Overall Rating
  Awesome: 20.51%
Worth A Look: 55.13%
Average: 12.82%
Pretty Bad: 8.97%
Total Crap: 2.56%
7 reviews, 36 user ratings
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| Sunshine (2007) |
by William Goss
"That Burning Sensation"
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Whilst en route to a screening of 'Sunshine,' the latest effort from director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland ('28 Days Later,' which also starred Cillian Murphy), a neighboring vehicle flaunted the following bumper sticker: “Gods don’t kill people. People with gods kill people.” That adage adequately sums up the film’s dichotomy, that of a story derivative of many other sci-fi offerings that aims for the spiritual and settles for the visceral, as effective a rip-off of 'Solaris' as it is of 'Event Horizon.'In an effort to seemingly shrug off the inherently imitative nature of the proceedings to come, Boyle kicks the story off in media res, just as things are about to go so very wrong for the crew of the Icarus II (and aboard a spacecraft touting a name like that, the fact that awry awaits comes as little surprise). Its multicultural collection of eight scientists and engineers are strapped to the back of a bomb the size of Manhattan, riding their payload straight into the sun, Strangelove-style, in order to give it a much-needed spark and thus prevent the loss of all they hold dear back home on Earth.
Psych officer Searle (Cliff Curtis) may embrace the notion of light-as-life, but his peers – Murphy, Troy Garity (After the Sunset), Michelle Yeoh (Memoirs of a Geisha), Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later), Benedict Wong (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story), Chris Evans (the Fantastic Four films), and Hiroyuki Sanada (Rush Hour 3) – are reluctant to see the sun as anything but a crucial, yet imminently destructive objective. As ever-aggravated realist Mace (Evans) points out: “We’re delivering that payload because that star is dying, and if it dies, we die. Everything dies.”
The last of heartfelt goodbyes are swiftly dispatched, and romantic subplots (most probably between physicist Murphy and pilot Byrne) are wisely dodged, as Boyle eschews characterization in favor of circumstance; the scale, scope, and stakes of the mission and its fate promptly take priority because quite literally nothing else matters. The actors are all more than worthy of the material, but they inevitably take a collective backseat to the complications they’re to endure once the prospect of a second last chance endangers the crew and, more importantly, their mission.
Despite warning critics against spoiling too much of what exactly goes wrong, the promotional department of Fox Searchlight has seen fit to employ flashy internet ads, video clips, and extended trailers, all of which boast as to who dies and how. In spite of this highly irresponsible marketing angle, it is almost better to be made aware prior of the impending shift in tone, although never so explicitly. Admittedly a downshift from the direction the first half seemed to be headed in, it’s a little less jarring if one is aware going in, and no less nerve-wracking either way. This ensemble of smart people may end up in a relatively stupid situation, but the majestic visuals and ethereal score are not only enough to render matters highly watchable – perhaps more so without a single spoken word – but they allow for greater concessions in the feasibility of the second half that go avoided in the first.Regardless of the climax’s literal manifestations on the spiritual conflict implicit throughout, it’s hard to deny that Boyle and Garland manage to take the most familiar sci-fi beats and make them exciting once more, the result of which is, for genre fans, a greatest hits collection that ends up merely good enough.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=16024&reviewer=409
originally posted: 08/08/07 07:05:23
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USA
20-Jul-2007 (R)
DVD: 08-Jan-2008
UK
05-Apr-2007 (15)
Australia
12-Apr-2007 (M)
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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