The Sun is dying. The Earth has been plunged into a Nuclear Winter. Icaris I, a mission to effectively reignite the Sun failed. The second crew are en route and are about to lose contact with Earth.

As they travel to deliver the payload to the Sun, a few seemingly minor mistakes jeopardise everything, with one mistake leading to many. They decide that it is probably a good idea to try and salvage the payload from the first mission, only to suffer from further casualties. As oxygen levels become an issue they are alarmed to learn that they may actually have picked up an unhappy hitch-hiker.

This film may sound a bit like The Core in it's storyline, but I can assure you that if the Core had been done like this then it would have been credible. The film avoids all the cliches and despite disaster and death result as we knew they would - it manages to come out with its head held high.

That is until towards the end when it makes a mistake, in my own opinion anyway. In The Day After Tomorrow this mistake was the wolves, in this it was the man we dubbed "Toastie". What was a good idea suddenly becomes almost a slasher film - well not quite but nearly.

It seemed to me that the sudden appearance of a "monster" was totally un-needed. A half-crazed man would have been more than enough if carried out with the same expertise as the rest of the film.

Then as the payload was delivered into the Sun, the storyline went a bit mental. I suspect that Toastie was supposed to add that religious/devilish dimension to the film - but it didn't seem to work. In the same way I felt that the trippiness of the last few moments was meant to show the distortion of time and space surrounding such a universal extreme. Unfortunately though, it came off as just confusing and trippy.

Don't get me wrong, this was a great film. A film I'd be happy to see again, at least in part so that I could get a few things straight in my head - but the things I described knocked it down from a 5 smiley to a 4.5. Sorry...

see also:
District 9, Battle Los Angeles, Cloverfield, Children of Men

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