10 Awesome Movies That Fail In The 3rd Act

Danny Boyle's Sunshine is, for its first hour-plus, a spectacularly well-crafted sci-fi thriller in which a group of astronauts venture on a mission to try and reignite the dying Sun.

It's a killer idea for a movie, and Boyle and writer Alex Garland do a generally terrific job of establishing a group of likeable characters who start succumbing to the arduous nature of the journey one by one.

But in act three, Sunshine transitions from a survival thriller into a disappointingly pedestrian space slasher, as the remaining crew members are attacked by Pinbacker (Mark Strong) - the burned, murderously insane sole survivor of the previous mission to the Sun.

Pinbacker feels shoehorned into the movie as padding, as though Garland failed to think up any other scenarios which could extend the central story to feature length.

Though the final scene is still very good, the introduction of more generic horror elements felt ill-advised at best, if not lazy and jarring at worst.