Sunshine Review

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"Sunshine" reviews

Movie

Sunshine

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2007-07-26 23:03:49

Rating

2.5/5

Provider

CinemaSource

Review

Danny Boyle's attempt at a genre-defying, profundity-spewing Space Odyssey crusher comes up a little short, but it does evoke the perplexity such an ambitious movie would hope to.

Story

The year is 2057 and, Al Gore be damned, global cooling is threatening mankind: The sun is on the verge of death, which would equal the death of the planet. Seven years earlier, a space mission, Icarus I, was shot up to deliver a payload that would reignite the sun; nobody has since heard from those aboard, all of whom are assumed dead. Now it's up to Icarus II, comprised of an eight-passenger crew of physicists and astronauts led by Capt. Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) and including pilot Cassie (Rose Byrne), biologist Corazon (Michelle Yeoh) and archrivals Capa (Cillian Murphy) and Mace (Chris Evans). As the ship is floating along, a blip shows up on the audible radar, ostensibly coming from Icarus I. The crew is faced with a difficult, crucial decision, only to be compounded when a miscalculation by the navigator (Benedict Wong) takes them slightly off course. If they pursue the signal from Icarus I, it could unlock key secrets as to what went wrong the first time and provide an extra payload—or it could be a fatal mistake. Either way, it's nowhere near the toughest decision they'll be forced to make.

Acting

As a heartthrob who can act, Cillian Murphy is precisely the double threat Chris Evans aspires to be someday soon. Maybe that'll happen on his next movie, The Nanny Diaries, because Sunshine finds him miscast—and testosterone-y when he's supposed to be testy. Evans, fresh off the more suitable Fantastic Four sequel, isn't quite cut out for the heady stuff in which he must internalize his inner action star. Murphy, to be fair, is no great shakes either. Clearly he's now a Danny Boyle favorite, but in their last collaboration, 2002's 28 Days Later, the doomsday scenario was different and Murphy's character would've been toast if he were half as sedate as his character Capa is in Sunshine. He comes alive towards the end, but that's when the movie comes undone. A possible future Boyle favorite, talented Aussie actress Byrne, who starred in this year's Boyle-produced 28 Weeks Later, could've benefited from more face time—as could have the film. In other words, there's no true female voice. Talented supporters like Yeoh (Memoirs of a Geisha) and Troy Garity (Barbershop), who stars as the second-in-command, are grossly underused, but Sunshine does need all the Chris Evans it can muster lest bad box office attacks.

Direction

Just as his actors in Sunshine are our last great hope to save the dying sun, director Danny Boyle may be our last great hope to save the sci-fi genre. Accordingly, sci-fi fans will definitely love where Boyle's head is at, but the rest of us will think he's just got a bad case of ADD. Boyle, director of beloved movies Trainspotting and 28 Days Later as well as largely reviled The Beach, spends most of the movie with proper pacing, messages and themes—only to erase it all from our memories with a spastic final act. He takes the ending in all manner of directions and genres after sucking us in with serious, quasi-topical commentary on life in general and life aboard a spaceship. It's too bad. Ditto writer/frequent collaborator Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later), who touches on some fascinating far regions of sci-fi-dom but winds up leaving them in space dust to co-indulge on the ending. The superb cinematography is on par with that of Boyle's past work, but the simpler shots are more entrancing than the complex ones: When the characters sit on an observation deck to reflect on a close-up of the burning sun, it's more profound and impressive than the frenetic, special-effects-heavy camerawork at the end. Which is perhaps the best way to sum up the slow-fast dynamic of the film.

Bottom Line

Hollywood.com rated this film 2 1/2 stars.

Movie

Sunshine

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2007-03-30 15:00:17

Provider

Review

The director-writer team of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (28 Days Later and The Beach) strike again, with Brit actors Cillian Murphy and Mark Strong tagging along in this space thriller.

In the mid-21st century the Sun is dying and man faces extinction. A motley crew is on a fateful journey to re-ignite it and save planet earth. Their ship, Icarus II carries a massive nuclear bomb - as big as Manhattan - to be cast into the Sun and create new life to save our solar system. The disparate crew are on the second mission of its kind, the first having been lost seven years earlier. Discovering the Icarus I, they divert from their flight path to pick up its cargo and double their chance of success. However, this throws their lives and mission into jeopardy, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the human race.

Icarus II is an impressive vessel with vast life support systems and a big reflective dish to prevent it being destroyed by its proximity to the Sun. Murphy is suitably brooding as the physics expert, Capa, who must launch the bomb, complimentary performances from Yeoh and Evans keep the ship on course plus Cliff Curtis, as ship's psychiatrist Searle, adds an intriguing dimension to the plot. Somehow though all this seems rather familiar. The style and formulaic plot borrow from 2010 and Event Horizon, while the visual extremes of Hitchhikers' Guide and the Alien franchise are in evidence in what, ultimately, becomes a disjointed story with too many unresolved strands. And it's evident Boyle and Garland were childhood fans of the TV series Space 1999 too!

It's not all doom and gloom! The tight direction bowls things along and in other actors hands this could have been extremely hackneyed. Predictable, derivative and, though visually engaging, Sunshine casts little fresh light on a genre in need of a new approach.