‘Sunshine’ Review

Ok, so my awesome run of watching great movies has come to a crashing end with Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. What’s sucks, too, is that for about 1 hour and 12 minutes this was easily one of the best movies I’ve seen in 2008. After that point in the film, things get painful.

The story is pretty simple: at some point in the future the Sun has started to stop burning brightly enough to heat the Earth, and a team of heroes gets on a spaceship, with a giant bomb attached to it, and heads to the Sun in hopes of revitalizing the dying star. Think Armageddon, except instead of our heroes being Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Liv Tyler, we get Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Michelle Yeoh (we also trade Steve Buscemi for Chris Evans, which I’m calling a push). That is to say, real actors who take imaginative roles with depth and class.

The first 1 hour 12 minutes does two things really well:

1. There’s a spectacular sense of wonder about being in space. There’s a very real “to boldly go…” feeling to this part of the film. I’d recommend that J.J. Abrams take a few notes for his Star Trek film, but actually J.J. Abrams wrote Armageddon, so nuts to that.
2. There’s a realism to the characters that leads them to be so clearly unconstructed, much in the same way the characters in No Country for Old Men are unconstructed.

That second point is what is so amazing about the first 1 hour 12 minutes. The film starts with the mission already in full swing, and quickly presents the following question: if you carried with you a bomb that was the last hope to save the human race, would you take a detour from your mission if that meant, maybe, securing a second bomb that might be the last last hope for the human race?

As you might expect, our team of heroes decide that “two last hopes are better than one,” and it is not without it’s consequences. The first 1 hour 12 minutes are full of real character drama, and I found myself completely engrossed in the lives of the crew and the decisions they were forced to make. The actors all brought their A-games, especially the always great Cillian Murphy and Hiroyuki Sanada, who proves that even without a samurai sword in his hand he’s still a badass.

Then comes the 1 hour 12 minute mark, after which the film devolves into a blistering pile of bullshit. A really great sci-fi character drama sudden becomes a really stupid horror/thriller. It’s as if someone accidentally photocopied pages of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon and slipped them randomly at the end of the script. Not the good parts of Event Horizon, either; I’m talking about the ridiculously terrible parts of Event Horizon, which, I suppose, is most of Event Horizon.

From that point forward the film is almost unwatchable. Maybe it’s because the start is so strong, or maybe it’s because the story really does become so preposterously craptastic, but I found myself fast forwarding through large chunks at the end. I felt back and went back to see if I missed anything good, realized that I didn’t, and just started fast forwarding again.

If I had to make a recommendation, I’d say rent the flick and watch the first 1 hour and 12 minutes… hell, actually, just stop after 1 hour and 10 minutes just to be safe, then fast forward your way until the last couple of scenes (the last scene in particular is pretty nice). It’s really such a damn shame, though. This could have been a really great film.

This is when you should stop watching. You have been warned.