Review - Sunshine

I was expecting great things from Sunshine, the latest film from Danny Boyle, one of the few good directors working in Britain today. With Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later he’s shown himself to be adept at taut genre thrillers, so the prospect of an intelligent adult sci-fi piece from him was exciting. Unfortunately the simple and effective premise of a ship on a mission to save Earth by kick-starting the dying sun is wasted here, married as it is to two-dimensional characters and a myriad of plot holes.

In the near future, the Icarus 2 and its crew are our planet’s only hope of survival. They must journey to the surface of the sun and deliver a ‘payload’ of a massive nuclear bomb (which looks like something out of The Matrix) in a hope to get the nuclear fusion going again, a mission which spells almost certain doom. Due to bad luck, a badly thought out plan, their own stupidity, and some very silly twists, their situation becomes rapidly even worse. There was a palpable sense of uncomfortable dread throughout this film, which was its most successful feature. The audience, like the crew, don’t want to meet their fate on the burning surface. Another successful element was the production design; the ship’s exterior is beautifully rendered, and the interiors are suitably dark and depressing, harking back to the Alien films’ or Red Dwarf’s industrial futuristic style.

What is less successful includes the crew itself. Although played well, each character ticks some cliché box: the sensitive girl who constantly cries (Rose Byrne), the fearless and stoic leader (Hiroyuki Sanada), the space jock (Chris Evans). We are supposed to be going on a journey to these people’s very souls, but they don’t really have any. It was, however, great to see Benedict Wong (Errol in the wonderful 15 Storeys High) on the big screen in an enjoyably whimpering performance. Cillian Murphy, he of the shocking blue eyes, broods a lot in the lead role of the physicist in charge of their precious cargo, and certainly shows star quality. A small point, perhaps, but what annoyed me most about the crew was that this was a British film made in Britain set in a very international future, and yet there was not one non-American accent. Why couldn’t Murphy keep his Irish one, or Wong his English, or Byrne her Australian?

When it comes to the plot, what starts out promisingly simple ends in a messy jumble. The denouement is extremely confusing and hard to follow, mostly because the mission and the layout of the ship is not adequately set up in the rest of the film to help the audience understand what is going on. The bogeyman element that dominates the end is unnecessary; it would have been more effective to have the psychological terror of the situation being the monster, rather than externalising it into something ridiculous. This is a film which throughout tries to be plausible and scientifically accurate (Dr. Brian Cox, a physicist and This Morning’s resident science explainer, acted as an advisor), so it is disappointing that it didn’t stick to its guns.

All in all this is a missed opportunity to produce some serious sci-fi. Although certainly unnerving in places, the unravelling at the end exasperates more than it excites, leaving little good will for the film from me.