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It's a Shame about Rays
Sunday Herald
8 April 2007
By Demetrios Matheou
Danny Boyle turns his ever-versatile hands to sci-fi, but though his apocalyptic thriller has brilliant flashes, it can't escape the weight of its influences.
With so many British directors being, let's say, pretty predictable—you usually know what you're going to get from Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, just as you always did from David Lean or Ken Russell—it's important to have a couple of mercurial mavericks in the repertoire. The restlessly prolific Michael Winterbottom is one. Danny Boyle is another. Having struck gold with Trainspotting, Boyle has been surprising us ever since.
After the backpacker melodrama of The Beach, the zombie horror of 28 Days Later…, and a children's film, Millions, Boyle now tries his hand at sci-fi with Sunshine. As with those other films, he shows himself to be always proficient, and at times quite inspired. Sunshine may let itself down in the final straight, but for much of the course this is a visually beautiful, well-crafted, absorbing genre movie. If there's one connection with Trainspotting, it's that Boyle really knows how to get his audience, as well as his characters, tripping.
It is 2057, the sun is dying and mankind faces extinction. The planet's last hope is the Icarus II, a craft with a crew of eight men and women. Their mission: to deliver a nuclear bomb that, if it succeeds, will ignite their fading star.
There's the usual motley crew, including the wise captain, Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada), the boffin, Capa (Cillian Murphy), the hothead, Mace (Chris Evans), and the pilot/babe, Cassie (Rose Byrne). Usually, I would now add the "expendables", but on this particular mission, nobody has high chances of survival. So it's a question of what order they die in, and in what grisly ways.
Boyle and his team have done a grand job of conceptualising the Icarus II. There's a giant, golden-panelled shield in front, a massive payload behind, and a spindly arm containing the crew's quarters. With a journey lasting years, the ship's key features are the "oxygen garden", presided over by the green-fingered Corazon (Michelle Yeoh) and a virtual reality room in which the crew can remind themselves of home.
The really fun part is the observation room, where the more foolhardy instruct the ship's computer to open the shade a little more each time, basking in the sun while knowing that just a fraction of a percent too much and they're toast. Ship's doc Searle (Cliff Curtis) is the most addicted to this drug-free trip, so much so that he has appalling sunburn and no inclination to treat it.
On the whole, though, the crew seem a well-adjusted lot, the only tensions being of the macho variety between the American alpha male Mace and the otherwise mellow scientist, Capa. But then they receive a distress signal—in the middle of space, 50 million miles from Earth. And in the manner of most distress signals, it presages a great deal of trouble.
This one comes from the Icarus I, which disappeared while on the same mission seven years earlier. Of course, its crew must all be dead. Of course, the crew of the Icarus II must ignore the signal and continue onwards, so as not to jeopardise their mission. Of course, they don't.
Boyle's consistency tends to lie in collaborations, and Sunshine reunites him with a few old friends. Among them is writer Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later…). Garland's most creative contribution here is the original premise, one that turns our fear of global warming on its head. Thereafter, he seems happy to trot out the sci-fi clichés: the fine tradition of the captain always dying first (sorry, but it's utterly predictable); the perils of space-walk repairs; the folly of linking up with a "dead ship"; the madness induced by deep space.
Buffs can play name that film: Silent Running, Alien, Supernova, Event Horizon, and, in the grand finale, 2001: A Space Odyssey, all come to mind. Such in-house homage is perfectly acceptable in genre films, as long as the whole retains its own personality. So it's a pity that mission and film alike unravel once Capa and co step aboard the Icarus I. There may be a nice frisson when their own ship's computer announces an unknown addition to their ship's register, yet the accompanying development, which dominates the remainder of the film, is disappointingly old hat.
That said, Boyle's design and special effects teams do lend Sunshine a certain gorgeous freshness for the most part. There is much to enjoy, including an astronaut trapped in no-man's land as the ship turns toward the sun, and a finale whose visual abstraction may lack 2001's metaphysical genius, but which certainly yanks the film back and ends it on a Boyle-like high.
