Sunshine 08/04/07

Sunshine is one of the those movies that I wish could have given me more. Here it was teetering on the edge of something of a masterpiece. The visuals are magnificent and the characters are colorful and well drawn (and work heroically without makeup). The science is intelligent and correct. 
The big letdown is the bad guy. He's the crazed captain of Icarus I, the first spaceship that didn't make it, a man named Pinpacker I believe. He's covered with sores after being exposed to too much sun and believes that God that doomed mankind by extinguishing the sun so mankind shouldn't try to reignite it. The only problem with this is that Pinpacker is not a real character. The movie provides no explanation on why a captain would go insane and why his crew would not fight back, or how a man with such limited sanity could be put in charge of the most important mission on in the Solar System. It's somewhat unbelievable and it seems to me that he is more a plot device than an actual character. 
The makers of this movie seem to be really searcing for a plot in order to showcase the special effects, not the other way around. Therefore we get the Earth's smartest engineer making a really stupid decision so the movie can jumpstart the domino sequence of disasters. But that's not enough, because the story has written in very smart characters who can solve these huge problems. That's when the psychotic bad guy comes in handy. He makes sure that the glorious disasters keep coming and coming. 
This movie, in the superior way it was made, reminds one more of classic sci-fi movies than those stupid B-movies found late night on the Sci Fi channel. Movies like 2001:A Space Odyssey and the Alien franchise. The details are the same. The characters look smarter than sexy (even the women). They don't wear makeup and speak convincing scientific possibilities. But in A Space Odyssey it was the computer that went mad. In Alien it was a killer extra-terristrial plus an android. The movie Sunshine, unlike those classics, lacks a true villain, and I think it's mostly because the villain, this time, is a human religious fanatic. The computers, androids, and killer aliens were memorable and scary because they used logic, reason, and instinct to go around killing people. They fit into a perfect science fiction mold. Religious fanatics, bless their souls, do not fit comfortably into a science fiction movie. Keep in mind that good science fiction is based on science fact. Logic, reason, and instinct work. God on the other hand is more spiritual than anything. He does not, bless his soul, fit into the perfect science fiction fold. The crazed fanatic doesn't make any sense. It's not logical. 
No offense, but in space, in the far out future, in a solar winter, in a state of the art spaceship, commandeered by a group of specialists and scientists, God simply does not fit in.