Do not see the movie Sunshine. You won’t like it. It’s terrible. It’s stupid. It’s SO bad.
I say: "How? Why? So confused."
Kelly says: "It follows the exact plot of Event Horizon."
Gavin says: "This is the dumbest film ever made."
Christopher says: "Event Horizon is a stupid stupid movie, but comparing the two is a disservice to Event Horizon."
We are all in agreement here.
More Book Group.
Could not agree more! I went in expecting at least silver and got nothing. Absolute zero. Alex Garland has disappointed me.
I say “For shame, Boyle, for shame.”
But…Cillian Murphy!
I wish I’d known that before I plunked down $11 to see it. What a mish-mash. A mess of a film that manages to be sorely depressing all the way through in addition to being just plain ridiculous.
And the tragic thing about it is that parts of it are so very pretty.
You mean it’s the devil in the end?!?! Or a guy who thinks he’s the devil?!
WOW! I *hated* Event Horizon.
Is it not even worth going to see in a cheesy, bad-movie kind of way?
Jeff
Wow. I must have seen a totally different movie to youse lot. There was things I didn’t like (as there were with 28 Days Later) but overall I thought it was a really good sf movie, which is to say not nearly as good as a really good sf novel.
You must have, J — I thought the first half or so was pretty interesting and then I felt like I was watching a very pretentious snuff film. I actually wished I’d read some reviews so I would have known what to expect going in… I also wish they’d used that gorgeous set to adapt any one of a number of good SF novels instead!
But you know what woulda happened if they’d adopted a good sf novel? It woulda become an sf film ie a billion times worse than the novel. No thanks.
By the way you set me off over on my blog.
But, really, Gwenda? Worst film ever? C’mon. There are many many many many much much much worser films. I think you were all in a bad mood and hive minded into a single response. This is why I never go see a film in groups of more than two.
Now I’m thinking I must check out Event Horizon which I avoided cause you all said how bad it was.
Actually, we were all in a really good mood both before and after — just thought it was a terrible, terrible movie. To each their own.
Part of the reason I would absolutely put it in my top ten most disappoining movie experiences is the wasted promise of it all. The bad slasher movie was SO SO bad, it wrecked everything else. Not to mention the nonsensicalness of much of the underpinnings, some pretty blatantly expository dialogue and lots of lingering death porn shots. Bleh.
Knock yourself out with Event Horizon!
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I despised it in my own unique, non-hive mindy way. I actually don’t totally buy the Event Horizon comparison beyond the broadest strokes, for example.
I usually disengage my rationality when it comes to Hollywood sf movies, but this one pretended to be smart, which is kind of worse to owning up to its stupidity (a la SERENITY, for example–and I’m talking about physics mainly–I can gleefully ignore physics when the filmmakers are _gleefully_ ignoring it, but not when the filmmakers are pretending that what they’re presenting makes even a little bit of sense, which SUNSHINE didn’t).
This whole “space makes you insane and incompetent” schtick that the plot depended on, the criminal underutilization of Michele Yeoh, and yeah, the frozen corpse! burned corpse! exploded corpse! drowned corpse! dessicated corpse! parade are also factors in what disappointed me about the movie.
An Australian won the non-doper category of the Tour de France overall today, though, so that’s something to cheer about.
I expect all Hollywood movies to be stupid. 28 Days Later was also full of second-half stupidity.
People in hive minds always deny it! 🙂
Didn’t see 28 Days Later–I don’t like zombie movies. Ahem.
But no hot shirtless guys on screen to make it worth renting?
>But no hot shirtless guys on screen to make it worth renting?
At least two that I remember (briefly, though).
I saw Sunshine on Sunday and thought it was yes, one of the silliest things I’d ever seen, but kind of magnificent, too.
Honestly, you can’t expect good science out of a movie that posits a Manhattan-sized bomb making an impression on the sun. And if that wasn’t enough warning, the voiceover at the start should’ve served as a reminder.
The logic switch goes _off._ The visuals-and-tension switch goes _on._ I can grok the thought about wasted potential, but that doesn’t change the fact that the film was flippin’ _beautiful._ It had me seriously tense for pretty much the whole hour and half, without making me feel manipulated. I thought (my trio on the whole thought) it was quite funny at several points, and I think that–well. I haven’t seen much Danny Boyle at all. But going completely bonkers in the second half is pretty much what I expect from him. I’d be a little disappointed if he didn’t.
I appreciated the chromaticism of the cast, and the sturdiness of Cassie and Corazon. I liked “good guy” Capa’s easy and ethically shaky decision re: what to do with Trey.
I don’t really see it making as a space-makes-you-crazy argument. No one on the Icarus II lost it, after all. You could, I s’pose, argue that Searle did–but he was holding together okay until he was left for dead. We don’t actually even know for sure that anyone on Icarus I lost it other than Pinbecker.
I wasn’t entirely sure, based on pre-movie review readings, that the human error aspect wouldn’t put me right off. In context, I thought it was–frustrating, but fine.
I do agree that there was a little too much death porn. The corpses didn’t really bother me, but I could’ve done with about 170 fewer shots of Mace’s trapped leg and poor dead face (though I do understand wanting to dwell on that face!).
Hmmm… Sorry, I just didn’t think it was all that beautiful. I’ll admit there are some nice shots, but I didn’t feel any of it was particularly new. And, y’know, I do expect movies to hold it together the entire time, no matter who they’re made by.
I think what Christopher was pointing out with the “space makes you crazy or incompetent” thing is that we’re meant to accept at least two (and probably more like three) Incredibly Stupid Actions on the part of people we would assume are pretty smart and that then you have the psych officer on II essentially serving as characterization by proxy for the Crazed Madman — serving as a not-so-far surrogate so we see how this Freddy Krueger double got so crazy. I don’t buy that a standard psych eval wouldn’t have caught this tendency, let alone the kind astronauts go through even here in the present day, not to mention how much it pisses me off to make such a banal choice as to make a scientist go nuts for _God_. I say again: Bleh. You’ll never convince me it doesn’t suck.
Something else that bothers me. I’m, again, intrigued by the idea of making an SF movie where the non-survival of the crew is tipped early on as it is here… but I have a problem with that movie mixed with humankind being saved in the end by noble choices (and a fight with a madman, etcetera). Give me something bleaker, for god’s sake, because anything else feels false. This whole movie only begins to work if I think of it as a paranoid delusion or Freudian daydream by one of the crew and I’m not willing to give it that much credit.