Sunshine – Review

Director: Danny Boyle (of Slumdog Millionaire fame)

Release date: July 2007 (USA)

Running time: 107 minutes (R)

The sun is dying. Icarus 1, a space ship is sent with *nuclear* bomb to reignite it. However, Icarus 1, commanded by a Pinbacker (Mark Strong), doesn’t make it to the sun for unknown reasons. The crew is presumed dead.

Seven years later, Icarus 2 is sent in the wake of Icarus 1 to do what latter couldn’t — reignite the sun.

What the crew of Icarus 2 don’t expect is to actually bump into Icarus 1 when they are close to the sun, in the orbit of the planet Mercury.

What they don’t expect is that they would need to board Icarus 1 to salvage Icarus 1′s *nuclear* bomb and oxygen as a result of their oxygen being depleted due to an accident on board.

What the crew of Icarus 2 don’t expect is to find the whole crew of Icarus 1 having committed suicide by deliberate exposure to lethal levels of sunlight.

What they also don’t realize is that this was probably perpetrated by Pinbacker who is very much alive but driven to insanity due to prolonged loneliness.

But most of all, what they don’t expect is that Pinbacker doesn’t want to allow anyone to reignite the sun as he insanely believes that "For seven years I spoke with God. He told me to take us all to Heaven."

Without going into complete details as it is a complex film that needs one or two viewings to fully appreciate the various emotions that people would feel if quite literally the weight of the whole earth was on their shoulders.

Eight people to save a couple of billion. The hard decisions they need to make such as euthanasia for the sake of conserving oxygen to get to the sun and detonate their *nuclear* payload, Being faced with a relentless and murderous Pinbacker who as a result of his insanity believes that he is the chosen one to do "god’s" bidding of disallowing anyone to mess with the natural progression of things, knowing that even if they did "restart" the sun they wouldn’t be coming back home.

I would highly recommend this movie to everyone who qualifies and is eligible to watch an R rated film. Rated R on account of the controversial nature of the subject, references to god in an ungodly sense at times, situations of suicide and euthanasia and just general edge-of-your-seat-but-claustrophobic-dark environs!

The most chilling passage of the movie is marked by a conversation between Cillian Murphy and the Icarus 2′s computer which is referred to simply as "Icarus":

"….Trey is dead. There are only four crew members; Cassie, Mace, Corazon and me."
               " Negative. Five crew members."
"Icarus (computer)… who is the fifth crew member? "
                " Unknown."