Sunshine
Director: Danny Boyle. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Alwin H. Kuchler. Film editing: Chris Gill. Production design: Mark Tildesley. Music: Underworld, John Murphy. Producer: Andrew Macdonald. With: Cillian Murphy, Chris Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong, Troy Garity, Mark Strong, Chipo Chung, Paloma Baeza, Archie Macdonald, Sylvia Macdonald. UK. 106 min. 2007.
Danny Boyle is a good guy and sometimes a good filmmaker, but this science-fiction thriller is a mess. Set on a spacecraft 50 years from now, the quasi-apocalyptic plot centers on a group of astronauts dispatched from Earth to save the human race by setting off a bomb inside the sun, which will otherwise stop emitting its life-giving rays. Also in the picture is a previous mission that was mysteriously lost (à la “Forbidden Planet,” a much better movie) but exerts a compelling pull on the present space travelers.
The acting is uniformly flat and the plot twists range from implausible to incomprehensible. Only the eye-boggling special effects prevent the picture from being a total loss. Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have clearly drawn inspiration from Stanley Kubrick’s philosophical 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky’s metaphysical Solaris, but those masterworks are much too advanced for less gifted filmmakers (which means almost all filmmakers) to emulate successfully, or even tolerably, as Steven Soderbergh discovered when he essayed his Solaris remake.
Mission control to Boyle: Expedition scratched. Get back to terra firma and stay there!
– David Sterritt
