Luke

I am a fan of the Kermode Uncut Film Club and was intrigued by the intro for Sunshine which cited 2001, Silent Running, Solaris, Soylent Green, Event Horizon and Zardoz as sharing DNA with Boyle's film in some capacity. Religiosity perhaps being the biggest one, but I feel the film works on the level as scientific disaster sci-fi better than any other point or other recent disaster sci-fi films.
By disaster sci-fi I mean stories in which earth is threatened from a space-based source and the crux of the movie is the coping or dealing with it; Armageddon and Deep Impact being, but examples like Don McKellar's Last Night, Melancholia and The Andromeda Strain have stories that exist within the same 'why'. Sunshine picks up story-wise well into a similar coping story, there are shreds, sometimes awesome, of curiosity (2001) or philosophy (Silent Running) or sheer fantasy (Zardoz), but Sunshine's plausibility, far more so than a group of oilmen landing two space shuttles on an asteroid, and it's sense of breathtaking adventure give it all it needs to be a great, wholly accessible film--which is what Boyle is best at doing, moving to a genre, analyzing it, and crafting his own creation in true cinephile fashion.