Sunshine is another of the "Must Save the World" epics, in the same vein as The Core, When Worlds Collide, and Armageddon. This time, a crew of astronauts must, I kid you not, restart the sun. Let me give you a little time to digest the silliness of that. Spoilers Ho!

If you can’t find silliness in the premise, then I suggest you read no further: I can’t help you. It’s likely that you thought The Core and Mission to Mars were paragons of science-fiction, or that Bruce Willis really could save us all from an asteroid. You are too far gone to help.

Now, for all you others, I’ll assume that you’ve stopped laughing. Oddly, if they had gone with a premise that was a little more realistic, it might not have been such a bad movie. It might have been average, even. Let’s meet the crew of the ship:

• Kaneda, the captain
• The guy who played Scarecrow as Kapa, the science guy. I’ll be calling him Scarecrow
• The guy who played the Human Torch as the asshole military guy
• The love interest girl Cassie, who was in 28 Weeks Later, I think
• Other expendable guys and girls, including the woman who likes plants more than people, the cowardly second in command, and the guy who seems to have a fetish for sunlight; they all die

As we know from this type of movie (and from other movies like Titanic), it’s never enough that a ship is sinking, or that a chunk of rock is going to hit the Earth, or that the sun is slowly dying (way, way, way too early): no, there has to be all sorts of other shit going on. In the case of Sunshine, we’ve got a previous mission to the sun that lost contact with Earth seven years earlier. Since two McGuffins are better than one, that ship reappears. This causes the following extra stupidity:

• Damage to a critical part of the ship that’s always likely to be damaged, with no way to access beyond the requisite spacewalk. Said spacewalk kills the captain.
• During the spacewalk, the oxygen garden is destroyed: there’s no way to complete the mission without the other ship’s oxygen
• While aboard the other ship, someone sabotages the airlock, leading to two more deaths.
• The guy who made a mistake causing the initial damage kills himself before the Human Torch can kill him (they need the extra oxygen).
• The last survivor of the other ship is now a crazed, super-strong serial killer, who starts stalking the other crew after sabotaging the ship’s computer.
• In keeping with the edict that critical parts of the ship are only accessible in ways that will kill you, the Human Torch has to dive into super-cold liquid to restore the ship’s computers. He dies.

I could go on, but I don’t have the strength. After the oxygen garden is destroyed, it’s calculated that there’s only enough oxygen for 4 people to make it to the mission’s end: it seems to me, though, that they were wasting a shitload of oxygen to pressurize unnecessary parts of the ship (including a warehouse sized area containing all the fissile material from the Earth).

Scarecrow, apparently, is the only guy who can arm all that nuclear goodness, too. Nothing like having single points of failure. The funny thing is that the Human Torch KNOWS that Scarecrow is the only one with the requisite knowledge, yet still "volunteers" Scarecrow for the extremely dangerous spacewalk. Huh?

The movie devolves into a slasher picture towards the end, and the Earth, of course, is saved. Luckily, everyone on board both ships is dead by the end of the movie (unless I missed any after end credits resurrection scene; I would not be surprised if this turkey had one). To me, that’s a happy ending.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 10th, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under DVDs, Movies, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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