It's 2057, and the sun is dying. Eight astronauts have set out on the Icarus II carrying a giant bomb; the idea is to drop it into the sun and set it off as sort of a jump-start. This isn't the first time this has been tried; the Icarus I left seven years ago, but that mission failed and the ship was never heard from.
(Point of order: Wouldn't the name of the first ship have simply been Icarus? One doesn't generally name a ship Something I unless one knows in advance that there's going to be a Something II, Something III, and so on; naming the first ship Icarus I would seem like a resounding vote of no-confidence in that mission. And while we're in a grumbly mood: Icarus, for a mission to the sun? Really? Is Greek mythology to be entirely forgotten in the next fifty years?)
Anyway... as the movie opens, the crew of the Icarus II is just reaching the point where they can no longer send messages back to Earth; they are truly on their own. And naturally, this is the point where things begin to go disastrously wrong, starting when they pick up a distress call from -- yup, you got it -- the Icarus I.
For the first hour or so, Sunshine is actually a pretty good science fiction thriller; the tensions among the crew are convincing, as are their debates about what to do as each little disaster happens. But about halfway through, the movie takes a sudden and drastic turn for the worse. It's not enough that it suddenly becomes a bad slasher movie -- Jason in Space -- but in its final half-hour, it abandons narrative logic and coherence entirely, diving headlong into pretty visuals that aim for transcendence but only achieve pretension.
In short, the movie becomes this year's version of The Fountain, and will no doubt appeal to the same folks who fell for that one, bamboozling them once again into thinking that they're seeing something profound and important. Sunshine is even more frustrating and annoying than The Fountain was, because it starts off so well before falling completely to bits.
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