MOVIE REVIEW: 'Sunshine'


Movie review in the Friday, July 27 Oregonian....




"Sunshine" looks a little more artistically ambitious than it actually is.

This sci-fi thriller -- which is alternately nail-biting, gorgeous and a little silly -- spends most of its time throwing mechanical and human errors at the most important space mission ever. The multinational crew of the Icarus II is cruising toward the sun behind a massive heat shield. Our nearest star is burning out, you see, and the Icarus crew is poised to deliver a Manhattan-sized bomb to re-light the orb.

But in the tradition of the best mission-gone-wrong movies, human nature bedevils the plan. The crew catches a signal from the long-missing Icarus I, and bold decisions and small mistakes turn Icarus II into a literal and figurative pressure-cooker -- and turn the already risky mission into a life-or-death race to get the job done before the air runs out. It's a bit like "Apollo 13," only the stakes aren't just the crew's lives, but all humanity's.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland (who previously collaborated on "28 Days Later") clearly want to make a smarter-than-average sci-fi thriller, one that pays homage to every halfway intelligent and philosophical space movie they ever loved. (That said, if they were really smart, they probably wouldn't have named their spaceship after a moron who flew too close to the sun and died.)

"Sunshine"'s bickering crew of talented actors and its talking computer very consciously gut-check "Alien." Its NASA-informed design sense, stunning visual compositions, vacuum-hopping crises and nods to metaphysics and the unknown very consciously gut-check "2001." There are also references to "Solaris" and "Silent Running." And for the most part, the movie is a nearly perfect synthesis of all its visual referents: It feels like its own thriller, not a fanboy museum piece.

For its first three-quarters, Boyle and Garland do a superb job balancing beauty and terror. The shots of Icarus II , the planet Mercury and various unlucky astronauts dwarfed by the Sun have a stark beauty that's incredibly refreshing in an era where "good" special effects seem to be defined as "packing the frame with as many busy details as time, money and processing power allow." These overwhelming images are a nice counterpoint to the knuckle-tightening claustrophobia inside the two Icarus ships, which take on haunted-house tones.

And the cast is mostly superb at conveying the effects of deep-space isolation on the human mind. The archetypes are all here: Cillian Murphy as a nervous egghead, Chris Evans as a hothead engineer, Cliff Curtis as a psych officer getting lost in the metaphysics of sunlight, Hiroyuki Sanada as the paternal captain. But all of them complicate their archetypes with real human feeling. Throw in Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, and Benedict Wong, and you really have one of the most across-the-board strong casts for this sort of movie ever.

Unfortunately -- and this is going to be a deal-breaker for many (though it wasn't for me) -- "Sunshine" loses some of its nerve in the fourth quarter.

Without spoiling too much, the movie very suddenly takes a 15-minute melodramatic detour into slasher horror. And metaphysical questions the movie was raising are kind of lost in a goofy stew of monster-movie action, reality-bending camera work and sun-worshipping goofiness. It betrays the smarts of the first hour and change -- turning "Sunshine" into "Event Horizon" with a Ph.D, basically.

This may have been the filmmakers' attempt to grapple with Big Ideas in an entertaining way, but it mostly feels like the filmmakers didn't trust the human and mechanical failures to generate suspense (and thought) on their own, even though they were generating it in spades.
_______

B; 107 minutes; rated R for violent content and language.

'Sunshine' (The Oregonian, July 27, 2007)

Permalink


Posted: Fri - July 27, 2007 at 12:00 AM        

|

©