Peepo!This isn't a review of Giz's good lady wife - that would be a bit odd. No, this is a review of the film Sunshine, by Danny Boyle, and like any good review it contains spoilers. I'm going to tell you what happens, and exactly why what happens is rubbish.

Because it is rubbish. Really rubbish. So rubbish that I'm probably doing you a favour by spoiling the film for you if you haven't seen it, so please read on.

What surprises me most about this film, now that I've seen it, is all the very intellectual reviews I read beforehand. They'll tell you that this is film is a fascinating psychological study of a crew of astronauts, sent out on a near-suicide mission, to detonate a stellar bomb in the heart of the sun - in the year 2057, when the sun is dying, and they represent mankind's best last hope for survival. And all of that is broadly true, except for the "fascinating".

There are two problems with Sunshine. Firstly, the basic concept (long suicidal missions into deep space are probably quite hard, people might go a bit mental) is not exactly a radical new idea in the world of sci-fi. It's been done, pretty comprehensively - just look at virtually any other space-based movie (with the exception of Star Wars and Star Trek) and you'll find elements of the same story. There's episodes of Red Dwarf that do it with more subtlety and cleverness than Sunshine, too.

The second problem with Sunshine is the whole of the last twenty minutes or so - and this is where the spoilers come in. It's one thing to spend most of the film retreading familiar sci-fi concepts of claustrophobic deep space trauma, but quite another to throw out any semblance of reality, along with any of the suspense you've built up, and throw in... a monster! Yes, at the end of the film our emotionally challenged, psychologically damaged crew don't have to fear themselves, or their crewmates, or the isolation of space, or the blazing sun... no, all they have to fear is the big superhuman psychopath running around with (inexplicably) no skin and a knife. In an instant, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (the writer) just give up on the whole intellectual tension thing, and turn Sunshine into a ridiculous and predictable slasher flick. That's the big clever ending to this oh so clever film: the baddie in a rubber mask is after us, quick run!

To sum up then - pathetic and boring. And stupid. It's especially dissapointing because "serious" sci-fi films don't get made that often, and when they do - and the money's been found to make them look all shiny and slick like this one is - you kind of hope there's a germ of a good idea somewhere in the screenplay. This time, there wasn't.

The only good thing? The psycho with the knife at the end is called "Pinbacker", and is the commander of a previous failed mission to bomb the sun. Any relation to the character of "Pinback" in John Carpenter's comedy classic Dark Star, about a crew going mad through boredom on a ten year mission to bomb unstable planets? I think so...