Score: 51/100
Score on a par with: The History Boys 53/100; Cooperman Returns 53/100; The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe 55/100; Red Eye 56/100; The Dukes of Hazzard 51/100; Charlie & The Chocolate Factory 51/100; Cursed 52/100; Assault on Precinct 13 55/100; Matchstick Men 50/100; Jeepers Creepers II 50/100; Bruce Almighty 53/100; The Recruit 56/100; The Time Machine 53/100; K-Pax 53/100; A Beautiful Mind 56/100; Zoolander 55/100; Planet of the Apes 50/100; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin 52/100; Along Came a Spider 53/100; Meet The Parents 55/100
Here we have something which is in thrall to the best and worst of sci-film: it began as an intriguingly tense study of characters in a confined space and rapidly degenerated into a heartbreakingly derivative film about fighting Things in the dark against the clock. It was Alien combined with The Core, and it was not a combination of those films’ better aspects – we had Alien’s Thing in the dark theme but without any of the menace or indeed plausibility (the distress call was also taken, I am almost sure, from Alien) and we had the plot from The Core but without that film’s (ridiculously high, given its awfulness) entertainment value. Sunshine is, in places, profoundly dull.
The sections of the film featuring the sun are extremely beautiful: the scene in which Mercury crosses the face of the dying sun is one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in the cinema. Unfortunately the acting and the plot are less beautiful and more or less totally unconvincing: these bickering dunderheads could not plausibly have been chosen to fly a mission on which all of humanity depends. Also unfortunate were the facts that the spacecraft’s interior was more or less a copy of Alien’s Nostromo, the insistence of having whooshing noises in space (NO! I wanted to scream), and the persistent belief that it is possible to survive in space by holding your breath. Dark Star was more technically accurate than this.
The ending of the film was perhaps the most frustrating part: by now we were deep in the fighting Things in the dark against the clock section, having long abandoned any concept of psychological horror in favour of a sunburnt lunatic with a scalpel hurrying about hard-to-determine sections of spaceship (it became increasingly difficult to tell who was still alive and where), here, as the craft approached the sun, the scenes swung between the beautifully inspired and slipshod crap. The sun and the bomb which was to reignite it (and so save the world) looked utterly beautiful, and yet the absurd final fight scene was filmed in such a cack-handed way that it was difficult to tell what was going on or why.
It was a film that was, in the end, hobbled by genre: instead of having the confidence to carve its own path by concentrating on the dramatic problems of the spacecraft in question and her psychologically collapsing crew, the film threw in a monster and a race against the clock – just like any other space film. It’s a shame, but I would really rather watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture again than this, because once you’ve seen the trailer for Sunshine you have already seen the best of the star of the film – the sun.
At least we’ve got a two-speed hedge-cutter.
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