Review. Danny Boyle's SUNSHINE

And that’s where the whole Core connection comes in. The Core was an exceptionally stupid movie about a team of scientists who must travel through the Earth’s crust to re-start its core which has stopped for some reason. Now I don’t know if it’s possible to re-ignite the Sun with a single, very large, bomb but the filmmakers do make it sound plausible and less silly than the aforementioned Core. In fact, they say in the beginning of the film that the mission is based on guesses and they don’t even know if it will work but they have to try because otherwise the Earth is doomed. Earth’s last hope is made up of a multi ethnic group who have lived inside the spaceship for a couple of years, not knowing if their plan will work while the fact that the last mission that tried to do the same vanished seven years ago without a trace looms over their head. Knowing that, tension is high when the ship reaches The Dead Zone, the point where all communications with the ship are cut off and people on earth will simply have to watch the sun to see if they made it. But when a distress call from the Icarus 1 is heard near Mercury they make the fatal decision to alter their course towards the lost ship to have a second chance to ignite the Sun if the first one fails. Hilarity ensues…well not really. What follows is a incredibly tense story about the survival of the crew to finish their mission and, of course, secure the fate of mankind.

Danny Boyle has only done rather low key films, mostly reality based moral dramas or comedies with a hint of the fantastic in a few of them. This is his largest film to date in terms of scale and story and he handles the material like he’s never done anything else. One can see the connection to Kubrik’s masterpiece 2001 with its “slow” story, though compared to 2001 Sunshine is a Michael Bay film while comparisons to Event Horizon come from the horror element and how it comes about in the film. Boyle manages to blend it all together and throws in a philosophical question about the role of Man and if we should try to alter nature’s course.

The cast is made up of a couple of mainstream actors and the rest either unfamiliar to most or big favorites with us film geeks. All do a bang up job, especially Chris Evans who I find extremely likeable actor ever since I saw him in the seldom seen action flick Cellular. Cillian Murphy is good as ever and I was surprised how well Hiroyuki Sanada (Ringu, The Promise) handled the English language and the role of Captain Kaneda.
The cinematography is superb and Boyle makes some interesting choices in terms of the visuals. All the space sequences are breathtaking and if there ever was a gimmick to be invented for a film it would be “Heat-O-Rama” for all the sizzling Sun moments. The effects are pretty much flawless and the sound department does a bang up job as well.

So this is a great flick, some will not like it, lord knows many people in the theater over here in Iceland were chuckling most of the time, not because they thought it was funny but because they hadn’t encountered a film that didn’t rely on one liners, car chases and a hot young TV cast. That and they simply didn’t get it. But I think I did and loved it. I will see it again, not in the theatre but when it hits DVD in a few months. Can’t wait.