Should one avoid exposure to Sunshine or not?<br /><br />ON THE SUNNY SIDE: <br /><br />I always welcome a serious attempt at a high class SF movie. Of course most efforts lead to serious disappointments. But this one has both Alien and 2001 as references. If it delivers at only 10% we would still be treated with the best SF in decades. 28 Weeks Later by Danny Boyle struck me as a very good horror movie. And descent horror movies are as scarce as descent SF movies. Hopes are up.<br /><br />It looks fantastic. Just based on its looks it deserves ten shiny, not dieing, stars.<br /><br />The acting, though not great, was certainly acceptable (apart from the navigator). <br /><br />The beginning doesn't ruin what now can still be hopeful expectations. Though the element of a dark kind of fascination with the sun by the crews psychologist is shown in a really stupid and in your face (lol) manner (exept if to you something like: "yeah, I'm very close to the sun, but waring these cool sunglasses I can take her on" seems in place for a crew member on a mission to prevent this nuclear 'monster' from kicking the bucket).<br /><br />Music by Underworld. Great choice (I am a fan).<br /><br />With this a bright side, what can go wrong? <br /><br />ON THE DARK -LEFT A BIT TOO LONG ON THE BBQ BURNED TO CHARCOAL- SIDE:<br /><br />A whole lot. Actually the whole enterprise.<br /><br />The error of the ships navigator (horribly portrait by an Asian actor who's reinvention of overacting is not worthy of anything but rotten tomatoes) is ridiculous. Hope fades.<br /><br />I don't know if characters need to be developed necessarily, like a lot of comments imply. But it IS needed here that viewers get involved and care for the characters. I don't care how that's realized but Sunshine does the opposite. Maybe Mr Boyle thinks it's cruel to let us care for characters who all get killed. So he let's them do all kinds of stupid things that make us quite indifferent to their fate. And since this group of childish amateurs is the elite crew selected from earths entire population in some future, we don't care a rats ass about that earth as well. Don't take our care for the planet for granted Mr Boyle. All hope is lost.<br /><br />Plot twists get sillier and sillier as the movie progresses, eh sorry, degenerates into a very vague monster (not a joke).<br /><br />Bad acting? I think the actors are not much to blame here. The Script is. It's amazingly bad. Isn't a script a key element in deciding if the making of the movie will go through? Why was this movie made (with this script)? I can't believe the rating here on IMDb is not corrupted. Maybe there are really a lot of people who enjoyed Sunshine, but it would have been so easy to improve on the script. And I hate the flawed clichés like instant freezing in the vacuum(!) of space. Are clichés required for urning a big budget, no matter how flawed? Do flawed clichés get past expert advisors? What deluded arrogance to present this as serious SF. Furthermore the 'science' is degraded by showing too much and leaving too little to imagination. It's OK to introduce techniques that are not explained to the point it can be reputed but do their amazing stuff like in Star Trek. If Sunshine is trying to be more scientifically supported by sharing more of underlying principles it shoots itself in the foot, for even layman can dismiss the science as fantasy lacking enough fantasy. And furthermore, ask yourself this question: If you take a man from earth, expose him to the sun insufficiently protected for seven years, how would he look like? See the answer the makers of Sunshine come up with! Like a walking talking grumpy piece of meat that's badly burned (yeah, right). But wait, maybe I'm astray, lost from Sunshine's ambitious path...<br /><br />Not invited by the movie itself, but by a state of boredom, stubbornly still not fully convinced of Sunshine's dark failure I start to wonder about possible philosophical implications the makers may have intended when abandoning simple movie conventions that enable viewers to see what's in front of the camera and to follow what's going on. How else to blend in a bit of Kubricks' odysseys' depth? Toying a bit with concepts of god, the sun and humankind my goodwill runs out in a last effort to deny that this sun will shine no more. Soon I decide that Sunshine with its vague villain won't score better in this respect than just any movie we look at through some kind of blurring device.<br /><br />Science fiction in my opinion is fiction with a certain level of scientific plausibility. A horror movie just needs to be scary. This movie aims to shine bright in both genres and fails horribly. I suggest, instead of seeing this star killer, to read all the 'hated it' reviews here on IMDb. To me that was a lot more fun. There is however still some attraction in seeing it for its good looks and missed potential.