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Kim-112
Reviews
Sunshine (2007)
Awful, awful, awful....
Badly recycled garbage from start to finish. Here's a partial list of why IMHO.
1. No subplots. Subplots help get you involved and caring about the characters. The plot of refiring the sun was established in the first 30 seconds (and in the publicity). Will they save Earth or not? But subplots, stories within the story, were totally missing. As a result, we knew next to nothing about the crew, their background, hopes, fears. I never felt involved and I didn't care what happened to the crew.
2. Technical Implausibilities.
a. Why would anyone send a manned mission? Even now we've had unmanned planet landings; much more complex than simply jettisoning a bomb into the Sun.
b. Lack of Gravity ignored. OK, it's inconvenient, irrelevant and expensive to have everything floating around. I think part of the ship was rotating but at the start a crew member was watching the Sun direct but filtered and it was not turning around.
c. How is refiring the Sun with an enormous bomb going to work? If the Sun starts running out of hydrogen, it needs more and not a bomb whose energy would be quickly dissipated.
d. When the Sun starts dying, in around 5 billion years, it will first expand swallowing the inner planets including Earth. i.e. we'll burn to death, not freeze.
e. Space vessel pointlessly enormous. They were using rocket technology, so getting something this size into space whether as a whole or in bits would be a pointless and costly exercise. Smaller is better, particularly when you have to fill it with oxygen.
3. Badly plagiarized bits from 2001 and Alien (mentioned by others here). e.g. computer taking over, voice dropping in tone as it shuts down, camera shots, music styles etc etc.
4. How did the burnt survivor get on board the other ship? Why was he burnt, always blurred, capable of unlimited nastiness. I thought I was watching another preview of Spiderman 3 for a while there. At least he didn't burst out from someone's stomach.
5. Illogical jumps. Too many to remember. e.g. After having said that Icarus I was on Mercury, how did they couple with it in space? Often jumps so bad that, like the director, I completely lost the plot.
6. Only 1 person trained to release the bomb. Yeah, right. This was given as reason when deciding who was going to stay behind in Icarus I to operate the airlock.
7. Navigator gets calculations on orbit change wrong ('I've F...d up'). And no-one checked the results? Almost as hard to believe as their seemingly unending supply of rocket fuel.
8. Dialogue varied from inane to uninteresting. I pitied the poor actors.
9. Set in the future, the crew's clothing and hair styles were very 90s. The technical gear, screens etc were very much of today with a few more coloured lights added.
SUMMARY: Save your money and time and go play solitaire on your mobile phone, ring a friend, have a coffee...
Si j'étais elle (2004)
An entertaining and amusing 95 minutes.
Alex (Hippolyte Girardot) personifies the macho man. Apart from his affair with the baby sitter, Alex is a workaholic, neglectful father and husband to his attractive wife Léa (Alexia Portal), a fashion lingerie designer.
Léa's limit is reached when Alex forgets to pick up the children from school but she gives Alex one last chance if he can answer any one of five questions about his family. He fails and Léa leaves.
Alone in the house on the night of a full moon, a strange force creeps in the window and Alex is miraculously changed into a... woman. And a rather attractive blonde too despite the permanent sneer that Hélène de Fougerolles brings to the role of Alice, the magically converted Alex. De Fougerolles brilliantly portrays the 'macho-trapped-in-a-woman'sbody'.
As Alice, Alex strikes up a friendship with his wife who confides in Alice just how bad Alex really is. In doing so will Alex/Alice become a really nice person? Will anyone believe that Alice is really Alex? And what is the name of his daughter's doll? The well known Thierry Lhermitte plays Didier Marchal, a famous and well-off family counsellor who becomes involved in the lives of Léa and Alex/Alice.
While I found 'Si j'étais elle' a thoroughly entertaining light comedy, I felt that the 1991 film 'Switch' handled the same kind of theme much better. 'Switch' moved through the comedy of the role switch to the drama and desperation of the ex-man set the task of finding someone who really loves 'him' in order to save his soul. 'Si j'étais elle' remains pure comedy throughout and so IMHO, stays rather two-dimensional.
What makes a script great for me is where there is strong character development. That is, one or more key characters are changed forever by their experiences and trials. I was never quite convinced that even such a fantastic transformation had actually changed Alex/Alice deep down as a person.
There are also parallels to 'Mrs Doubtfire' (1993) in which an estranged husband gets closer to his family by becoming their nanny. And again in this film, as in 'Switch', there were both character development and poignancy.
There are some lovely comical moments though. Watch out for the first few minutes after Alex's transformation and the mannequin parade scene alone makes the film worthwhile.
All up, an entertaining and amusing 95 minutes.