Sunshine

This week's movie rental was Sunshine ...

a 2007 British science fiction film directed by Danny Boyle. The film was adapted from a screenplay written by Alex Garland about the crew of a spacecraft on a dangerous mission to the Sun. In 2057, with the Earth in peril from the dying Sun, the crew is sent on a mission to reignite the star with a theoretical bomb.


- the captain (Sanada) gets suited up for what turns out to be a really unfortunate EVA mission

There were some familiar actors in the film: Cillian Murphy (Inception, Red Lights, the Batman movies), Chris Evans (Captain America, the Fantastic Four movies), and Hiroyuki Sanada who played Dogen on LOST :) and who was also in a number of movies like The Twilight Samurai.

I was worried the movie was going to be another Event Horizon as both movies have the present ship and crew attempting a rescue of an earlier ship/crew that had been lost, and though we were asked to consider the ethical dilemma of choosing between murdering a crewman or failing the mission and causing the eventual deaths of everyone on Earth, the film was too much about the various grisly ways people can die in space and too little about science and sacrifice (and did we really need the inevitable religious maniac?). Still, having said all that, the movie was entertaining enough and had some nice special effects.


- Capa (Murphy) sends a vid message to his sister back on Earth

Roger Ebert liked it more than me, though, and gave the movie 3 out of 4 stars in his review. Here's a bit of what he wrote about CERN physicist Brian Cox's contribution to the movie ...

[...] Considering that the movie is set only 50 years in the future, the sun seems to be dying several billion years prematurely, especially in a "hard" (i.e., quasi-plausible) science-fiction film. Man, am I glad I didn't go off on a rant about that before learning that the film's science adviser, Dr. Brian Cox of CERN (Conseil Europeen Pour le Recherche Nucleaire [European Laboratory for Particle Physics]), thought of it, too.

The sun is not "dying in the normal sense," IMDb.com reports, but in the Cox scenario "has instead been 'infected' with a 'Q-ball' -- a supersymetric nucleus, left over from the Big Bang...that is disrupting the normal matter. This is a theoretical particle that scientists at CERN are currently trying to confirm -- the film's bomb is meant to blast the Q-ball to its constituent parts, which will then naturally decay, allowing the sun to return to normal."

I'll buy that ...

Hmmmm - isn't that what happened in that Stargate SG1 episode Red Sky? :) Oh well, anyway, here's a trailer ...