Sunshine

source: Sunshine

So, i took a leap i thought maybe just maybe this could be worth me watching... i read up on reviews, good and bad ( to all those who wrote good reviews: You SOLD your SOUL!!!) this movie was terrible, ohh so bad. what should have taken me an hour and a half to watch took me 3. sheer boredom crept in and i had to do something different. so its a rubbish plot to start with- we know. then to make it worst a few crew members think its pretty to stare at the sun!!!! OMG lol that's stupid, and by wearing sunglasses it makes it all coolio(LMAO). then there is a stupid GREEDY idea of the second bomb- which that mace guy has the nerve to blame kappa for in the end, not that they didn't give him sole responsibility and you know if they hadn't gone for the second bomb it would have been his fault still. so they go, loose 2 crew members burn the ship, decide 3 people must die then pick up 1 more; who has been so sun exposed its a wonder how he lasted 1) for 6.5 years 2) without developing skin cancer and 3) why he is even in the bloody movie!! i couldn't watch no more of the movie after this. i walked out. flush money down the toilet its a better way of wasting it. or better yet give it to charity. to add insult to injury there is this bit where they go into the other ship and you know in "fight club" where brad pitts character starts putting into the kiddy movies frames of porno, that effect is used. however it comes across as if some loser got into the projection room and wanted to have a giggle. its not until they occur more often that u get the idea that its supposed to happen.

I was really enjoying the movie to begin with, and it had all the makings to be a great Sci-Fi film. But just as the movie was heating up, it's like the script writer got carried away with all these ideas and decided to cram them all into one film. If they had just stuck with a single, well thought out story line and a few plot twists, it would have been great. Instead, I had to watch a completely perplexing display of twists and turns until the story line was completely incomprehensible and unrecognisable. I honestly had no clue what was going on for most of the final 30 minutes.

You know a movie is in trouble when the only thing interesting is looking forward to seeing an actor's (in this case, Cillian Murphy's) incredibly beautiful blue eyes! Those magnificent eyes do inspire! I wish I could say the same about anything else in this moronic movie! So much emphasis was placed on gruesome violence that it bordered on the pornographic, while at the same time there is zero sex, or romantic interest. ALL the laws of physics are completely thrown out the window, making it so ridiculous, it will boggle your mind: A 2001, Hal-like supercomputer falls apart like butter. Human beings can travel through space with nothing more than strips of aluminum wrapped around their body, and by holding their breath. Our sun is dying so a really big bomb can create another sun, on and on, ad nauseum! Somewhere along the line an evil mutant creature joins the party. He wants to destroy the world in order to send everyone to heaven! How nice! He waltzes in out of the blue. But he is not invisible, but he must be because no one saw him until they discovered he was breathing! (No, I'm not kidding!) In a way, this story is actually an extremely poorly written murder mystery under the guise of Science Fiction. It tries to create a foreboding mood, which ends up being about the only thing it creates! In some ways, Sunshine attempts to be a cross between Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" (the Sun's alive, instead of a planet) and "Ten Little Indians" (knocking off those poor astronauts one-by-one)." Both films, are at least, a 100 times better movie than this rotten piece of celluloid! So save yourself a lot of aggravation, and rent one of them instead!

Mankind's last best hope is a bunch of emotional hipster morons. Awesome. ALL SPOILERS - 1) No one on earth thought they might rendezvous with the first mission? 2) One unnamed dude can change the course of the spaceship in the middle of the night? 3) He FORGOT to adjust the SHIELDS protecting them from the sun? 4) HE FORGOT?? 5) It takes .05 seconds for someone to point out his mistake? 6) He couldn't ask first? 7) There's no protocol for who does repairs outside the ship? 8) The only people who are trained are the two most important people? The physicist Capa and the captain of the ship? 9) After 16 months, the captain, the psychologist and the physicist (who all look like they're from the same band) are all suicidal? 10) There's no protocol among astronauts about who is expendable and in what order? 11) No one is trained to do repairs beyond their specialty? 12) There's not a doctor on board? 13) An exploratory mission again includes the captain and the physicist -who is AGAIN called the most important person on the mission? 14) An unidentified man from the other ship boards their ship and this amazing computer neglects ANY MENTION OF IT? 15) This man is burned to a crisp but alive after 6.5 years of sun exposure at like five miles? But his entire crew is a pile of ashes? 16) No one else can survive the sun's rays but a psychopath? 17) Only when you ASK the computer, does it tell you that there's an unidentified person on the ship? But, it just calculated the remaining oxygen? 18) The person who cares most about the oxygen generation room doesn't care that they only have one? 19) Submerging the main frame computer manually into it's coolant requires going UNDER the computer, submerging oneself into the coolant tank? You can't make a button Lenovo? 20) the ending? ugh.

I had high expectations for this film, as the scenario is an interesting one. Unfortunately, the film is clumsily structured and incoherent in parts, and many elements are contrived to keep the crew in danger. Here's a not quite comprehensive list: The movie opens with a voice-over explaining the situation and you jump right into the ship. Since there's no shots showing what is actually happening on Earth until the very end, I didn't feel invested in the mission. Any science that was once in the script has been gutted here - there's no mention of WHY the sun is dying or exactly how the bomb will restart it, although an interesting theory about a "Q-particle" infesting the sun is on the production blog. You'll be confused by some of the most incoherent fight scenes ever filmed. With his extreme closeups and quick cuts, Boyle can't even pull off a 20 second fight in a corridor without losing the audience. It gets worse with the Pinbacker character, who's filmed so blurry and artsy that my wife seriously thought he was some kind of trans-dimensional alien. For such a critical mission, the Icarus ships are not very robust. They contain only one airlock (even the shuttle has two ways to get out!), one mainframe that depends on a constant supply of coolant with no backup computer, and no emergency lighting. Instead of the habitat spinning to provide gravity (which would make more sense than the never-mentioned but apparent artificial gravity), the only part of the ship that spins are the communication antennas - the one part you want stationary and pointing to Earth. The heat shield is composed of thousands of mechanical louvers with no imaginable function, instead of a simple solid piece. I rarely had a clear idea as to where anything was in this ship; for example, the viewing room was cut into the bomb's heat shield, but there was no impression that anyone had to walk through the bomb area to get there. Oxygen levels play a big part in the suspense, with Michelle Yeoh calculating that there's only enough air for four crew. Yet this was a vast ship with literally cubic acres of air in the bomb area alone (which begs the question, why have air around the bomb at all?). And all this oxygen was generated by the small plant area? I don't think so. Why exactly did the first probe fail? Did everyone just decide to burn themselves up? Didn't quite catch that explanation. If the mainframe fails, there's only one person who can operate the bomb. Why weren't the rest of the crew trained to operate it? What else did they have to practice on for 16 months? The bomb will be traveling so fast space & time will break down? Please. This thing is the mass of Manhattan, you're not going to accelerate it very fast. Why was communication lost as they neared Mercury? We've had probes go to Mercury and even closer to the sun, and we've talked to them just fine. All remaining plausibility flees at the end, when Capa detonates the bomb and has a leisurely gaze at..what? The wall of nuclear flame? The fires of creation? You tell me. The famously cryptic 2001 made a lot more sense than this. In general, much of the film impressed me as contrived situations to keep the crew in danger. This movie had a lot of potential, but Danny Boyle chose to get lost in his own head.

To be fair for a short while I was quite taken with the sheer atmosphere of Sunshine. The ship, the location, the effects. Breathtaking. Still, it didn't take long for them to mess it up. Here they go again... The wheels started to fall off about the time the crew start having a brawl. I'm thinking, maybe the selection process should have focused a bit more on the maturity of the people saving the human race? Responsibility and all that. The story continues and we have a major catastrophe and the shield is damaged as a result of a human memory malfunction. Two observations: 1. We have an intelligent (?) computer that will override their vital mission to fix the shield in a vital, life threatening way but it wouldn't bl**dy well make the one point something angle correction to the shield when they changed course in the first place! (Which thus also endangered the mission) Since when do we let computers make judgment calls? Why didn't they again use their codes to override the computer for the mere 30 seconds or so it would take to save the Captains life? 2. There was a huge, inconvenient fire in the oxygen producing compartment. Now the computer tells the crew many useful things but did it mention there is a fire? Nope. Was there an effective way to deal with this risk? Again no. Unless you consider burning the oxygen you need to survive effective..... I might mention here that the implication is that the trees have created so much pure oxygen that the fire is particularly violent. Um, surely you have been feeding the trees CO2 or basically the same air everyone is breathing? Moving on... We have the space jump from the Icarus 1. Some guy, we really don't care who, ends up in the absolute cold of space behind the shield. Absolute cold of space being -273 degrees Kelvin we're told, so pretty rapidly he freezes. Now that's tough I guess but it's even worse, it's just wrong. If we assume there is no radiant heat coming from the shield itself here's the story. Space is a vacuum, a vacuum is nothing, so it is neither hot or cold. If, there is no radiant heat source present, then an object will radiate it's heat without gaining any in return until it's all gone. This occurs at absolute zero which is -273 degrees Kelvin. Good so far. The reason freezing instantly is rubbish is because the writers haven't realized that there is no heat loss by conduction (as in air) but only by radiation. This can be a very slow process. Which is why we put hot drinks in a vacuum flask to keep it hot, a vacuum is the best insulator. Basically freezing would be the least of your worries in space without a suit. A few more minor points too sharp to swallow The shield has lots of moving parts, that don't appear to be useful... - If the plan all along was for the shield-bomb unit to fly into the heart of the Sun, what was going to protect the spacecraft on the return journey? What was going to protect the bomb when it entered the Sun and the heat could come from behind? - Why can you simply raise the, absolutely vital, mainframe computer out of it's coolant without any safety devices or alarms going off? (To override a mission saving action by the computer you need two people and security codes...) Once you raise it, although it turns off, in a while it will destroy itself, somehow. To service it the best way is to dive into freezing water and use a....spanner. The system that raises and lowers it has enough grunt to trap and maim a human being. - When the computer goes off the lights go out, there are no emergency lights... - You can ask the computer to allow so much heat and light in that it will kill you. What the...

When I realized who directed this one, I thought, "Oh, no - not Danny Boyle!" but since I totally LOVE science fiction, I ordered the DVD and thought: "Mr Boyle, surprise me!" And surprise me he did. This is without doubt the best science fiction movie in a very long time. Visually, this one is a gem. I don't think I have seen such beauty in the Sun ever. The "Icarus II" interiors and exterior is truly wonderful and looks so very real. The actors do a great job realizing a surprisingly good script. The story is a blend of many science fiction movies, but more on the paying tribute to what was than stealing. You have for instance the resemblance of "Discovery One" in "2001: A Space Odyssey", and a couple of other scenes from there. Watch both movies and you will get my point. Several other movies also have "guest appearances". Expect state of the art special effects, expect an excellent script - and expect wonderful acting. I'm not only surprised - I am also very much impressed!

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.

Danny Boyle has rebooted the sci-fi genre to a magnificent start. "Sunshine", clearly inspired by the classics "Alien", "2001: A Space Odyssey" and many more, but brought to the modern age. The plot sounds ridiculous at first, but once you get into it, you really get into it! A crew of 8 are sent on a mission to set a bomb in the sun as it is dying and the earth is suffering a solar winter. 7 years before that there was a similar mission, but that failed. They find the lost spacecraft and decide to board it, but a fatal incident occurred that lost them their oxygen supply. There is no longer enough for all of them to get back to earth alive. But there is enough for few; so who will take the plunge and who will survive? And will their sanities stay intact to last them the epic journey? With such a small cast there was surprisingly no weak performances. Everyone had the desired screen-time to be able to care for them. But the characters anger and frustration caught up with them after being on the ship for 16 months, they begin to take acts of violence on each other and feel stressed so they forget vital aspects that could cost them their lives. You have to remember that they will save mankind if their mission is a success; that's a lot of pressure. And the film feels like a lot of pressure due to the intenseness it creates. Boyle's skills to create tension is impressive. He uses special techniques to make us feel claustrophobic and more importantly, to panic. Close ups, angles, blurs, stretches, stops, flashes all add up to the effect. The effect of feeling the heat. It burns. But in between those scenes you get to see the relaxing side of space. The view from outside. Its beautiful, truly dazzling and spectacular. The score is incredible. During the beginning its like a calm 'breather'. But then its turns into a beat. A fast beat. And your heart joins it. Pumping away to make you feel more insecure. Very intense. Boyle really proves he has talent for different genres in this modern sci-fi to be classic showing how people do the most inhumane thing to survive. I highly recommend it. Rewatches over the years have revealed its flaws and clichés but it's still enjoyable and nostalgic for me. 8/10