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

X-Men: First Class (2011)

So....was this a prequel or a reboot? I'm going to go with requel. We have 3 X-Men movies that are more less consistent, we have the X-Men Origins movie which messes up some stuff but is trying to be part of the timeline and now this. Let's overlook for the moment the fact that some characters are out of place with the comic books, let's just think about the movie universe. Xavier is one of the main problems - we never know in the movies how he lost the ability to walk and this movie gives that to us which is all fine and good, except he loses the ability to walk as a young man, but in the 3rd movie, Xavier, portrayed by Patrick Stewart is accompanied by Magneto to the house of young Jean Grey, and he is walking. Speaking of Magneto, he has pretty much decided to wage war on humanity at the end of this film which is 1962 and roughly 20 years later he's back working with Xavier finding mutants? I will buy that he could have changed his mind and then changed it back, since that happens in the comic every time a new writer comes on board. Ororo Munroe is the next problem - we see her briefly the first time that Xavier uses Cerebro. If she's 10 in 1962, that makes her close to 60 in the first movie, and while it's not unheard of for mutants to age more slowly, that is not one of her abilities. For example, this is not a problem with Mystique who we know to be aging at half the normal rate, plus she can make herself look younger if she wanted to. I'm going to be generous and give Beast the slow aging power to, because he is almost the  same age as Xavier.
The other main concern of mine and I imagine a lot of fanboys around the world is when they take an already existing character and drastically change one or more things about him or her. Case in point, Alex Summers, a.k.a. Havoc a.k.a. Scott Summers younger brother in the comics. Is he supposed to be Cyclops father in this timeline? And moving the Hellfire Club from NYC to Las Vegas and making it basically a casino with a secret. Um, how does that fit in with Shaw thinking he and the members superior to humans? And while I certainly don't mind seeing Robe Byrne and January Jones stripped down to their undies, I really liked the aesthetic of the comic book Hellfire Club, it gave it a much more sexual aspect and also explained why the men treated the women the way they did. Speaking of January Jones, I've been watching Mad Men and her Emma Frost, whom I wish they had given the white blond hair to in the film, reminds me a lot of Betty. I haven't seen her in a lot of other things, so maybe Ms. Jones's characters are always like this, I guess the character she played in the Tourist was very similar as well. I'm also not so sure about Emma Frost being able to become diamond, does that happen in the comics? I don't ever recall it. Is Emma Frost one of the mutants that Wolverine frees in the Origins movie? Or, is that someone else who can turn to diamond?
I don't mind the movies creating mutants to fill roles, but it seems a shame to not use existing mutants from the comic books. I'm not sure if Riptide, Azazel, Angel or Darwin are in the comic books. They are all pretty cool. If they're not in the comics, I think it's cool that Singer added them to the film, especially as Azazel being on the same team as Mystique certainly explains Nightcrawler's origin. I also wonder why these characters, not counting Darwin, are not in the trilogy? If Storm can still be young and vibrant, why not Azazel? I'm betting it's just a case of retrofititis like Lucas did with the Star Wars Prequel - just throw in all this shit because it looks cool and never worry about why that stuff has disappeared by the later timeline stories.
Other than the above, which is certainly not enough to keep me from enjoying this film, I thought it went off quite splendidly. The story is wonderfully over the top and all the actors really get into their roles (I'm pretending that January Jones being really into a role looks like Emma Frost). I love the way the Governments of both the U.S. and Soviet Union are portrayed. Even better is the way the CIA is shown. Who would have thought that in the CIA, the only cool guy would be Oliver Platt? I also liked the way that the two opposing navies were portrayed in the stand-off. American and Soviet sailors doing their duty and not wanting to go to war, but willing to go to war if that's what their commander orders.
I enjoyed this movie enough, that unless something drastically changes, I'm going to watch the rest of the X-Men saga again in timeline order, so that means next will be X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and then X-Men 1 through 3.
I almost finished this without even talking about the goodness that are James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence. I think these are three of the finest young actor working today, maybe even going so far as to say that these are the three of the five top young actors working in movies right now. Two of the three were faced with the same daunting task that Ewen MacGregor was when he took on the role of Obi-wan Kenobi. Partick Stewart and Ian McKellen are two of the best actors alive and I would go so far as to say two of the best actors period. McAvoy and Fassbender had big shoes to step into, respectively. I think they handled it marvelously (no pun intended). Rebecca Romjin-Stamos is not a world class actress, so it was easy for Lawrence to overshadow her acting wise, but Romjin-Stamos is a world class beauty who lets it all hang out in her role as Mystique and Lawrence followed suit, or no suit as the case may be.

X-Men: First Class at IMDb