5. Pinbacker - Sunshine
Director Danny Boyle should be admired for his ability to work in a multitude of genres: in his first sci-fi film,
Sunshine, he proved that he can work this tricky genre, too - that is, until the last few scenes, where his otherwise brilliant, intelligent and engaging movie falls into chaos. Literally. The flick, penned by
The Beach's Alex Garland, concerns the crew on a space voyage to our dying sun - their mission is deliver a payload (a huge bomb, basically) to re-ignite it and save the world. Sounds kind of hokey, but it works. I don't really know what happened in the script department towards the end, though, because Boyle seems to just throw out the careful, precise tone that has marked the entire movie in favour of a blur of incoherent images and bizarrely edited moments: basically, the crew's ship, Icarus II, is boarded by a surviving member of the ill-fated Icarus I, "Pinbacker," who proceeds to run around killing everybody, and it's just goodbye plot from then on. Ultimately, the twist proves to be nothing but a strange, mis-judged mish-mash of scenes which only serve to derail what looked to be a highly promising modern sci-fi adventure. Bah.