2. Sunshine (2007)
Danny Boyle's
Sunshine was plagued with a relatively nightmarish production, and it shows - filming begin without a finished script, and the movie's writer, novelist Alex Garland, has admitted that they struggled to come up with a satisfying conclusion to the story. Which is why, perhaps, that
Sunshine's bizarre genre shift, which takes place a little later than halfway (call it a third act shift, if you like), feels so forced and unnecessary. Especially since this movie starts out as hard sci-fiction and later settles for being just a generic slasher movie. The flick itself concerns the crew of the Icarus II, who are on a space voyage to our dying sun in the not too distant future. Their mission? To deliver a payload (a huge bomb, basically) which they hope will re-ignite it and save the Earth. Complications arise, though, when a surviving member of the ill-fated Icarus I, "Pinbacker," boards our protagonists' ship and begins to wreak havoc. But in switching from sci-fi to plain ol' slasher movie,
Sunshine loses its intelligent momentum and falls into chaos (the editing, incoherent and bizarre, doesn't help).