I really meant to post this review last Monday, when I saw a preview screening of Danny Boyle’s new film Sunshine. But life got in the way. Here, then, is the executive summary of what I was going to say right after seeing the film.

Sunshine single-handedly redeems two whole genres of film. The first is the trippy-whoah-space-LSD genre that includes 2001, Solaris and The Fountain. The second is the desperate space mission, motley-team-trying-to-save-the-Earth-from -certain-doom action movie. Sunshine includes elements of both genres, but fuses them incredibly well and uses them to tell a story. It’s embarrassing how grateful I am to see genre tropes and big spectacle actually used in the service of storytelling. It’s that rare. There was a point, about five or ten minutes into Sunshine, when I thought we were in trouble. I was seriously concerned we were vanishing into acid-trip land, never to return. I was shocked and amazed to realize that the acid-trip stuff was actually going somewhere interesting, both in developing the characters and in propelling the story. And the deeper you get into the movie, the more you find the occasional trippy moment actually conveying useful information and building suspense. Meanwhile, in terms of the action movie stuff, there were a few moments when I felt pretty sure I knew where the movie was going next. And then I turned out to be totally wrong. Which was awesome. Also, it feels economical: at only 107 minutes, it doesn’t spend a lot of time being self-indulgent. It feels like a taut thriller and a metaphysical exploration rolled into one.

I notice I’m one of the few people who’ve flat-out loved this movie so far. The SF Chronicle gave it an empty chair. Other critics have been positive but not blown away. So I felt it was important to speak up and plug the shit out of this movie.

One final thought: in its relentless focus on the logistics of the mission, and the gritty, hands-on work of making things function on a spaceship, Sunshine reminded me of Space Island One, the 1990s television series. Space Island One gets a bad rap for its dialogue-heavy and sometimes slow stories. But at its best (in about nine or 10 of its 26 episodes) Space Island One was a brilliant exploration of the dynamics between half a dozen three-dimensional characters trapped on a space station together. And ridiculously few TV series — or movies — have attempted to be that rigorously scientific or convey an actual feeling of the danger and drudgery of being in space. When will we get Space Island One on DVD???