Sunshine (2007) - Insane, Stunning Solar Mission - REVIEW
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For tonight I was planing on putting out my Hokum (2026) review but decided to instead talk about a movie I recently rewatch, Sunshine from 2007, back in the day I use to watch movies just because friends who told me they were a good watch and not as a hobby like now days and I keep coming back to every few years and it never stops hitting the same way, which is kind of remarkable when you think about what it is actually asking you to sit with for an hour and forty minutes. Danny Boyle made something pretty strange here, a hard science fiction movie about eight people hauling a stellar bomb toward a dying sun with the weight of every living thing on Earth sitting on top of them, and the movie earns that weight almost immediately. The story is very simple and not complex at all with the sun slowly dying, the Earth is locked in a savage solar winter and the crew of the Icarus II is the last real shot anyone has at keep the show going, meaning the sun burning, before everything freezes to death permanently. What makes it work right out of the gate is how the movie traps you inside that ship without over explaining it. You feel the claustrophobia and the pressure from minute one without anyone needing to spell it out. Earth stays completely out of frame for most of the movie, kept distant through pre recorded video messages the crew sends back home right before they pass into the communication dead zone beyond Mercury, and that choice is devastating because it makes the isolation feel absolute. The tension starts cooking from the very first scene where the crew psychologist Searle stands alone in the observation room staring at a filtered image of the sun at two percent brightness and the ship computer warns him that bumping it to four percent will cause permanent eye damage, so he pushes it to three point one anyway, because he is already becoming obsessed with the light and Danny Boyle uses that one image to tell you everything you need to know about the psychological pressure building up inside everyone on this ship.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/
- Platform: DISNEY PLUS
The best part of this whole movie is the first two thirds and that is because the characters make some of the hardest desicions but completely logical under impossible pressure and watching that unfold is some of the best science fiction you are going to find on this movie and probably overall because you can feel the exploration, the distant, the empty space on this movie and thats what makes out of space movies so good. Chris Evans plays Mace, the ship engineer and he is absolutely on fire in this role, playing someone who is all mission all the time, no exceptions, no emotional arguments, just cold logic and it works every single time he shuts somebody down. There is this sequence that you will probably never forget where the navigator Trey screws up the shield calculations by just over one degree after they divert course to investigate the lost Icarus I ship, and that tiny math error starts this chain reaction of damage that threatens everything. Mace does not even hesitate, he volunteers the physicist Capa to go outside with captain Kaneda to repair the broken panels and watching those two climb out in these enormous gold reflective spacesuits with their claustrophobic little visor slits while the edge of the sun creeps closer is equal parts visually stunning and completely terrifying. Things go completely to hell when a fire breaks out and destroys the oxygen garden that Michelle Yeoh was running as Corazon, the ship autopilot corrects the rotation to compensate and suddenly the men outside are being exposed to direct sunlight with zero warning. Kaneda makes the call, he stays to finish the repair and orders Capa back inside and watching him turn around to face this advancing wall of fire coming to incinerate him is one of the most upsetting deaths I have seen in any science fiction movie, it hits you harder than it should because the movie made you care about everyone on this ship without you even noticing it was doing that.
There is a sequence later that does a better job of showing the indifference of space than honeslty most theatrical movies could do and it is the part where the airlock connecting both ships decouples and destroys itself, stranding Searle, Capa, Mace and Harvey on the dead ship with only one working spacesuit between them. The solution they come up with is to wrap their bodies in ripped out wall insulation and launch themselves through open vacuum at around minus two hundred and seventy degrees or something like that, it was insane temperature and the movie treats it like math, like the only answer available. Searle stays behind to manually operate the airlock so the others can be propelled across and watching Harvey miss the airlock and drift away, snap freezing instantly with tiny ice crystals forming on his last exhaled breath and his eyes glazing over in seconds, is one of the coldest both literal and zero feelings moment and most matter of fact deaths I have ever seen put on screen. That whole section is what the movie is flat out best at, this grounded terror just from been in space and a out of luck, where one small mistake creates a domino chain that the crew has to think and sacrifice their way through without any villain needing to show up and make things worse, all this feels completely fair because there is nothing artificial to it, treating the physics and consequences of space travel with real respect and letting the reality of the situation generate all the dread without manufacturing any of it artificially.
Not everything on this movie is perfect but its very close, reason why I gave it a 8/10 because the movie was headed for a perfect score right up until the third part and thats when it takes a sharp left turn into territory that really pissed me off. After the oxygen garden burns and the mission is in serious trouble, the detour to dock with the abandoned Icarus I ship becomes their only shot at salvaging resources, and that part still fits the tone. What does not fit is what they find on that derelict ship, which is the original captain Pinbacker, who has been surviving alone out there for close to seven years, completely destroyed by solar exposure and who has turned into this religious fanatic convinced that God wants humanity to die in the cold. He sneaks aboard the Icarus II and starts hunting the crew down on a space station and it completely wrecks the tone of everything that came before it, like the part of not needing a villain. What makes it worse is that Danny Boyle shoots every scene with Pinbacker using this distorted blurry camera effect that makes it impossible to even focus on the screen, it looks cheap, it looks like a bad music video effect from 2003 and it pulls you right out of the atmosphere they spent an entire hour building with so much care. The movie already had Searle, a character clearly becoming dangerously obsessed with the sun right from that opening scene, so it would have made so much more sense to let him be the one who snaps and starts threatening the mission from inside, but instead they drop this random burnt ghost into the last twenty minutes and just let him trash everything the smart writing built up. It is the kind of ending that makes you want to go back and have a stern conversation with whoever approved that third act script.
Even with all the damage that weird horror detour does to the second half, the actual final minutes manage to pull things back together in such a beautiful way with Capa finally making it inside the massive cube payload with gravity shifting around him in this strange weightless way and during the final struggle he manages to manually detonate the bomb as they are already falling into the star itself. The visual of Capa reaching out toward the surface of the sun as a new star ignites all around him is one of the most breathtaking images Danny Boyle has probably ever put on screen and then the movie cuts back down to a frozen Earth where the Sydney Opera House is buried under thick snow and ice and you see the sister of Capa standing outside with her children until the sky suddenly gets just a little bit warmer and brighter. It is a quiet and uplifting finish that washes away some of the frustration from the bad villain choices and leaves you thinking about what those characters gave up just to give the people on Earth one more decent day in the sun. Cillian Murphy carries the emotional weight of this thing on his back the entire runtime and never once drops it, and Chris Evans reminds you that he had serious chops before he ever put on a Captain America suit. The first hour is as good as science fiction gets and the visual scale of what Danny Boyle accomplished with that sun is stunning from start to finish, just go in knowing the third act is going to test your patience and you will be fine.
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