10 Awful Plot Twists That Completely Ruined Great Movies

5. Sunshine

The Movie

Danny Boyle's gorgeously stylised sci-fi odyssey, in which a group of scientists journey across space to nuke our dying Sun back into action. Their ship, named Icarus for a bet, comes across another Icarus, the original bomb-deliverer which stopped short of its destination when its Captain - Pinbacker - went mad after staring at the stars for too long. Astonishingly, there's a twist coming that's even more ridiculous than the initial plot.

The Awful Twist

Surprise: Pinbacker's alive! Except it isn't a surprise, and it's certainly not a welcome one, not when Danny Boyle suddenly turns a sci-fi ruminating on God and the meaning of life into a cheap slasher movie. Derivative it may be, but Sunshine is thematically rich, where most modern science fiction lives and dies by its explosions and product placement.

The intelligence of its first two-thirds marks Sunshine out as one of Boyle's best, but that intelligence is swiftly shattered by unleashing a murderous Pinbacker on the crew of Icarus II. It's really just a way of quickening up the kill-count, ringing in a horribly misjudged tonal shift into horror gimmickry and juddering, MTV-style camerawork that clashes with all that came before.

It barely even constitutes a twist - that Pinbacker will make an appearance is signposted so clearly throughout the film (he makes constant appearances in archive footage, plus he's played by Mark Strong, one of the bigger names amongst the cast), it's hardly a surprise when Cillian Murphy's Capa finds him lounging in the observation room with the shade down, like it's a high-intensity sunbed.