I’ve spent most of the summer largely sf and fantasy free for no particular reason.  Just catching up on other things on my reading list.  Except Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows of course, but I figure everyone else has discussed that to death so I don’t need to.  At least I know when my opinion doesn’t really matter.

There have been a lot of movies with fantasy elements out this summer, but in between the superheroes, pirates, boy wizards, and falling stars you may have missed the one honest to goodness science fiction film that came out at the end of June.  Sunshine, written and directed by the same team that gave us 28 Days Later (Alex Garland and Danny Boyle respectively, in case you were wondering).  Is it going to set the world on fire the way 28 Days Later did?  No.  But it’s still good and the sort of sf flick that only comes along every once in awhile, so it’s worth the look.

It follows a team of astronauts on a mission to reignite the sun with a bomb the size of Manhattan (okay.  Sure.  Maybe if they get all the superheroes, wizards, and pirates behind them, but, hey, this is what suspension of disbelief is for.  For what it is worth if you check out the blog for the film they have a whole explanation of why the science is plausible, but it all boils down to something quite theoretical and still isn’t plausible enough for me.  But moving on now…) when they receive a distress signal from the first ship that tried and failed at this mission.  Then the decision must be made whether to go investigate the first ship and the consequences of that decision, which are predictably bad.

The cast is all (forgive the pun) stellar barely-knowns, people you’ll recognize but may not know their names.  Most of them are much too young to actually be astronauts–compare the cast ages to the ages of the actual crew in space right now and you’ll see what I mean, but this is movie world where young actors typically play characters in career positions a real person wouldn’t achieve for another decade at least.  The producers were already taking a chance on making a space movie, can you imagine if all the cast were over 30 too?

But for all my grousing, the actors do well (unlike Kate Bosworth trying to play a mother and Pulitzer winning writer).  The three main characters are the soft hearted pilot (Rose Byrne), the practical and focused engineer who brings the grit and determination that Naomie Harris’s character Selena brought to 28 Days Later (Chris Evans–and I’ll admit Selena and Mace are my favorite characters of the two movies for pretty much the same reasons) and the middle ground physicist who is our hero (Cillian Murphy) with wonderful support from Michelle Yeoh as the biologist and Hiroyuki Sanada as the captain.

The most terrifying moment in the film isn’t any of the deaths (of course there are deaths), but the moment they realize they only have enough oxygen for four out of the seven people on board to complete the mission and save the earth.  They are faced with the choice of killing each other to continue the mission and save the billions of people on earth, or all suffocating together and letting earth die with them.

Unfortunately the movie cops out on that question and goes in for some raving about God’s will to end the earth, but the idea is chilling none-the-less.  Go see Sunshine when you feel humanity is worth saving but still feel cynical enough to see our flaws.