Review of Sunshine (2007) by Delta_Assault — 27 Sep 2011

Sunshine is 2/3rds of a great film. But that third act is such a ruinous mistake that it taints the entire experience.

I mean, for the first two acts, Sunshine's basically a master class in how to create a brilliant scifi film. There's this loneliness and tension and a methodical, measured tone that really works to pull you into the film. It's obviously very referential of 2001, but without the mindnumbing pace and lack of characterization of Kubrick's film. It just fires on all cylinders in this beautifully conceived scifi environment. Plus, John Murphy's soundtrack is absolutely mesmerizing. "Adagio in D Minor" is a particular standout and his career achievement to date. Some of the events in the film do feel familiar, but that wasn't a bad thing. They felt like nice little tips of the hat to the giants of the genre. For example, the dilemma about running out of oxygen and having to kill a member of the crew to cut down on consumption felt like a very obvious callback to Tom Godwin's classic scifi short story "The Cold Equations." You know, the one about a girl secretly stowing aboard a small spacecraft with one pilot that's delivering life-saving drugs to a colony. Unfortunately, there's only enough fuel for the weight of the pilot and the drugs aboard, and the girl's added weight means the ship is going to run out of fuel and crash on the planet, killing both of them. So the only solution is to jettison this poor girl out the airlock. It's a very similar situation in the film, but that didn't bother me at all. If you're going to take influences, might as well take them from the best.

And then the third act twist occurs, and it all just goes right to hell. I dunno what Danny Boyle and his scriptwriter were thinking, but man, that uh... that last act and what happens was just such a course change, and an unneeded one for me, that it completely stopped the movie. You're just staring at the screen wondering why, why, why. Why would they drop the ball like this? The whole tone and tenor of the piece just veered off in this rather ridiculous and unbelievable direction. I felt cheated, to be honest. It didn't make sense and didn't seem to be what the first two acts had been about. The twist is that the captain of the first Icarus is alive and he's basically a monster out of a slasher film. He's somehow been living on the other ship getting a suntan for all these years and now he's on the Icarus 2 murdering people and possessing superhuman strength even though he's covered all over with horrible burns. Also, he appears as this blurry, vibrating, fluctuating mess on camera which makes no sense. I guess Danny Boyle wanted it to create some sort of effect or to suggest that perhaps he's just a hallucination, but it just looked irritating to my eyes. Of course, you've gotta wonder how he even became Captain of the Icarus, you'd think NASA or whoever would check for mental instability when picking the crew for THE MOST IMPORTANT MANNED SPACE MISSION OF ALL TIME.

It's tough, because you really want to recommend this somewhat unknown scifi film to friends (it only made around 3 million at the box office IIRC) but that last act is a blunder that just sinks the whole thing. Can I really recommend 2/3rds of a film to someone? That's what I'd like to do.