When you think of the word sunshine, it typicaly evokes warm, cozy feelings. Cats napping. Quiet, lazy afternoons.
Not so in Sunshine, the brilliant SF movie just out on DVD. It's played by a utterly convincing international group of actors in the movie, suggesting a truly international effort by mankind to "fix" something with the sun. What that something is we never find out, but it's going out, and quickly. Earth is dying, and the only hope of saving it is to chuck a manhattan-sized cube of something exotic into the sun and re-ignite it, forming a "sun within the sun".
The sun is of course the star of the movie. Somehow it becomes a living, breathing character. Life sustaining yet so powerful that it can vaporize you if you're inside the orbit of Mercury, where the movie takes place.
The movie is not without it's problems. Artificial gravity is used, but all the other technology is just a decade or two ahead of our time. The spaceship seems quite conventional and convincing (great effects) but yet it can stop, orbit the sun, match orbits with another spaceship, and resume it's course.
But it doesn't distract you from this excellent movie. Well worth a look -- sci-fi at it's best.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/
