This film had everything, a good director with a solid body of work behind him, a fairly healthy budget but not too big and a pretty good cast too. Unfortunately it has Alex Garland writing and here lies the problem, Alex Garland is not John Hodge and this is a fact that Danny Boyle seems completely unaware of. Alex Garland is a novelist, not a screen writer and this becomes very apparent when looking at his work.
Sunshine starts out and it's atmospheric and clastrophobic, I thinking it's got a very good '2001' thing going on. The set up for the story is sound and the science seems movie credable. Then things start to go wrong for the characters, OK well this is a movie it was bound to happen. Then they get even worse and suddenly the whole film changes.
I find myself in a paranoid piece that reminds me almost of 'The Thing' except the plot doesn't grip nearly as tightly. Characters start dropping like flies but they have been so underdeveloped that I really don't care about their fates.
Then, guess what, the whole film does another massive switch and I find myself watching something along the same lines as 'Event Horizen'. I'm starting to think Garland must have just watched his favourite movies and then blended the plots together to create something he passed off as his own.
Then came the ending of the movie and OH MY GOD I was left in a state of confusion and relief (I've never been so happy to see credits roll since I sat through 'Pearl Harbour'). The ending makes no sense and the bits that do are just boring. They all die in the end but, as I said before, I really didn't care.
Sunshine would make a good book but it made a god awful movie...Garland should write it as a book actually, then write another one and then another. Hopefully it would stop him from writing dreadful scripts.