Sunshine is such an impressive throwback to the almost lost thinking man’s genre of Science Fiction that you can almost forgive it’s final act. The combination of director Danny Boyle and Cillian Murphy is as potent as it was in 28 Days Later.
The lives of six billion people rest in the hands of eight, fraying crewmembers. Taking place in the near future when the sun is rapidly cooling due to an unexplained phenomenon; the movie starts with the spaceship, the Icarus II, hauling a bomb the size of Manhattan to the sun in an effort to restart the star. This is the second and final attempt. The first ship that was sent seven years ago never completed the mission. All of the remaining fissionable material on Earth was mined to make this last bomb.
The crew is beginning to come apart as the movie starts. They are about to enter the dead zone where radiation from the sun will cause too much interference for messages to be sent to home and they won’t receive any either. When Capa (Murphy) uses all the time left sending a message to his family, a fight breaks out between him and the second in command Mace (Chris Evans). The fight gets settled by the ship’s doctor (Cliff Curtis) who is developing a seriously dangerous addiction to sun bathing.
The women of the ship are holding things together slightly better. Corazon (Michelle Yeoh) spends most of her time in the ships gardens, the source of food and air. Rose Byrne’s Cassie is having a fling with Capa.
Once they enter the dead zone, Mace picks up the signal of the original Icarus, parked in an orbit between the Sun and Mercury. After a vote the crew decides to deviate from their original course and try to use the other ship’s bomb as a backup to their own. In addition they want to solve the mystery of what happened to the other mission.
The navigator makes a serious mistake when he changes the ships course and several critical systems fail. Now the other ship is needed for its resources as much as it’s bomb.
The tension, the look and the feel of the movie to this point are flawless. The crew members are becoming victims of their own psychological flaws and these take a toll on the others. As the more rational members are forced to sacrifice themselves in attempts to save the mission, it leaves the lives of every one left behind on the Earth in the hands of the less stable members.
At this point the movie, just as the movie is getting to its most interesting ideas, is goes off the rails when Boyle introduces a boogeyman out to stop the crew of the Icarus II. The whole concept of the character is to be a real physical threat as opposed to the psychological danger that the crew pose to themselves.
The look and feel of the movie is top rate. You get a real physical sense of the spaceship’s layout. The space suits used by the crew have a pretty unique look. They reminded me of Kenny from South Park drifting in space.