I love me a good sci-fi flick as much as the next self-proclaimed geek, so I had high hopes for Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. I didn’t catch it in the theater—chalk it up to sheer laziness—so I added it to my Netflix queue to see whether it lived up to its “fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes or deserved to languish in box-office oblivion. (The film grossed less than $4 million during its brief theatrical run last summer.) Alas, I wish I’d heeded the advice of the always reliable Anthony Lane, who summarized Sunshine thusly:

The film is nonsense, and what counts is whether viewers will feel able to lay aside their logical complaints and bask in what remains: a trip in search of a tan.

Put simply, it’s a stinker, despite its classy cast—Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michelle Yeoh—stunning visuals, and risk-taking director.

The story itself has promise. A crew of astronauts is dispatched into deep space with an atomic payload. Their destination: our dying sun, which has begun to sputter out billions of years ahead of schedule, causing Earth to descend into a permanent state of winter. The first forty or so minutes of the film are rather uneventful, depicting life about the Icarus II. (Yes, it’s that kind of film: heavy on the symbolism, light on the insight.) The crew waxes philosophical over their mission, sends messages to loved ones at home, and squabbles over the small stuff. (Who left the toilet seat up—that sort of thing.) I think this section is supposed to serve as a character study, introducing us to the crew so that we care who lives and who dies in the final reel. Unfortunately, most of the cast lacks the requisite gravitas to convince us that they’re scientists and pilots; Yeoh and Sanada seem to be the only adults among the sullen crew. The biggest misfire casting-wise, however, is the normally excellent Murphy. That quiet intensity he’s brought to roles in Batman Begins, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley has been replaced by bored passivity; it’s hard to believe that the silent, shaggy-haired fellow in the wifebeater is supposed to be the mission’s nuclear physicist. Couldn’t the screenwriter have fed him a few lines of scientific mumbo-jumbo to boost his credibility—perhaps a reference to the space-time continuum, or a detailed explanation of how, exactly, the ship’s payload is supposed to jump-start a star?

The crew’s routine is interrupted by a distress signal from the Icarus I, which vanished before successfully completing a similar mission. The astronauts rehearse familiar arguments about tracing the signal’s source—didn’t any of them see Alien?—ultimately deciding that their sister ship might still have its nuclear payload intact, offering them a plan B if their own Manhattan-sized bomb should fail to detonate. This decision triggers a series of small catastrophes that damage the ship, compromise the crew’s oxygen supply, and kill off the less developed cast members.

Sunshine’s final act quickly devolves into a grim hybrid of slasher flick and kamikaze drama when the crew realizes it has a saboteur in its midst. Whatever claims to scientific accuracy the film made in its first reels are quickly refuted by a series of ludicrous set-pieces, including a scene in which several astronauts hurtle through the vacuum of space wrapped only in some insulation—and survive. (Even if the scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories charged too hefty a consulting fee, wasn’t there someone on the set who could point out that the human body doesn’t withstand dramatic changes in pressure and temperature?) Other signs of desperation are evident as well: sympathetic characters meet gruesome ends purely for the shock value, and Boyle begins employing jump-cuts and shaky cams to heighten the sense of urgency—and perhaps conceal the saboteur’s identity—as the dwindling number of survivors continue their one-way journey to the sun.

The biggest problem with Sunshine, however, is that it never feels like a fresh gloss on a tired trope. Boyle worked wonders with tried-and-true B-movie formula in 28 Days Later, which borrowed liberally from George Romero’s classic zombie pictures while updating the genre to suit contemporary tastes. In Sunshine, however, these hat-tips to Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott never feel like organic elements of the story; like Quentin Tarantino, Boyle seems to have confused air quotes and knowing nods with genuine homage. I didn’t mind the shout-out to the silky-voiced HAL, but it felt utterly gratuitous, as if Boyle was intent on reminding us that he’s seen a lot of classic science fiction. This high-mindedness begins weighing on the film early in the first reel, when Boyle employs the kind of lingering camera shots and languid pace I associate with Tartakovsky. If Boyle had something interesting to say about human nature, or about our dependence on the sun for existence, such expository dawdling might be excusable. But when such Solaris Lite scenes are the prelude to an artsy, Freddie vs. Jason spectacle, the audience feels cheated: why the bait and switch?

About the best I can say for Sunshine is that the sound and set crews did a terrific job designing the ship. The movie looks like a million bucks—well, $40 million, to be accurate—and has a suitably eerie, minimalist soundtrack that’s a welcome relief from the swelling strings and tutti blasts so characteristic of space sagas. Bernard Hermann no doubt would approve. Whether Stanley Kubrick would feel as charitably towards Sunshine will remain an eternal mystery.