Science fiction sometimes seems to have colonized every last reach of space, that vaunted final frontier. The fates of human beings rocketing about in darn-fool tin cans are well mapped out: aliens inside, aliens outside, crafty computers, madness, metaphysics. Even when “Sunshine” opens with the news that, 50 years from now, a spaceship of scientists is the only hope to save our dying sun, some might shrug and respond, “And?”

The director Danny Boyle doesn’t claim to revolutionize the genre, but he knows how to fire up the screen with pace, pulp, and visual panache. The man who helped raise the zombie horror genre from the dead in 2002 with “28 Days Later” finds a sweet spot in “Sunshine” between suspense and wonder. Just as critical, and impressive, he restores space to its glory as a sheer force of nature by simple but brilliant means.

Icarus II is the ill-fated ship sent from Earth to “reignite” the ailing sun with a nuclear payload, following the apparent failure of a previous mission. Facing the long haul with stoicism is a multicultural crew with indispensable individual talents: Cillian Murphy as the physicist who can program the bomb, Chris Evans as an ornery engineer, Rose Byrne as a worried-looking pilot, Cliff Curtis as the sun-addicted psychologist, and so on.

Like any space family, they struggle with infighting, claustrophobia, sexual tension, lunacy, and the great whooshing beyond. Their challenges are not unfamiliar: They soon escape radio contact with Earth, and are puzzled and wary to learn that the previous mission’s ship may in fact have survived. Throughout, they engage in ultimatum-heavy dialogue: If we don’t do X in Y amount of time, everyone dies.

Proving that HAL 9000, the murderous supercomputer from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was right all along, it’s human error that first threatens to derail the mission when the navigation officer (Benedict Wong) botches a flight recalibration. Thereafter, the crew gets picked off one by one through the attrition of what might be called occupational hazards.

Mr. Boyle twirls through his genre duties very respectably, but his coup is recognizing that the real star of the movie is, well, the star of the movie. Roaring and blinding across the screen, the sun in “Sunshine” is rapturous, something worth cowering about. Mr. Curtis’s psychologist character, Searle, gazes at it obsessively, braving the observation deck at lower and lower filter levels; another crew member, on a space walk for repairs, comes all too close to this vision of the infinite, in the ultimate sacrifice.

In a lot of other science fiction, you run mental circles around the dull, heavy conception of outer space while waiting for something to happen. But in “Sunshine,” the object of Icarus’s mission is always a morbid locus of fascination. As the crew goes through the requisite game theory of individual vs. global survival, or even just when the caretaker of the ship’s oxygen garden (Michelle Yeoh) frets over her lush captive jungle, you are always aware of exactly who (or what) is really in charge.

The precision gale-forces of the sound design and the scintillating cinematography by Alwin Kuchler are the technical reasons for this solar impact, but “Sunshine” trades as well on the menacing, riddling presence of the sun: You can’t look at it, but you need it to live. The simple question of the mission’s success or failure bends intriguingly around a kind of variation on the Heisenberg principle, as the crew tempts fate by approaching an all-annihilating entity that is also the sustainer of life.

This visceral sense of doom and all-consuming beauty is far more effective than unleashing a monster or intimating the divine. But “Sunshine” prudently avoids going as deep as Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” as high as Kubrick’s “2001,” or as low as “Event Horizon.” It’s a movie that may not develop its ideas per se, but that makes you feel what’s at stake. By the time the crew is nosing around the abandoned ship that belonged to the first mission, the solar doom is palpable beyond the ship walls.

Some ink might be spilled, or popcorn thrown, over the movie’s ending. After hovering so long at the edge of transcendence, “Sunshine” veers suddenly into slasher territory. But Mr. Boyle’s choice here (along with screenwriter Alex Garland) eventually grew on me as a self-spoiling gesture, injecting a terrestrially corny nightmare into the head trip and underlining the fallibility and pettiness of man when he’s finally face-to-face with the infinite.

“Sunshine” may feature one of the sillier names for a desperate mission to the sun that must succeed at all costs. (Calling it Icarus is like naming an orphanage the Oedipus Center.) But Mr. Boyle has succeeded in galvanizing his genre picture and in fulfilling the description of one actual astronaut, Joe Allen, who quoted Kipling to capture the view upstairs: “The sun truly ‘comes up like thunder.'”