Sunshine: Hey would you idiots stop bickering over the phone long enough to save all life on earth?!
(This is a review I wrote some time ago. The BBT link to it is not working, so I'm republishing it here.)
If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they send a whole crew up to the sun to die horribly? In Sunshine, our closest star is dying, and so naturally a giant bomb will save it. Send a space ship up with an explosive the size of New York and load up Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, and Johnny Storm from The Fantastic Four and you’ve got a deal. What you also have is a slow-moving clunker, full of nice looking planetarium-style special effects, a bickering international ensemble, and not much else.
You don't have to be a folklore and mythology scholar to suspect that a mission called "Icarus II" is ill-fated. Icarus, in fact, is the name of the female-voiced ship's computer, a mostly-benign version of HAL 9000 who speaks in a sexy stage whisper. She even gets all slow and warbly when her mainframe is removed from the cooling tanks, if you know what I mean.
This space odyssey travels along well worn paths blazed by other space disaster flicks, complete with backbiting crewmates, honorable sacrifices, and a Strange Presence on the ship. The situation spends no time going from bad to worse, with early foreshadowing as the ship's killjoy gets Our Hero in a headlock in a tiff over hogging the phone. The situation stays in the "worse" category for most of the film, with little real suspense, just tedious grumbling from the doomed and disgruntled astronauts.
It's hard to understand why their mission isn't more compelling, after all, they are trying to rescue the Sun, and therefore, every living thing on earth depends on them. Unfortunately, none of the characters does much to compel interest. Our Hero, supposedly a physicist, who does nothing resembling physics in the course of the story, spends his time alternately brooding and looking scared in a really laughable space suit (like a tardigrade wrapped in gold foil). Any character approaching the combination of being competent and being likable is summarily tossed into the vacuum of space, which, depending on the movie's whims, either burns you or freezes you. By the time a malevolent force, a naked Freddy Krueger filmed with Altered States blurry-vision, begins attacking them, it's not easy to choose sides.
Fortunately, it's not necessary either. Without giving too much away, we're told pretty much up front that the chances for a return trip from the sun aren't very good. But when we are there, we are given the chance to gaze into the face of God, or so they would have us believe. Stare at the sun long enough and you'll think you're seeing lots of things.
If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they send a whole crew up to the sun to die horribly? In Sunshine, our closest star is dying, and so naturally a giant bomb will save it. Send a space ship up with an explosive the size of New York and load up Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, and Johnny Storm from The Fantastic Four and you’ve got a deal. What you also have is a slow-moving clunker, full of nice looking planetarium-style special effects, a bickering international ensemble, and not much else.
You don't have to be a folklore and mythology scholar to suspect that a mission called "Icarus II" is ill-fated. Icarus, in fact, is the name of the female-voiced ship's computer, a mostly-benign version of HAL 9000 who speaks in a sexy stage whisper. She even gets all slow and warbly when her mainframe is removed from the cooling tanks, if you know what I mean.
This space odyssey travels along well worn paths blazed by other space disaster flicks, complete with backbiting crewmates, honorable sacrifices, and a Strange Presence on the ship. The situation spends no time going from bad to worse, with early foreshadowing as the ship's killjoy gets Our Hero in a headlock in a tiff over hogging the phone. The situation stays in the "worse" category for most of the film, with little real suspense, just tedious grumbling from the doomed and disgruntled astronauts.
It's hard to understand why their mission isn't more compelling, after all, they are trying to rescue the Sun, and therefore, every living thing on earth depends on them. Unfortunately, none of the characters does much to compel interest. Our Hero, supposedly a physicist, who does nothing resembling physics in the course of the story, spends his time alternately brooding and looking scared in a really laughable space suit (like a tardigrade wrapped in gold foil). Any character approaching the combination of being competent and being likable is summarily tossed into the vacuum of space, which, depending on the movie's whims, either burns you or freezes you. By the time a malevolent force, a naked Freddy Krueger filmed with Altered States blurry-vision, begins attacking them, it's not easy to choose sides.
Fortunately, it's not necessary either. Without giving too much away, we're told pretty much up front that the chances for a return trip from the sun aren't very good. But when we are there, we are given the chance to gaze into the face of God, or so they would have us believe. Stare at the sun long enough and you'll think you're seeing lots of things.