Sunshine

Yesterday I went to the cinema with my girlfriend, Claire, to see Sunshine. The reason for this choice of film was that it was the only film we could see while still being able to make our restaurant reservation in time.

It’s been a long time since I saw a film that I thought was rubbish – but this was one of them.

Nothing about the plot made any sense at all.

A brief synopsis is as follows – The sun is dying and mankind needs to fix it. They have the brilliant plan of flying a nuclear bomb into the middle of the sun and detonating it, thus regenerating the giant star and everyone can continue their lives in peace.

This plot just prompts so many questions – which must have come up when the film-makers originally pitched their ideas to the studio. I imagine the conversation going something like this, (with ‘S’ standing for Studio and ‘F’ for film-makers):

S - So, how will this ship fly that close to the sun without burning up?

F- Well, they have this big shield in front of the craft made of sun-resistant metal…yeah…that should work…

S - Why will one nuclear bomb make any difference, when the sun is the equivalent of a fusion reactor with millions of hydrogen bombs being detonated per second?

F - It just will and we won’t really explain it properly…

S - Surely the bit where the two guys travel through space with no suits is just impossible?

F – Well, we will wrap them in some tin-foil like stuff; the audience will surely let us away with it if we make the material shiny enough…shiny things in sci-fi always works

S – Hmmm, I’m not really sure this film is what we’re looking for. I mean, the idea of the sun exploding and killing everyone in the galaxy just isn’t scary enough…

F – What if we add in a bit about a crazy guy running amok with a scalpel trying to kill everyone…basically we will just copy and merge together the premise from the films Armageddon and Alien very, very poorly.

S – Well, they were very successful movies. Are we talking about just a regular guy with a scalpel? That’s not very scary.

F – What if the guy has no skin?

S – Deal.

And from that, Sunshine was born. Actually it probably didn’t happen that way. I have credited them with having a conversation and thinking about the many plot holes in the movie…this clearly couldn’t have happened.

We should have just stayed in the house and watched some Babylon 5.