Disappointing Endings... Sunshine.

WARNING: SPOILERS (Obviously).

I had been waiting to see this movie for a long time. 28 Days Later… is one of my favorite horror movies, and I just kept hearing more and more about this film. It didn’t come to theater here, so I had to wait for the DVD, which came out yesterday. I knew about the supposedly awful last part of the movie, and I even readied myself for it. I was prepped and had my expectations set pretty low for the very end. And I was still disappointed.

Sunshine is about a group of astronauts and scientists who go to reignite the sun with a huge bomb after the previous attempt failed and the ship went missing. On their way, they find the previous ship and decide to go off-course in order to see what happened and to get their bomb so they would have two, in case they screwed up the first time. Bad things ensue.

Visually, this movie was beyond amazing. All of the effects were mesmerizing and top notch. The sun itself was spectacular. The acting was done very well, and overall… it was just a great piece of work. The first hour and 15-20 minutes was a great film. And then the last 20 minutes came.

…What the hell happened? Like 28 Days Later…, the third act of this movie takes a completely different route than you had been expecting. But unlike Days, it really doesn’t work here. Suddenly it goes from an awesome sci-fi movie to a less violent (but less stupid) Jason X. I have no idea what the hell is going on anymore. Suddenly the camera is too shaky to see what’s going on at all, there’s almost no explanation as to what happened, and an extra crispy man that would make a sadistic Colonel Sanders proud starts wreaking havoc on the ship. To me, it felt like The Descent all over again (I swear, I’m the only horror fan on Earth that didn’t like that movie. The first half was great and suspenseful… and then the little blind Gollums show up and it gets crappy).

But then Capa (Cillian Murphy) detaches the bomb, starts banging his head against the ground, and then leaps through space to grab onto it as it launches at the sun. I have no idea why he’s doing this, and then it looks like he’s dead. But oh no, the next thing we know, he’s inside the thing and walking around, and has to fix something or other for the bomb to explode (What, I don’t think we’re ever told).

The last minute of the movie ('8 minutes later') is a good, but it was way too late by that point. The 20 minutes prior to it was just… words cannot describe. If they were adamant to go this route, it would have been better had they just had one of their own crew (the little Asian dude, maybe) get all mental and go crazy like any other paranoia/claustrophobic movie (like Cube). I don’t even really know how to score this movie. The majority would get a great score and the ending would get an awful score, and if I average it together, it would be just that… average. But I don’t think that’s fair to the bulk of the film. So I’ll just leave it open.

(P.S. Was it just me, or did Chris Evans look better/cooler with the long hair and beard?)

UPDATE: I've updated my opinion on this now. The updated opinion can be found here.