Disjointed scenes and mediocre acting, however, probably wounded this film most. The horror aspect might have worked if they found a better cinematic technique than jumpy, blurry cuts….an edgy technique like the Japanese horror flicks Ju-on or Ringu perhaps.

Yet like others here, I felt the moive had enough “wow factor” space moments to make it thrilling, and occasionally thought provoking.

Wondering what other films out there people think are the best in the “speculative fiction” genre.

Both 2001 and 2010 were worthy. Children of Men too. I also liked The Fountain, though admittedly it has a good bit of sci-fantasy mixed throughout.

Still a good movie with great effects and possibly the best natural disaster movie I’ve seen. I typically hate the genre. But Sunshine combined the disaster with some Event Horizon horror-esque elements which worked well. I don’t think I ever got bored during it. Great stuff, if you can look past the bad science.

Exactly what is the Q-ball supposed to be doing to the Sun? Destroying it is supposed to not just stop the deterioration of solar output, but restore it to normal (see last scene). So it seems that the Q-Ball is somehow just suppressing the energy producing reactions at the core. However, we all know that it takes thousands of years for radiation to propagate from the core of the Sun to the surface. So, it should take thousands of years to see any change after the Q-ball is destroyed. Also, how is the bomb supposed to get anywhere near the core before it’s vaporized? Why do they detonate it above the surface where it won’t do any good?

Or, if the Q-ball is supposed to be orbiting inside the Sun sucking up enough matter to make a difference, how would destroying it be able to reverse the damage? Also in that case, how would they find it? They don’t seem to make any attempt to do so.

Then there’s the bomb which has the mass of Manhattan Island. Where did humans get the technology to send that much mass to the Sun? Or even to build a spaceship that large? And if they have it, wouldn’t they have sent a somewhat larger crew, like maybe hundreds? Why would they bother with the farm when the mass of the required life support expendables would be negligible compared to the bomb? Or why not send a slow robot ship with the bomb, then follow up with some faster ships with people (if they are really needed for anything other than screwing up)?

And how about those “fissionables”? We are told that all of the Earth’s fissionables (Brian Cox says uranium) have been extracted in 50 years. How did they manage that? Does it include the uranium in the oceans? Did they set up giant breeder reactors also? More to the point, once they had all that uranium/whatever, why not just use it to power civilization, instead of betting on this crazy Sun-saving mission? That would have been an especially good idea after losing half of it on the first attempt. Which reminds me, wouldn’t it have made sense to at least send a few extra ships full of crazy astronauts to see what happened to the “Icarus I”, and maybe try to salvage the bomb?

It would have been so much better in zero-gravity. Is it really that hard to do realistic zero-gravity in movies these days?

I did appreciate that the physicist got to be the good looking hero.

Plus, visually beautiful. The busy, corporate whored effects of Transformers can kiss my…

I saw a quite poor video/audio quality copy of this film but it’s style was still very impressive.

I give it a 5/5, no a 10/10… :-þ

I wonder if there’s going to be (or already is) a backlash from the religious section of society, proclaiming what an evil film this is because it dares to present atheism/atheists prominently, and even had people ‘convert’ to atheism while it was being filmed. (Yet we’re all supposed to blindly accept any religious stuff in films as not only OK, but right.)

None of those opinions are ‘right’, but they *are* mine.

I agree with Mark Martin, it’s an existentialist thriller moreso than a modern sci-fi. I think it harks back to sci-fi from the ‘olden days’ which used extraordinary circumstances to address different issues. The issues Sunshine addresses are morals vs logic, intelligence vs violence, the desire to know vs the desire to believe… and the value of one human life compared to Humanity as a whole…

Ken G asked “Did the message fail so badly, or have we just become so jaded that we can no longer see a sincere effort to depict science in the light it was intended?”

I think Sunshine is a bit of a mirror. If you don’t have an existential bone in your body, then you just won’t see anything in it, irrespective of whether you like looking at the stars or not. The message in Sunshine didn’t ‘fail’ – I know loads of people who have been completely and utterly blown away by the film – but sometimes people just aren’t looking for that message. Fair enough.

One ‘bad’ review I read of ‘Sunshine’ said something like, ‘Watching it made me realise how small and insignificant we all are, how giant, powerful and magestic the universe is and how we don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. I hated it.’

The people in the movie are mere charicatures, not characters, and the movie feels like a video game from start to finish, even featuring an “end boss.”

Gia, just because a movie presents scientists in a positive light does not mean it is a good movie. This one isn’t.

I don’t want to know if everyone in the crew (or for that matter, on Earth) dies by the end of the film, but the “everyone dies eventually” argument is pretty lame, because it’s so obvious. I think we all KNOW that everyone dies eventually. If, however, that’s actually the point of the film, that we all die, but what we do in life can make a difference to those living, I guess I see the point of bringing it up that way.

Anyway, I guess I’ll know soon enough how the film is, and it’s all about. (Unless, of course, I die first. Whee, what a charming thought.)

“Considering that the movie is set only 50 years in the future, the sun seems to be dying several billion years prematurely, especially in a “hard” (i.e., quasi-plausible) science-fiction film. Man, am I glad I didn’t go off on a rant about that before learning that the film’s science adviser, Dr. Brian Cox of CERN (Conseil Europeen Pour le Recherche Nucleaire [European Laboratory for Particle Physics]), thought of it, too.

The sun is not “dying in the normal sense,” IMDb.com reports, but in the Cox scenario “has instead been ‘infected’ with a ‘Q-ball’ — a supersymetric nucleus, left over from the Big Bang…that is disrupting the normal matter. This is a theoretical particle that scientists at CERN are currently trying to confirm — the film’s bomb is meant to blast the Q-ball to its constituent parts, which will then naturally decay, allowing the sun to return to normal.”

I’ll buy that. Blasting a Q-ball to its constituent parts sounds normal to me, but then I read every sci-fi magazine published during my adolescence, and my hero was John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding/Analog, who insisted his fiction not be preposterous, but sensible and possible, such as a mission to the sun to blast a Q-ball to pieces.”

I’m not sure I’d exactly call it a ten-little-indians type thing either. It’s just that the thesis has to do with the temporariness of us and the World. Over on IMDB a number of people have asked, “Does everyone [in the crew] die?” A number of times I’ve replied that “Everyone dies. Even had one or more of the characters been left alive at story’s end, the fact remains that way past that end, those characters will eventually be dead, of violence, old age, of something. No one makes it out intact.”

It would be nice to see one, but the main point is that they do not seem to exist, so it is good to have at least something…

It’s not really a slasher flick, though (as the American ad campaign now makes clear) all the crew do die off one by one in various circumstances.