Sunshine

July 27, 2007

Rated: R Runtime: 107 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

In the not-too-distant future (50 years from now or so), the Sun starts to dim. Not like it has run out of hydrogen; more like its pilot light has gone out. Earth will perish if something can’t be done. A group of astronauts goes to the Sun in a big spaceship with heavy shielding to try to re-ignite it.

As the old joke goes, they forgot that you’re supposed to go at night.

Sunshine Directed by Danny Boyle (TRAINSPOTTING, 28 DAYS LATER, MILLIONS).

Science fiction doesn’t have to be based around “this can happen”, it can be a speculative “what if this DID happen?”

The movie doesn’t try to explain why the Sun is going out; it’s happened, and these astronauts are going there in a huge spaceship, so they must have a plan.

If you accept the wonky premise, the rest of the film plays pretty fair with the problems of approaching the Sun.

It struck me that it’s the first real space science fiction film I’ve seen in a long time. There are various movies with spaceships, but usually they’re more action or horror movies; this is more of a traditional throwback scifi film. Lots of worrying about heat shields failing, airlocks breaking, fires on board, freezing, low oxygen, vacuum, cranky computers, space madness, and how to solve those problems. A typical week on the International Space Station, in other words.

The spaceship is called the ICARUS II, because another spaceship, ICARUS I, tried the same thing seven years ago and vanished without a trace. It seems to me that naming your ship that’s going to fly close to the Sun is risking bad luck by being named Icarus, who after all is the guy in Greek mythology who fashioned wings, flew too close to the Sun, and died. I’m thinking you might name your second attempt something other than ICARUS II. Maybe HAPPY HAPPY SAVE MANKIND SPACESHIP. Just a thought.

The first hour of this is pretty good, and then, it REALLY falls apart. Eventually it seems to come down to an endless number of crises that each require sacrificing one crewmember to continue onwards. It’s like “The Cold Equations: The Miniseries.” And then it really takes a turn for the silly that I won’t reveal here so as to keep the surprise, lame though it is.

In the end, this seems like a mix of the 1990 Charlton Heston film SOLAR CRISIS (A movie that turned out so poorly that Alan Smithee had to take credit for directing it), mixed with THE CORE, and a dash of EVENT HORIZON, and the Discovery part of 2001. And it’s every bit as good as you’d think a ladle full of that gumbo would be.

It’s disappointing, because the first hour of the film showed real promise.

Posted by Mack Guffin | Filed Under 2 Stars, Chris Evans, Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michelle Yeoh, R, Rose Byrne, SciFi, Theatrical, Thriller