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Sunshine

SFX Magazine

April 2007

By Steve O'Brien

Danny Boyle doesn't want to let the sun go down on us

It's been a long time since we Brits sired our own bona fide space movie. That Danny Boyle's finally done it shouldn't be too much of a surprise. He's probably our biggest direction—and the one whose proud commercialism never ended with a career-crushing move to Hollywoodland.

Boyle's been flirting with SF and fantasy since the early days. There's the edgy A Matter of Life and Death-isms of A Life Less Ordinary, the Romero-on-speed juggernaut that was 28 Days Later…, and the more full on SF of his short Alien Love Triangle. Ten years on from being hired and fired on Alien 5, he's finally making his Alien Redux.

Boyle, along with writer Alex Garland, wears his love for this genre like a zoot suit. Portions of Alien, Silent Running, and 2001: A Space Odyssey are all there&mdashwell, if you're going to nick, nick from the best! It starts off feeling similar to Alien. With a crew already well into their journey, you're slamdunked straight into the claustrophobia of the Icarus 2. The ship is on a mission to pump new life into our dying sun to save the earth.

Of the cast, Cillian Murphy breathes pretty-eyed life into what could have been the dullest role as the Icarus 2's resident astrophysicist. Chris Evans, however (who, after Murphy, probably has the most to do) seems too jockish and hotheaded for the most important mission ever undertaken.

What Sunshine is good at is creating a sense of awe. The ship has an observation room which allows the crew to witness the fiery sphere closer than any human has done before—but look at it with full visibility and you'll fry. The film is good at slipping in what in other hands could be dry nuggets of scientific fact in with the wonder. More than most SF movies, Sunshine proudly peacocks its science. In some ways this is a clever device, wrongfooting you as to the film's eventual destination.

For the majority of its refreshingly brief running time, Sunshine plays pretty realistically. For one moment—after they discover the Icarus 1, a previous mission that went missing seven years before—it even looks like it might be turning into a zero-gravity reheat of And Then There Were None. But as they approach the sun, the film takes a metaphysical left turn and suddenly we're in the realm of pure spectacle cinema. You can also see a bit of Boyle's favourite film, Apocalypse Now, in there too.

Sunshine can justifiably rub spacesuit shoulders with the movies it cribs from. It's proof that while America has the money to send real people into outer space, we're just as good—if not better—at putting fictional ones there.