Just fifty years into our future, planet Earth is traveling on its last legs in orbit around a dying star. Sunshine is director Danny Boyle’s fantastic projection of mankind’s desperate, aeronautical effort to revive its life force by somehow dropping a bomb into the center of the sun and jumpstarting it into gear. Seven years after the crew of space mission ‘Icarus’ is unexplainably lost en route to deploy its sun saving bomb, ‘Icarus II’ takes up the same challenge in a last ditch effort to protect its perishing planet. A team of eight men and women have just about made it to the galaxy’s solar core, when they are faced with a choice, a setback, and a barrage of fatal errors that force them to act in a fashion more like lifeboat ethics than spaceship science.

I’ve never been able to get really stoked over science fiction movies; one usually turns into a nonsensical, over-budgeted mess by the time its over-allotted running time is up. In an aesthetics light, I give Sunshine credit for stretching quite a small budget into a substantial visual effect. Cliff Curtis plays an ‘Icarus II’ crew member very obsessed with staring into the ever nearing sun through the ship’s observation room; it’s quite evident why. The film brilliantly presents the sun close-up as a hypnotizing mass that’s incessantly churning swirls of gold and ruby colored glow. This effect is just a facet of a movie that is an overall visual gem.

What throws Sunshine out of orbit is the way it seems terribly torn between being science fiction and psychological thriller, never mastering either approach. The scientific stuff is slim pickings. Sunshine tried to blind an inquisitive audience here by disguising the unexplainable with showy euphemisms; the closest explanation I got regarding the technological goals of this mission was that ‘Icarus II’ was using its bomb to “create a star within a star.” Sunshine dabbles more than casually into issues of suicide, sacrifice, and spirituality, but never offers a cohesive perspective on the human condition. What’s annoying is that it seems Sunshine tried very hard to look humanity through a microscope, yet the flick came closer to torching it through a magnifying glass.

Performance-wise, Sunshine stayed in the shade. The characters were shallow and poorly developed. If a film dedicates substantial screen time to a character bursting into bloody ice chips after freezing to death in the vacuum of space, I’ve gotta care. Even a normally very intense Cillian Murphy is uncharacteristically uninteresting here: by the end of the film, I was pretty bored with his blue-eyed soap opera stare.

There is a sufficiently exciting plot twist in this movie, but it’s never fully explained. And while I appreciate that Sunshine had the courage to kill off its characters when things got too hot to handle, I’d have appreciated it much more if the movie hadn’t tried to make burning to death look so beautiful.

Liz Licorish

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