Film Club Review – Sunshine

Sunshine

This movie broke my heart.

This film was brilliant in almost every way. The concept was wonderfully interesting and executed in such a way that we believed what was happening the whole time. The cast and crew obviously took it seriously. The photography was stunningly beautiful and the score, well, the score was one of the best I have heard in a long time. Why? Because it hit the perfect tone for each moment it was used and drew us into the world so that we felt like we were millions of miles away close to the surface of the sun along with the crew.

The extremely high stakes of the mission, to kick start the sun using a massive payload bomb before the sun dies out, was felt in every scene, adding a tension that is rarely captured on film this authentically. There were moments of pure brilliance, such as the mercury passing and the transmission coming in from Icarus I. I sat there thinking that this was definitely the best film of its year and one of the best I have seen in a long while.

And then it turned into a monster movie.

I have never seen such a brilliant film go so badly so fast. The ending of this masterpiece ruined it nearly to completion. Suddenly the sunburnt captain who has been living in space for 7 years was on their ship, killing them off and sabotaging their mission. It felt like a completely different movie from this point, and I shook my head in astonishment. Suddenly things no longer made sense and I couldn’t help but hope that this would end up being a dream sequence or something. This film was about the pressures of the entire existence of Earth resting on your shoulders, and the ending could have matched that, retaining the tension the film carried so brilliantly up to that point without having to rely on some plot twist which didn’t fit. I am deeply saddened.
I honestly don’t know how to rate this movie. It was truly  a 10 up until the point where the computer said that there was a “fifth person onboard”.

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