The ship going into the star on purpose was robbery of the audience.
I actually found that kinda interesting and considered it a likely explanation for the trajectory and thought the effects were pretty nifty. I'll give them a pass on that and it seems to follow the "trust the ship, it knows what it's doing" theme that's been developing. The bigger cop-out was that they wasted time on the lame "Uh oh, you can't catch the ship" bit that didn't really add anything when they could have used that time for some character development. At the very least, they could have had wonder boy Eli visibly consider that if the shuttle doesn't get back, he has a shot at cheesecake girl.