Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

My favorite science-fiction works have always been those that don't make sense entirely. Films or writings in which a certain ambiguity exists about the meaning of events that transpire in the story. And while I insist that the work still hold together, I resist any attempt to hold my hand and walk me through the material like a child. I like to use the old noggin every so often; it keeps me awake. Give me a story to interpret, discuss, dissect or just plain old baffle me. This is why the original SOLARIS is one of my all-time favorite films. I appreciated Steven Soderbergh's remake, but the things I didn't like about it all had to do with his attempts at making the film more accessible and sensical. That just isn't necessarily. Solaris succeeds because of its near impenetrability.

Danny Boyle's SUNSHIEN, for the most part, makes complete sense; don't assume that my intro to this review is implying anything else. In fact, it's a masterful work filled with stunning visuals and a casual tone to the science-fiction aspects of the story that made what I was seeing seem flawlessly authentic. We as viewers sometimes forget that this awesome technology and these unthinkable events would not seem all that extraordinary to thee people in the story. To them, it's commonplace, and Boyle (TRAINSPOTTING, 28 DAYS LATER, MILLIONS) remembers this.

The premise of SUNSHINE is that it's 2057 and the sun is dying. Earth's scientists have devised a way to send a nuclear device of unimaginable explosive power into the sun to essentially reignite it. Why it has to be a manned mission, I can't quite remember, but by making it so, the human drama of these events all the more elevated and terrifying. Perhaps the scarier prospect for the current crew is that they are actually the second mission (labeled Icarus II) to attempt this seemingly impossible task. Icarus I entered an area close enough to the sun to lose radio contact and was never heard from again. And by all calculations about the sun's demise and the available resources on earth to make this bomb, the current Icarus mission will also be the last. The mission is designed so that the scientists on board will survive, but they also understand that their lives are 100 percent expendable; everything is secondary to the mission and the survival of Earth.

One aspect of the film that truly impressed me was the make up of the eight-person crew: there are no military types or traditional astronauts on board. They are almost entirely scientists, engineers and physicists. And while they are a very good-looking bunch, this is a crew full of nerds. Boyle also spends a great deal of time just establishing the day-to-day routine of the team, which would drive even the most strong-minded individual insane after so many years in isolation and such a heavy task ahead of them, one with a billion opportunities for mishap. When the crew receives a signal from the Icarus I's distress beacon (which has been missing, at this point, for seven years), the call is made to rendezvous with it and possibly salvage its bomb in case a second attempt to reignite the sun is required. This turns out to be a really shitty call.

Compounded with the fragile mindset of a couple crew members, one devastating event after another befalls the team, and while they are always able to fix it enough to continue the mission, a shortage of oxygen and an endless series of catastrophic mechanical problems make the fate of those aboard Icarus II look more and more dire. At this point, I should mention the absolutely astonishing visual effects work by the UK group Moving Pictures Company. There aren't any blasters or aliens in SUNSHINE, but that doesn't mean the visual effect team doesn't have plenty of chances to really blow our minds with detailed vision of the Icarus crafts, the close-up views of the sun's surface, and some wicked death scenes (I'm guessing most of you aren't surprised that one or two people die in this movie).

The cast, too, is across-the-board strong. Rose Byrne (28 WEEKS LATER) and Cillian Murphy (28 DAYS LATER, RED EYE) are the obvious "heroes" of this film, but there are equally strong performances from Chris Evans (actually showing he's a decent actor and not just the one-note Human Torch), Cliff Curtis, Troy Garity, Benedict Wong, Mark Strong and the perfect-as-always Michelle Yeoh, who does not once use any martial arts. There's an intensity and sharpness to these characters that I'm not used to seeing in movies lately. They certainly debate when a character seems fated to die ("Should we do this, if it means the life of...?"), but the discussion doesn't last long and the outcome usually hinges on the importance of the mission. Any crew member who allows their emotions to influence their decision-making process is clearly looked upon as weak. The other groovy aspect to the film is that very few characters who die do so from the heat of the sun. It is possible to die from excessive cold that close to the sun, I've learned, which makes sense because of the volumes of coolant these ships must carry.

My guess is that SUNSHINE's third act is what will make or break your enjoyment of Danny Boyle's vision (as written by his frequent collaborator, writer Alex Garland). Like many Boyle works, the final section of the movie makes a sharp 90-degree turn in a direction I truly did not see coming and makes the film a bit more conventional, but in wonderfully unconventional ways. For most the film, the only "villains" are time and technology, but this changes in the last third. I'm not saying the shift is for the better or worse, but it's noticeable and startling. The most surprising aspect to SUNSHINE is that Boyle never lets us assume that any cast member will live to see the end of the mission or the movie. And the exposition seems less concerned with the fate of earth than you'd expect. The knowledge that their actions will decide the fate of the planet clearly hangs over every aspect of the film, but it's not something that's discussed endlessly, and why would it be? They all know what's at stake.

SUNSHINE is an exceptional film from a director who seems intent on surprising us with each new work. Following his young-adult-friendly MILLIONS with 28 DAYS LATER and then this seems hard to comprehend, but Boyle has always been a textured director who has convinced me that he'll always hold a few choice surprises back from us with each project just to marvel us with whatever he has next. SUNSHINE is sci-fi in its pure, undiluted form, and in recent years, it's one of the best of its genre that I've seen.

Capone