This is easily the most underappreciated movie this year. Nobody saw it because it was marketed horribly and only released into 400 theaters on a budget of 50 million! It is a sci-fi classic that shouldn’t be missed. It’s is out on dvd January 8th. Don’t rent it buy it. You won’t be sorry.
I saw it in the cinema a while back. It was quite enjoyable. I suppose I’d better put the rest in spoiler tags…
[spoiler]It could have done without all the weirdness. I know that there has to be some sort of malfunction, problem etc. for there to be a plot, but where the hell did that previous captain come from. How could he have possibly survived. A little bit of explaination would have been nice. [/spoiler]
The movie was gorgeous, and the cast was strong. But I felt like the plot lifted from one too many other movies: a little bit Event Horizon, a little bit Alien, a little bit 2001, and maybe a couple others too. The plot never really surprised me because it felt as though…it had all happened before, and was all happening again.
That said, it was a beautiful movie to watch, and I saw it in an old movie theater with a handful of other movie geeks. Definitely was not marketed well enough.
It is nearly impossible to make a original sci-fi film these days. Every possible idea had been used up and remade.
Truly one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen and I don’t say it lightly.
Not the best but most beautiful. Now the story isn’t original, but still solid, but the acting is quite good, cinematography was excellent, and just the visuals of this movie were breath taking. the kind of i wish i could frame them put up on my wall good (sorry i’ll stop gushing now)
I’ve had to wait forever for it to come out on DVD here in North America; I’ll be picking mine up first thing Tuesday.
I guess you can label this the Simpsons Syndrome
Sunshine was also one of my favorites of 2007. Like y’all have said, gorgeous cinematography and really wonderful performances. Cillian Murphy as Cappa was so nuanced and so real! I did not mind the lack of originality because it wasn’t trying to be a ground-breaker. I was pulled in by the FANTASTIC trailersand was lucky to be able to see it in the theater. No, it wasn’t perfect, but it was really quite good.
The one thing that bothered me was that the science part of this sci-fi was pretty light. See this Slate article for a little bit of commentary on that. Small complaints aside, I would definitely put Sunshine on my “best of” list for oh-seven.
>>It is nearly impossible to make a original sci-fi film these days. Every
>>possible idea had been used up and remade.
Now, there’s a point to this that holds true not only for sci-fi but for any genre: the stories mankind has been telling itself have remained basically the same since the first cave drawings.
Take Shakespeare, for example. There’s only one or two Shakespeare plays for which he actually made up a whole new story. For all the other plays he used history books, folk lore, Italien novels and what have you as source material, that guy was ripping off from everybody, big time. But, and here comes the real kicker, he had an unsurpassed talent for taking up bits and pieces from other sources and turn them into damn good drama. The ideas weren’t his own, but the words, the imagery, the poetry, the magic was one hundred per cent genuine The Bard.
So, when I’m gonna diss “Sunshine,” it’s not because it wasn’t a very original story, there’s nothing to say against well-executed plagiarism. Just that in case of “Sunshine,” it just wasn’t well done, it felt incoherent, it didn’t have the what I call the “sexyness” that is invariably innate in true sci-fi classics, it’s not a piece that will hold its ground two decades from now. For what it’s worth, it had a lot of potential, but it just wasn’t as gripping like “Alien,” it wasn’t as awe-inspiring as “Event Horizon” and it lacked the scope of “2001.”
A couple of weeks ago, I read an interview with a German sci-fi writer - I don’t know if it’s available in English, but he wrote a really good book about a time traveler who happens to go back to around 30 AD and makes a video tape of Jesus Christ and this tape is dug up 2000 years later and becomes the centerpiece in a great conspiracy. Anyway, this guy said that basically, most sci-fi that is written today (he was thinking of German sci-fi, but it might be a world-wide trend) is mostly about problems that mankind is going to be dealing with in the near future: cyberspace, cloning, stem-cell related topics and such things. And he said that he felt that the grander vision that the classic writers used to provide, had just been lost and he called that a pity, which is true I think. “Sunshine” is a good example of this trend, I believe, it’s - in my opinion - for the most part a problem piece about environmental/climate changes. And yeah, it’s okay to make people aware of these things, it’s surely important … but where is your classic, grand-scale, epic space opera? Yeah, of course, there’s BSG, but it’s a re-make and it’s vision is far from, say, Roddenberry’s classic Trek optimism. And what else is there? People are tired of the Trek franchise? That’s okay, let them have a creative break, nothing wrong with that. But who is there to pass the torch to? Where is a new Trek-style space opera, one that could thrill, fascinate, inspire a whole new generation not only of sci-fi geeks but of people, ordinary folks. I mean hey, even my mom who is a million light years away from being anything close to a sci-fi fan used to watched Classic Trek because it was GOOD! Where’s the successor to that? I feel like sci-fi is becoming ever more marginalized and what’s worse, I feel like it’s marginalizing itself in some way, I feel like today, sci-fi is made exclusively for those who are already fans of the genre. Where’s the sci-fi vision of the 21st century? Where is it? Where’s the phenomenon that can do as Star Trek did? As Star Wars did? Where’s the new masterpiece that speaks to the kids who are kids today? I have a little brother who is seven and a half years old and he is digging the original Star Wars trilogy, he’s got almost all the Lego toys, he plays X-Wing Alliance, reads the comic books and yeah, it’s cool that Star Wars can still enthrall someone who was born three decades after it was made. But a part of me feels like there’s something wrong about that, that it’s anachronistic in some weird way, that he just shouldn’t be playing with toys that I could have played with when I was his age, that there should be a new vision, speaking to a new generation, taking their breath away in a way that no adult could understand in a way Star Wars or Star Trek did for me and my mother couldn’t understand, even though she used to watch classic Trek. Where’s sci-fi’s new Peter Pan space opera, the work of art that would take my little brother on a dream journey of his own, on his generation’s voyage to the stars, instead of hijacking my old X-Wing and/or hitchhiking on the old Enterprise?
Sorry for the rambling, but that’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
hm … second star to the right and then straight on till morning … good night, everybody …
While the second part is arguably true, that doesn’t support the first part of your assertion. There’s more to a story than plot (indeed, it’s frequently argued that there are only (three/five/seven/twelve/…) stories ever told.* And yet we keep spinning new ones. The delight is in the details.
*My personal fave is John Hodgeman’s. He breaks them down to (IIRC), man vs. man, man vs. himself, man vs. society, man vs. nature, and man vs. cyborg.