‘Sunshine’ was okay despite being surprisingly derivative
September 2, 2007After watching the sci-fi thriller ‘Sunshine’, I’m surprised more reviewers didn’t make the obvious comparisons to Event Horizon. Both movies were about risky missions sent out into space, that run into trouble when they find a vessel that was supposed to be lost on a previous mission to the same part of space. They also both combine horror and sci-ff, with mixed results. The difference was that Sunshine isn’t bad, whereas Event Horizon was garbage.
The idea in Sunshine is that for some reason the nuclear furnace powering our sun is dying. Icarus II is sent with a gigantic nuclear bomb that they plan to drop into the sun in order to re-ignite it. Icarus I went missing, but Icarus II finds the very weak beacon from the first mission, orbiting too close to the sun to be seen from Earth.
While sensible people sent to save the planet would have tried to complete their primary mission first, the Icarus II scientists decide they could use the bomb from the Icarus I as back-up in case something goes wrong with Icarus II. So they alter course to intercept and of course all hell breaks loose. I won’t go any further to spoil the plot, except to say that as you might expect, things do not really end well for the crews of either ship.
Like I said though, the plot follows very similar lines to Event Horizon. But that earlier movie was just dumb and gory, whereas Sunshine is pretty smart and uses camera techniques to infer the physical violence without being as gory.
Neither movie though is really good enough to be worth picking up on DVD. There’s no replay value to either I think. But of the two, only Sunshine is worth watching once.