Sunshine (2007)

"You haven't seen Sunshine?" she said. "Oh, you'll like it. It's good."
I nodded and considered how nice it would be to watch a film I knew would be good.
The days passed, and finally the movie arrived. I took it along with some other films whose name I barely even registered because I was looking forward to Sunshine with such eager anticipation that you would never know that I had only read about this film the week before.
I entered the still house, quiet for a change, but stuffy from being closed up all day. I was alone except for the cat who had exactly the same thing on her mind as I had on mine, to get food and get it fast. I did the best I could to satisfy both of us without resorting to giving her the canned cat food that I so disliked the smell of  that I thought being faced with it might be enough to turn my hunger away.
Food and beverage ready, I sat down and fired up the ancient desktop that a lifetime ago had been a top of the line machine, or so I had told the girlfriend who would become the wife who would become the ex-wife. For what it is worth, it turns out I was right, buy the best machine you can afford even if it does more than what you need and you should be able to add minor hardware upgrades and make it last for four or five years instead of one or one and a half. Spending twice the money, but only as third as often works out great for long term personal economics. But the four or five years had doubled to over eight.
The monitor came to life as flashed with light, the familiar logo prevalent on nearly all American computers at one point and still on most. The monitor, new to me with a sleek wide screen almost made the whole system seem new. This felt perfect for a science fiction adventure.
The first trailer to play was for a slick looking horror thriller that implied the earth had succumbed to a zombie apocalypse. The second trailer was less subtle and outright flaunted being the unrated version of a horror movie, and the third openly bragged about being a zombie thriller - with the director's name flashed up and took me but a second to realize that it was the same director as for the film I was about to watch. I had the sudden feeling that I had made a horrible mistake. What if all of my excited anticipation had been for something that didn't exist?
I took a deep breath and a nice long drink of a cooling beverage specifically chosen by me to help forget about the day's heat and stresses. I could handle a sf thriller, after all hadn't Alien, one of the all-time great sf movies been a thriller? I pushed the hummus around in the bowl as I mused on this and then scooped it up with the broken off piece of flat bread and popped it in my mouth and hit play.
As Sunshine unfolded, it became first clear that this was hard science fiction. Characters were astronauts and scientists, not smugglers or space marines. It also became clear that the movie was taking itself seriously and not only was the acting of as high of quality as the setting, but so was the story. By thirty minutes in, as my meal was gone and beverages waning, I knew that no matter how this film wrapped up that it was fortunately nothing like the three trailers they had played before it as I had feared it would be.
The movie did wind itself up to a level of tension that had me eagerly awaiting each scene, tension due to both drama and action, both of which stayed true to the hard science core of the movie. The characters behaved like they would in this situation, which is for the most part with honor but we also some characters buckle under the stress and implode. There was nothing gratuitous or inappropriate about this film. The actions that were taken were the ones that needed to be taken in the context of both the film's setting and the character's psyche.
As the film climaxed and resolved, I realized that I had been needlessly concerned about the portents of the trailers. There had been an attempt to go after the same audience demographically speaking but not based upon genre. The silliness brought a smile to my face as I recalled the zombie I had watched over the weekend. I had not been dreading watching a film about zombies then. And of course she was right, I did like this film, thinking as I turned it off about the similarities it bore in both name and story the sf classic film, Solaris.

Sunshine on IMDb