Sunshine

[black campbellq]

Danny Boyle's new movie is a sci-fi thriller. I liked what he had done with 28 Days Later so I went to have a shufty.

They don't really explain the why (apparently cut for time), but the crew are trying to restart the sun which is slowly burning out. If you get past that bit, it's extremely tense from the get-go. The acting is superb, the writing's pretty tight, and the effects are great (save for the usual bugaboo of mine: sound in space.)

There's a subplot that kicks in at the end that's not needed -- the action and tension level's high enough, but it wasn't a deal-breaker for me. Overall, I liked it. It didn't have much terribly original in the storyline, but the presentation was unique.

[Tobian]

Yeah I've heard good and bad things about it. I'll probably pick it up, as I am always a sucker for scifi with cool FX, and horror, but I don't have high hopes.. That said sometimes films I've not had high hopes for, were good

[Evan van Eyk]

Well I have to totally disagree, the movie was one of the worst I have ever seen. Even when one accepts the illogical start that some additional, strange mass stops the sun form burning ( actually it would accelerate it ), there were so many mistakes in the movie from a scientific point of view that it really hurt. Since they claimed to give a scientifically correct impression, this even wighs more.

One major mistake was that the navigator had turn of the computer for calculating the new course... Erm no. Such calculations are impossible to make without a computer, expecially this close to sun where there is not only the Newton-laws of stellar bodies, but also relativistic effects. The first mentioned equations don not have an analytical solution but need an numerical approach.
The navigators turning off of the computer might however explain why his calculations were wrong...
The fact that they simply stop in sun's orbit does not add to the scientific quality of the movie. They simply stop, they don't even fire engines to enter an orbit, which would be difficult anyway, because the rotation of the ship would have to be synchronized with the orbit's speed and due to inhomogen gravitational field of the sun ( just like Earth has that! ), you could never achieve that without significant fuel burn. Anyway according to their screens they simply stop when they reach the sun - which is simply impossible.
Once they enter Icarus I, things get even worse. But first of all, I liked the setting and the idea of flashing short frames of what actually happened on board in the present time of the movie.
Once the hack and slay on the Icarus II begins, in my eyes the film is lost. I felt is degraded even more, by going along with all those teenie-horror movies. Somehow the whole problem of the movie was that they could not decided what it actually was. Horror, realistic scifi, action-movie, etc. In the end it was really nothing except a row of errors and inconsitencies ( especially concerning the results of the sun-panorama-view on Icarus ).
The pictures, besides faulty exhaust-streams of engines , were very well done and spectacular but in my eyes this could not save the movie.

[Tobian]

So pretty but vacuous

Pretty much what I had heard. I'll still give it a go. Sounds a lot like Solaris (with the exception of the hack/n/slash) exceedingly exquisite to look at but rather confusing story and no actual point

It has to be said there are lots of films with horrifically bad physics and awful science, but if you like the characters, the story and the emotional weight of the piece outweighs the errors, then you end up enjoying it: Hence I liked Armageddon, despite its many flaws (well Liv Tyler goes a long way smooth over technical errors haha)

[Evan van Eyk]

The problem I had with themovie was mainly that it tried to be three different kinds and in the end was none.
I thought the story was rather lame, because there was no twist, nothing very smart in it.

[Street]

Solaris did have a point, but it was so muddled that I had to watch it three times to figure it out. I'm not positive, but if I remember correctly, the point was that you couldn't tell what was reality and what was a creation of the entity by the end of the movie.

[Tobian]

"hi I'm a huge ball of gas and wizzy special effects, and my entire purpose in life is to mess with your head". Sums up the film then. I can't overemphasise that as being POINTLESS then

[RaconteurX]

Solaris unfortunately is a very difficult novel to adapt for the screen. I felt that both versions (the 1972 Russian original and the 2002 American remake) did an admirable job of being psychological without the need to delve overmuch into horror per se. Existential philosophizing doesn't always make for popular film fare, alas.