Sunshine

Grade: B-

Nothing is more frustrating than a perfectly satisfying movie that takes a disastrous wrong turn, becoming so awful in the home stretch that you can barely remember its virtues by the time you stumble out of the theater in a brain-dead stupor. Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King is one of those films, if memory serves, and James Cameron's The Abyss is another promising movie that ends, well, abysmally.

The latest offender is Danny Boyle's current release, Sunshine. Rising star Cillian Murphy (a great drag queen in Breakfast on Pluto) plays a physicist aboard a do-or-die mission to re-ignite the dying sun before the human race dies out. Despite the cool concept, a solid cast and beautiful special effects, Sunshine inexplicably morphs from an intriguing character study to a stupid monster movie that miserably fails to emulate classic deep space thrillers like Alien.