I thought I might like this one, but between the junk science and the….  Well, you’ll see.  Sunshine (2007) was directed by Danny Boyle, the Brit who gave us Trainspotting and 28 Days Later.  This movie, his first attempt at sci-fi, didn’t do so well for him.
From the outset, the science is bad.  The premise is that the crew of the Icarus 2, eight international astronauts, have been assigned to deliver the payload of a Manhattan Island-sized nuclear device into the heart of the sun, which is dying and has locked the Earth in a solar winter.  Seven years before, the original Icarus tried the same thing, but was never heard from again.

I will refrain from ranting about the science because, well, it’s a movie.  So let’s just pretend that this is in some other magical universe where anything below a stellar collision could change a star’s progress in its life cycle.

So, we have eight characters in a ship.  The sets are lovely, I’ll say that immediately, and so are the models/digital models of the Icarus 2 (and the Icarus).  They look plausible for a solar approach, which is saying a lot.  The basic structure (in ascii!) is (— , with a large reflective dish at the front (covering the payload), backed by a long, needle-shaped ship.  Within the ship are the usual living quarters, a rather normal kitchen (but then, they have artificial gravity), a holo-room-type thing (very nicely presented), an oxygen/water reclamation/greenhouse room called an oxygen garden, and the cooling chamber where the ship’s computer’s processors are submerged in coolant.  Oh, and apparently there is an observation deck with a variable sun filter.  I don’t know why they have one at all.

So…nice set design.  Pretty to look at, seems plausible (beside the observation deck).  Our eight characters are fairly standard.  We have: Cillian Murphy as the physicist (Robert Capa) who is apparently the only one who knows how to set the payload, Michelle Yeoh as the biologist (Corazon) in charge of the oxygen garden, the captain (Kaneda), the coms officer and second-in-command (Harvey), the doctor and psych officer (Searle) who seems a bit obsessed with the observation deck, the navigator (Trey), an egotistical engineer (Mace — played by Chris Evans, who was the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four) and the pilot (Cassie).

The flight is going as planned–they even get a nice view of Mercury passing in front of the sun, in what I think was my favorite part of the movie.  It captured the awe and grandeur of space for a few minutes.  Then the rest of the movie kicked in.

The Icarus 2 had recently passed into the transmission dead zone by the sun where any signal it sent back would be lost in the background radiation.  Because of Mercury’s influence (letting the transmission be bounced to them), they hear the distress beacon from the first Icarus.  That ship is very close to the payload drop, but not close enough, and apparently dead in the water.  …space.  Whatever.  Even though it’s been seven years, they think that someone could be alive on it since it had the same type of oxygen garden, with food, water and oxygen all in supply (though probably not for a full crew of eight).  Also, it has the original payload.

After some bickering, the decision is left with Cillian Murphy’s character Capa, who chooses to detour toward the Icarus.  This requires a slight adjustment of course, and is the start of everything that goes wrong.

I won’t detail things from that point, I’ll just generalize.  Things go wrong, obviously.  After a few sequences of the usual space-flight dangers, the Icarus 2 docks with the Icarus and the crew realize that they really shouldn’t have done that.  One member of the Icarus’s crew is still alive–and seriously insane– and sneaks on board the Icarus 2 in order to sabotage that mission like he sabotaged the first one.

Now the movie becomes a slasher film as the madman chases the remaining crew around the spaceship, and the crew try to complete their mission.  There are some good scenes–like the first time the computer informs Capa that there is indeed an unknown person onboard.  I found it rather chilling.  But overall, it signals the devolution of the movie into a lot of screechy sounds and shivery motion effects, to the point that in one scene, after the screeching and the shivering had been going on for a few seconds and was not stopping, I just got bored.  Oo, big shaking eye and screechy noises.  Sigh.

Eventually it’s all up to Capa to release the payload and fire it into the sun.  Done, right?  Well, apparently not.  He decouples the payload and leaps onto it in one of the bling spacesuits they have (covered with gold panels, maybe practical but really strange to see), and goes inside.  Because apparently the payload is this huge cube made up of cubes inside the solar dish.  And Cassie (the pilot and sort of vague love interest) and the bad guy are inside!  And they’re all falling into the sun!

I’m sorry, I’m spoiling it, but I was just so flabbergasted at that point that I just stopped caring.  The climax also involves more of this shivery-screechy stuff, and some icky dismemberment, so if you had any vague urge to show it to your kids, you might want to think twice.

Premise: bad.  Antagonist: bad.  Climax: bad.  Ultimate ending: predictable.  Very pretty to look at, and I think Michelle Yeoh and a few of the other actors (the ones playing Kaneda and Searle particularly) were good in their roles, but Chris Evans was a jackwad the whole time and the Cassie character turned into one of those chicks just in the movie to annoy me.  Cillian Murphy…  I have no opinion.  I think I’ll blame the script.

This is a movie that should be MST3K’d by people who know how stars work.  Or maybe watched on mute.

Sunshine is currently out on video.