It is 2057, and the sun is dying. Earth’s first attempt to revive the star failed when the ship and its crew mysteriously disappeared. The Icarus II and its crew of the world’s best and brightest are rocketing through space with an enormous nuclear bomb -humanity’s last hope of restarting the sun- in the 2007 sci-fi thriller, Sunshine.

The film stars an international cast featuring Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Chris Evans. British director Danny Boyle and a crew assembled from across the world brought this futuristic drama to life.

The Icarus II is a self sustaining space station with a huge reflective shield protecting it from the heat and light of the sun that increases as they get closer. Almost the entire movie takes place on the ship, and focuses on the crew as they undergo their desperate mission. Throughout the film, the crew struggles with the possibility of death, since no one really knows what will happen when their huge payload detonates inside the sun.

As they approach closer to the sun they discover the Icarus I and they decide to figure out what happened to them. Pretty soon, everything starts to fall apart, and the crew must try to complete their mission as countless problems put it in jeopardy.

Overall, I liked it. It had a few problems, but it was still a good movie. The seriousness and desperation of the mission really kept the tension high throughout the entire duration of the film. The characters were all quite interesting, it was clear that most of them had considerable depth. Searle (Cliff Curtis), for example, had a strange obsession with sitting in the observation room and looking at the sun as bright as he could. Two of the main characters aren’t the best of friends, and their disagreements add another layer of complication to the crew. Even the ship itself used its electronic voice to become a significant character.

The movie brings the audience on the dramatic journey of the crew as they are forced to question their own morals and feelings to continue on. In space, these decisions are life and death not just for the crew, but for the sun.

One problem I had was the fact that much of the premise of the movie was impossible. The reason the sun was dying in the movie was because of a particle called a “Q-Ball” that was essentially eating it from the inside. Not only is the existence of these particles not proven, but if they are real it would still be impossible for one to become embedded in the sun. Even if it did, the sun would create more energy, frying the earth, not slowly get weaker and lower the temperature of the earth like in the movie. The plan is also very flawed. The bomb that they are towing is supposedly holding a mass of dark matter, which is physically impossible to do. Even if they did manage to contain dark energy, using it to cause an explosion would have little effect on the sun’s condition. Even though we can discern that now, the movie insisted that scientists 50 years in the future won’t know that.

The way the ship was constructed was also obviously flawed. It consisted of a huge concave disk with reflective shields that protected the ship behind it. The actual ship was laid out like a big tail, modules connected side by side behind the ship. With harmful rays of heat and light assaulting the ship, there was little room for the ship to maneuver without the shield revealing the ship to the heat. This, of course, is the cause of one of the first major problems the crew is faced with. If they had just arrayed the modules in a more compact manner, like stacking them together, they would have needed a much smaller shield. They also could make the shield more concave, giving the more compact ship even more protection. It seems obvious to me, but I guess no one in the entire world(like me) will be able to figure it out.

There were also some things that weren’t explained very well. The demise of the crew of the first Icarus is just confusing. It seems like despite being some of the smartest people on the planet, they missed a lot of simple solutions to problems that became major issues for the Icarus II.

Despite this, if you can maintain your suspension of disbelief then you will probably enjoy the movie.