"Sunshine" Review

As much as I geek out for space fantasies like Star Wars and Aliens, there will always be a large part that loves and respects the "hard" sci-fi movies like 2001 and Solaris, with their profound life crises, grounded approach, and emphasis on how desolate spaceships really are. Sunshine treads the line between the two, and as such, it's remarkable in its ambitious existential explorations of human existence, but at the same time it's also a tense, endlessly entertaining space thriller.

Set 50 years in the future, Sunshine steals a plot from camp disaster movies like The Core and Armageddon, but takes the other route in its approach. There are no dooming disaster scenes, nor is it played that way. The movie starts off with the crew of Icarus II, the spaceship carrying astronauts and scientists given a seemingly impossible mission... to deliver a cargo of thermonuclear bomb, pooled from every nuke-head on Earth, hoping to re-ignite the dying sun. The premise is a reach, for sure, but it's hardly the focus of the story.

It's refreshing to see a space movie that culls a lot of its tension only from the humans instead of some computer malfunction (no offense to HAL) or a sudden asteroid field. When Icarus II eventually fouls up, as it must for this to be a thriller, it's because of simple human error. Sunshine goes to great lengths to show how imperfect we are as people; how petty, weak and inattentive we can be when we get too arrogant and comfortable with our abilities. The movie's protagonist, Capa (Cillian Murphy), is neither heroic nor that much likable-in fact, he's quite effeminate-just trying his best not to buckle under the enormous pressure of saving the world.