Sunshine
A little missing?
Movie review There's an old adage that science-fiction movies tell us more about today than tomorrow. Sunshine, from Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle, arguably goes further: it has its eye on the past as much as the future.
The movie-making past, that is. Sunshine is the latest film in that small sub-genre the 'space endeavour' movie. The most recent example is Brian de Palma's Mission to Mars, and while the strand's genes extend back to the likes of George Pal's Destination Moon, the real archetype is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sunshine has a snappier title and way more sophisticated special effects than Kubrick's gem, but that's clearly the movie it most wants to be favourably compared to.
Odyssey lays down the laws of the genre, and Boyle follows the rule-book almost to the letter. The 'space mission' premise is simple: a small crew of boffins in a starship progressing in a stately manner through space to perform a task of Earth-shattering significance. In Sunshine, it's to re-ignite the dying sun and spare humanity a slow, cold death. Not for them space travel as everyday occurrence but a project with the human race's best minds behind it.
Crucially, all these movies are really about what happens when the crew arrive at their destination, but being serious sci-fi flicks with at least a nod toward Titanic-esque verisimilitude, they can't cut to the chase but have to endeavour first to show us what 'space travel is really like'. And it's dull, very dull.
To keep the movie ticking over and the audience from walking out, en route to the sun we get a series of dramatic events. In 2001, it's all that stuff about HAL cracking up; Sunshine has a previous mission that failed - essentially the same motivation for the Mission to Mars crew - and the discovery of the first ship. All this is set against the familiar sci-fi themes of dislocation from the home world - courtesy here of a communications "dark zone" - and the inevitable disobiedient computer - a seriously overclocked 'mainframe' if the sub-zero coolant it sits in is anything to go by.
Sunshine's script - by Alex Garland, author of The Beach, also filmed by Boyle - gives solid reasons for all this and what happens next, but ultimately, as with 2001, it's presented solely to set up the ending, leaving it largely unsatisfying.
Which is why the finale has to work that much harder, to provide a pay-off that not only justifies the crews long peregrination but also the audience's. Sunshine's coda is cute: the familiar juxtaposed against the inappropriate landscape, in this case the Sydney Opera House, poking up above the snow like the ruined Statue of Liberty sitting in the surf.
COMMENTS
don't bother
This film is really bad. It is derivative and boring. There was not a single element of plot or character that hadn't been cut'n'pasted from elsewhere in cinema but without the charisma. I didn't give a toss about the characters and by half way through I was hoping that heat death would overcome the cinema before the end so I wouldn't need to watch the rest of it. All of which is a real shame because I'm a fan of the previous Boyle/MacDonald/Garland movies and was expecting something good
...Amusing...
"I rather enjoyed the film apart from the complete lack of explanation as to why the crew were experiencing some sort of artificial gravity."
Um... We're sending a *single* (as in "one") ship to rekindle the frickin' *SUN* and the fact that they have artificial gravity bothers you...?
If we have the technology to (say it with me) Restart... A... Star... then, presumably, minor details like generating artificial gravity and, hell, lighting and heating the Earth WITHOUT NEEDING a sun, should already be off-the-shelf technologies. (...probably drives that would allow us to get to the vicinity of the sun in less time than the movie's actual running time, but I won't go there...)
...And Captain PINBACKER...?
No!!!
Really...?!!?
Is this file some sort of post-millennial remake of Dark Star...?
(Whose turn is it to feed the beachball?)
Bahhhh
It doesn't matter about the ending, you'd have worked it out half way through the film anyway. The whole film's ripped off from 2001 anfd Event Horizon both of which are superior.
Looks like one
2010 was bollocks. Hmm, where's the gravity come from? Why is this film really boring? Event Horizon was ho-hum (yawn, look we plucked out our eyes. I'm so scared. Alien was scary, not this). This sounds like a tired old hasbeen of a movie. You've just said it's not as good as 2001, yet apes it. If it looks like a turd and smells like a turd then it probably is one. That's what I get from this review. Silent Running - there's a film about the misery of space, done 30 years ago. And that one with Kirk Douglas and Bad Lieutenant going nuts. Saturn 3, that's it.
In space no one can see you.... float
I rather enjoyed the film apart from the complete lack of explanation as to why the crew were experiencing some sort of artificial gravity.
At least 2001 had some sort of explanation with the rotating main 'life pod' but in Sunshine the crew were seen to be experiencing gravity along the longitudinal axis of their craft.
To be fair simulating artificial gravity during filming ( a la Apollo 13 ) was probably out of the scope and budget of this production but they should have at least thrown in some sort of explanation, no matter how far fetched.
