Coming from the director-writer team that brought us the imaginative, creative "28 days later", "Sunshine" is a disappointment. It's as if the movie makers, halfway through making the movie, got hit by some mysterious radiation or virus and abruptly changed their mind, turning a space epic adventure with promising potentials into a space horror B-movie. Permit me to elaborate.
I like the cut-and-dry, no nonsense opening, when we see the crew of eight, after 16 months in space, arrives a week ahead of schedule at the edge of the "dead zone" from which communication with Earth is no longer possible. Their mission is to re-ignite a dying sun with an explosion, something that the previous mission 7 years ago failed to do. In similar movies, there is invariably a build-up showing the background, the assembling of the team, establishing characters and conflicts, and so on. Doing away with all these preliminaries in "Sunshine" is a courageous thing in itself, showing the movie makers' confidence that whatever they put on the screen will be spellbound for the audience. For a moment, they seem to be right.
There are one or two interesting parameters. No pain has been spared in driving the point home that the Sun, while the source of all lives on Earth, is at the same time the deadliest of enemies, particularly at close range. And yet the fascination it has on the crew (especially two of them) is almost hypnotizing. This theme has been consistently reinforced throughout the movie. There is also careful depiction of the psychological impact of prolonged isolation on some of the crew members.
The key turning point of the plot is the discovery of the vehicle lost 7 years ago and the decision to make a detour, not to check for survivors, but to collect the unused bomb so that the mission will have two chances instead of just one. So far so good. Mishaps happen along the way, naturally. In this genre, the audience in prepared to accept a certain degree of weak logic. But as incredulity develops to mind-boggling proportions you begin to lose interest. For example, how can you believe that an expert who carefully calculates every detail of the mechanism for changing the course forgets to take into consideration the effect of the deadly Sun, something that is more critical and fundamental to their survival than water and food? But all these mounting plot holes are dwarfed by the complete shift of the movie from a save-the-Earth mission to a space horror. Even worse, this is not a space horror that is firmly rooted, such as "Alien". The plot twist in "Sunshine", despite the elaborate packaging, is a sloppy devise of four words: one guy gone crazy.
The characters in "Sunshine" stand out neither more nor less compared with those in movies such as "Armageddon", "Deep Impact", "Core", "Mission to Mar" or other ones you might think of. Cillian Murphy is completely wasted here. He gets a better deal even in "Red Eye".
On the technical plane, this movie is not bad. Images, sound, editing, score all contribute towards the creation of an atmosphere of tension. You would like to put aside your reasoning capacity and enjoy it. But when your tolerance is stretched to a breaking point, this movie become memorable, for the wrong reasons.
