God, this movie left me so frustrated. The premise for Sunshine is one of those that is so obvious, you really are left scratching your head as to why it hasn't been done already. I mean the sun is our energy source, the one thing that keeps us alive.... as one character says in the film "if it dies, we die" and very quickly indeed, without remorse and without prejudice. The Fox Searchlight logo opens the film with the Sun just visible in the background and very quickly Cillian Murphy lets us in on the problem that is plaguing mankind. Sometime in the near future, as you have no doubt seen from the trailers, the sun is on the verge of dying out and a group of scientists have been sent out in a spaceship to fire a payload into the star to reignite it, and stop it from burning up. It's an epic opening. One that you can't stop staring at and thankfully it doesn't burn your eyes. Essentially, that's pretty much what the film is about, looking straight into the Sun and seeing what it is that stares straight back at you. Is it God you see at you the moment before you burn to a frazzle? The rush and feeling of being so close to the most powerful thing in the Universe is what drives some of these crew members.... as they believe they can see some sort of enlightenment if they look closely at it. For some, it's not really about saving the planet but retrieving the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail like Indiana Jones. We find out that this isn't mankind's first attempt at reigniting the sun. Seven years earlier a ship attempting to do the same thing suddenly disappeared without a trace. No-one knows what happened to the crew or the ship, but everyone presumes they are dead. So this crew embark on a mission that most of them believe they will never return from. Sunshine manages to capture each of these characters and give most of them a good amount of screen time to get to know them. Murphy is our lead, he holds the film together with his easy likeability and charm even if he does look a little psychotic with his very "villain" like face. Chris Evans is hit or miss as the hotheaded but cold hearted crewmember Mace, who only see's people as what benefit they serve to the mission and not as human beings. Sometimes he's on, but other times the guy seems to be trying a little too hard and one of his main dramatic speeches in the film is a bit of a let down. The rest of the cast are solid, especially Michelle Yeoh and Cliff Curtis but unfortunately they aren't as prominent in the film as some of the other crew members. The problem with Sunshine is exactly the same problem I had with the last Danny Boyle movie I saw.... 28 Days Later which ironically also starred Cillian Murphy and are both written by Alex Garland. Both movies have an intriguing concept, and set-up some great characters and begin at a brilliant pace.... but they both fall victim to a flimsy third act where the narrative structure is blown completely out of the water. There is a moment 2/3rd's into the film, where you are completely in the hands of the storytelling masters and the tale they have crafted when BOOM... like the thundering Titanic after it hit the iceberg, the movie quickly, without any kind of logic, sinks and fumbles into an afterthought. It's great ideas laid to bury under the surface. I was left cringing by the creative decisions in the final 30 minutes and personally, I felt rather sick, as a movie I thought was on it's way to being a classic Science Fiction movie along the same lines as Stanley Kubrick's 2001, completely committed cinematic suicide and fell to the bottom gutter depths of a horror/slasher movie in space. It went from Kubrick like visuals to Paul W.S. Anderson's stupidity in a matter of seconds, as it changed from wanting to be 2001: A Space Odyseey to Event Horizon. Why the film was allowed to make such a stunningly stupid transition is the only thing I kept asking myself as I walked out of the cinema. Sunshine ended up forgetting about the plot and the interesting characters they had setup started making decisions that were completely out of the context Boyle had formed or even worse they were just discarded pretty much altogether. XX
rating:2.5
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What a missed opportunity. Sunshine was well on it's way to being the most significant and intriguing science fiction movie in years before once again Boyle & Garland got bored and dumbed down their great movie. In the end...Sunshine is 2/3rd's fantastic, but one third depressing........... depressing because this film should have been so much better.