Sunshine

While I was standing in line to buy tickets for this movie a lady asked me, "Is Sunshine any good?" to which I replied, "It's a British-made movie with a lot of actors you've probably never seen before, so it has to be pretty decent," and it turns out that I was right. If I were to describe this movie in a single phrase "high-quality stock sci-fi with a few misguided horror elements" would hit the nail right on the head.

Our sun is dying, and with the sun our world. As with all astronomical disasters which threaten humankind's very existence, our best hope is to blow up a big nuke inside of it. That's the "high-quality stock sci-fi" part of the equation. It's a simple enough idea, and the movie doesn't take it too far or get preachy or any other annoying things that a lot of survival stories subtly beat you over the head with.

The "misguided horror elements" are mostly concentrated near the end of the movie when the director decided to throw in a bunch of disjointed images and frantic still shots of the main characters suffering, struggling, and frightened. In another movie, or perhaps another genre, it might have served to create a sense of primal fear or instinctual terror. Unfortunately, in this movie its just distracts the audience just when you need them to concentrate most.

The story is very typical sci-fi, and seems to have drawn elements from a lot of well known movies, but don't think that means you've seen it all before. The story draws you in quickly, and the characters have enough depth that they hold your attention. It's a good movie. I think that, trying too hard to create a frightening ending aside, it very successfully wove a sci-fi movie together with a scary movie.

high points: Gimme a sunburn HAL! In space nobody can hear you shatter... but they can see you vaporize! Eyeballs eyeballs eyeballs!

low points: What space station would be complete without a motorized kick-scooter? I understand that if we don't kill this one guy he and I both will die in a few days anyway, and everything on Earth will also die... but he's my friend!

not quite science: Fifty years, three billion years... round it off however you like, the sun is going to die someday. Why did it take us sixteen months to cover the first sixty million miles, but only a few days to cover the last thirty million? Gravity works two ways in the sun! We're close enough to the sun to successfully drop our nuke, but not so close that we can't make a u-turn escape its gravity. Of course dropping a nuke that was small enough to be put into orbit will have enough kick to reignite the sun!