| SOLAR FLAIR : Danny Boyle's 'Sunshine' [7/10] |
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| Wednesday, 11 April 2007 | |
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Easily one of the most remarkable-looking - and sounding - British productions for many years, the latest collaboration between director Boyle and scriptwriter Garland (after The Beach and 28 Days Later) is essentially a fairly straight cross between Event Horizon and The Core, with nods to Alien, Solaris (both versions) and Pitch Black along the way. As this jumbled ancestry indicates, Sunshine doesn't seem to know which branch of sci-fi it belongs in: external scenes of stately, rather trippy, Kubrickian grandeur and interior-set sequences of talky Stanislaw-Lem-style philosophising sit somewhat uncomfortably along plot developments that nod to the cheesiest of bargain-basement straight-to-video fare. The decidedly implausible, hole-ridden plot puts a new spin on topical climate-change issues: in the near future, the sun has started to show premature signs of impending death, plunging the world into perpetual winter. An increasingly desperate mankind sends a spaceship (Icarus II) containing all of the world's fissile material (protected by a vast shield seemingly constructed of all the world's gold), which is to be propelled into the heart of the dying star in order to effect a kind of cosmic 'kick-start.' A multi-racial, multinational, (mostly) model-pretty crew (including Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne) are tasked with delivering the payload, only to be diverted when they receive a distress signal from the ship (Icarus I) sent on an identical mission several years before, and long presumed lost... Sunshine sets out its stall with admirable economy and minimum fuss, gradually building tension and atmosphere as hazards intervene and on-board frictions mount. And while the Icarus II's mission becomes one disaster after another, the course plotted by Boyle and Garland proceeds much more smoothly, the pair knowingly ticking off (and often tweaking) various genre conventions as they go. Problems only arise, indeed, during the third act: Garland - having exhausted his list of hand-me-down spaceship-mishap perils and realising he's got too many characters still left breathing - take a disastrous, near-fatal mis-step. He brings into play a homicidal stowaway - a naked, demented, knife-wielding slasher (played by Mark Strong) whose villainously delusional/theological dialogue recalls Sam Neill during the bonkers latter stretches of Event Horizon - while his full-body solar-exposure burns give him an unfortunate air of Freddy Krueger on occasion. Not that we ever get an especially good look at this chap - as the climax approaches, Boyle abandones the impressively steely control that's marked the Sunshine's earlier stretches in favour of stylistic overload: flashy editing abounds, with artsy freeze-frames and increasingly berserk camerawork. The actual finale is - fortunately - executed with sufficient chutzpah to end proceedings on a definite high, although, like much of what's gone before, it's objectively rather absurd. As with the sun itself, so with Sunshine: basking in the glow is a pleasure, but you shouldn't even think of examining it too directly... Neil Young 11th April, 2007 SUNSHINE : [7/10] : UK 2007 : Danny BOYLE : 107 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Empire cinema, Sunderland (UK), 6th April 2007 - public show (paid £5.50)
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