Of the list of directors I thought might win Best Picture in the next few years, the dude who made 28 Days Later wasn't one of them.

This is not a knock on the multitalented Danny Boyle -- responsible for both fast zombies and Slumdog Millionaire -- if anything, it's whatever the opposite of a knock is. It's when a door pounds you. He's been off doing his own thing with largely ignored movies like 2007's Sunshine for so long it's a surprise to finally see him get the sweaty critical love he's long deserved.

In the near future, the sun is dying. Physicist Cillian Murphy and a team of scientists and astronauts are given the modest task of saving all mankind. Their mission: pilot a Manhattan-sized nuke a hundred million miles through space, then bomb the sun back to life.

I've thought long and hard on this, and resurrecting a star with an atomic bomb the size of an island has to be the most kickass use of the human brain since we invented club technology. When this crew gets back home, they're going to be signing so many chests they'll have to immediately colonize the moon and convert it into one big Magic Marker factory.

Assuming, of course, they make it back. Nothing ever goes wrong on an endless space voyage, does it?

But it isn't the arrival of disaster that makes Sunshine such a tense, engrossing experience. It's the way Boyle and writer Alex Garland spring the trap on their cast. With the logical precision of some kind of mechanical man, they spin small mistakes into problems too enormous to keep up with, even by a team of the most brilliant men and women Earth had to offer. Like The Thing, it's a prime "stuff keeps getting worse" movie.

By this point, Boyle's more than just an apt storyteller. His plotting is supplemented by the always-unique score of John Murphy (whose crescendo-heavy pieces you might remember from such movie trailers as all of them) and striking, instinctual camera work that captures the alien scale of space in something closer to its own language.

More importantly, it kind of ends up a slasher flick. Paired with his obvious commercial instincts, it's that kind of unpredictability that's made Boyle worth watching from the start. If the cast, effects and supercausal plotting don't make Sunshine a minor sci-fi classic, the delightfully arrogant astrophysicist DVD commentary might seal the deal.