REVIEW: Sunshine

Saw the new Danny Boyle film Sunshine last night. Boyle is the very stylish director of 28 Days Later..., Trainspotting and Millions. His two collaborations with screenwriter Alex Garland are both re-imaginings of genre films which remain completely faithful to their source material. 2002's 28 Days Later... is the best low-budget, end-of-the-world film with flesh-eating zombies you'll ever see. It was a highly profitable film which has spawned an inevitable sequel 28 Weeks Later... directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (reviewed favorably by Mad Professah). His new collaboration is another end-of-the-world film, this time in the genre of science fiction. The plot involves a team of astronauts who are on a mission to save humanity by flying a bomb to the sun in order to jump-start our dying star. Of course the team is multiculturally diverse and psychologically flawed. To add depth, this mission is the second human mission to restart the sun, morbidly named Icarus II. (Icarus, of course, was the boy in Greek mythology who despite warned by his father not to fly too close to sun was overwhelmed by the fun of flying with wings made of wax and feathers and forgot his father's admonition and thus fell to his death.) The casting is peculiar with 28 Days Later...'s Cillian Murphy (and his big beautiful blue eyes) paired with 28 Weeks Later...'s Rose Byrne, Fantastic Four's impossibly beautiful Chris Evans, the unusual Michelle Yeoh, the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Cliff Curtis (Live Free or Die Harder, Fracture, Whale Rider). By peculiar, I mean that for a big-budget Hollywood summer film the actors are generally not above average in looks (except for Evans) although the acting was uniformly believable (even Evans).

The movie looks absolutely breathtaking, with incredibly brilliant views of the sun, showing it to be a dangerous, powerful and beautiful symbol of nature. There is Boyle's signature use of music to enhance emotionally powerful scenes. (The main musical theme from 28 Days Later is so evocative that versions of it are currently running in trailers for Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf and the Kevin Bacon vehicle Death Sentence.) Additionally, the appearance of circles and close-ups of eyes as well as the power of extreme heat and extreme cold are narrative themes in Sunshine. While Boyle used a shaky, hand-held almost guerilla filmmaking style to with great impact in 28 Days Later... in keeping with that film's minimalist budget, in Sunshine the art direction, set design and overall production values are minimalist and modern in a manner which oozes money and reflects the much larger budget and expectations for this film. Unfortunately, these heightened box-office expectations have not been met and Sunshine has only grossed about $4 million dollars, less than one tenth of the production budget. Most reviews fault the movie with falling apart in the third act, and while it's true the film slightly changes genres (from very hard sci-fi cum suspense drama to sci-fi cum suspense thriller) Mad Professah really only had issues with the the last 5-10 minutes of the film where Boyle's directorial flashiness actually impedes the storytelling and was completely on the edge of my seat for more than half of the film. It's the kind of movie you want to go back to catch metaphors and foreshadowings you may have missed during the first viewing.

GRADE: A.