3 reviews

Killian Murphy reignites the sun. What more could you POSSIBLY want from a film?

A vaguely plausible premise for the action? A watertight plot? Characterisation? Well, this is sci-fi after all. And wonderful gripping sci-fi it is too. No other genre can combine the thrilling and the suspenseful with the haunting and the utterly breathtaking quite so well. The scientists on this last-ditch effort to save humanity must fire an enormously powerful bomb, which they call the 'payload', right into the heart of our dying star. Whether they succeed or not has much to do with their will to survive in order, ultimately, to die for the rest of humankind. Or will their mission be sabotaged?

Sci-fi has a habit of reminding us that we are an expendable and finite species clinging to existence on a rock in the vastness. If only Kiilian Murphy had a 'payload' for climate change?

cboylan 16 Apr 2007

50 years from now, the sun is dying, and after a first mission has apparently failed to reignite the star, a second ship is sent with 8 crew members to save all mankind.

It will come as no surprise to whoever has seen ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘28 Days later’ that Danny Boyle was bound to do a great job if he was to go for a sci-fi script. What was not quite so certain is whether this particular script was not a bit too far-fetched to lead to a truly good movie. Well, there really wasn’t any need to worry after all: ‘Sunshine’ is by far the best film of the year, a sensory and emotional experience so powerfully overwhelming that you may need some time to recover afterwards.

Of course, the plot has weaknesses, and the premises are scientifically quite dubious (even with the best shield imaginable, how come the ship doesn’t melt so close to the sun?). But hey, it’s sci-fi, so just overlook all this, and you’ll be on for the ride of your life!

The great strength of the movie is that you are directly plunged into the action. When the story begins, the first mission already failed, the second ship is already approaching the sun, and its crew has already left Earth for several years. This means that not only the situation is already on the brink of explosion, but the physical and mental resistance of each character has already been tested almost to the point of rupture.

A truly frightening suspense is installed within the very first minutes of the movie, never to go down until the very end. And this is where Danny Boyle shows the true extent of his amazing talent. Thanks to mind-blowing visual effects, the sun appears as a full character of the movie. As the trigger of both mechanical damage to the ship and psychological damage to its crew, the dying star even enables the movie to subtly verge on mysticism.

Influences from ‘Alien’ and ‘2001: a Space Odyssey’ are obvious, but ‘Sunshine’ actually stands up to the very high standards of such respectful predecessors and reveals itself as a complete masterpiece of its own.

Jurassic 13 Apr 2007

2007: this reviewer is dying of sensory overload (sound very loud plus strobe lighting and bright images of the sun) after watching this really quite interesting film, which starts so well and then descends rapidly into a violent melée of plot holes and deaths.

So, the plot for you who want to go and see it, is the sun is dying; 7 astronauts are aboard a vessel transporting a bomb towards the sun in the hope of detonating it and kickstarting the star into saving the earth. The previous mission had failed, so this one was all the more important.

The visual effects are great; the interior of Icarus the ship are very Alien-like; the camera work centring on faces also increases the feelings of claustrophobia that being on a space ship for a year must bring. So far so good. Even the dynamics between the ship members is believable. The physicist, played by Cillian Murphy, who knows who to detonate the bomb is the unexpendable crew member, so he makes the decisions and is always priority in any dangerous situation, which makes for good psychology. The ship picks up a signal from the first Icarus; he decides that they should go and get to it to see if the original bomb could be saved, and thus the fate of the ship and crew is sealed.

After they go to the ship, the plot starts to unravel badly, and rapidly the film becomes a "Who is going to die/be killed next gorily and loudly" one.

I came away thinking, why did the nice guy on the ship kill himself by staring at the sun (didn't make sense); how come the baddie looked like a sunburned mummy and had knives and a funny voice; why didn't Cillian Murphy call for help when he found out things weren't quite as they seemed (prior to this, all crew members were communicating on a com system) - major plot hole; and why the last scenes of the film at all, as someone being fried by the sun just isn't heroic or pleasant at all.

Sorry sci-fi buffs, this is just for you; or somone wanting to blast their senses into submission. For anyone else, beware the gore.

RL 9 Apr 2007