris Evans) but for the most part the crew interact and carry out assignments like a very well trained crew.

People can argue until the cows come home about the final act which abruptly shifted the genres, and for people expecting a full on sci-fi film I can see how they'd be disappointed, however I loved the third act as it kept to the pace of the movie in that the stakes kept increasing, even though it probably wasn't the best route to go for a story. I blame the production company for rushing the release date...

Eitherway I don't think anyone can argue that the sound and visuals aren't amazing on their own right. The music itself really if anything punctuates the tone of the film's urgency and puts the whole mission on the grand scale, while the visuals are completely original and memorable.

There are a few plot holes from a sci-fi perspective, but I feel that some of it just wasn't really explained due to the short length, and could be covered up pretty easily with some thought put to it. Maybe I'm just a blind rabid fan but considering how starved for quality the sci fi genre has been lately (Moon was a soap opera with clones), this came as a welcome surprise to me as well as showing Danny Boyle's talent for crossing genres, as I'm sure he can check the Sci-fi genre off his bucket list.