Sunshine

Dir: Danny Boyle, Starring: Cillian Murphy, Rose Bryne, Chris Evans

The Sun is dying, and only eight intrepid astronauts can blast it back into life, where a previous mission failed. Sunshine has been billed as a splice between the Alien films and 2001: A Space Odyssey – but retains only the worst features of each.

It certainly lacks the commitment to scientific accuracy of 2001. Despite director Danny Boyle’s claim that the team went to the trouble of trying to get every calculation correct, they seem to have forgotten that the Earth actually moves. Yet perhaps griping about having to drive our Script Bus over the plotholes misses the point: it’s not about the hard science; it’s about the human stories. But they’re disappointing too.

The cast were subjected to spending a fortnight in close quarters for two weeks before filming started to try and give them an idea of the inevitable tension of living in a small space with other people for so long. Particularly for a spaceship that’s meant to have been away from home for well over a year, this doesn’t come across on-screen at all. I’ve seen worse fights living in halls.

Any empathy with the characters is inevitably difficult when they admit themselves that their own lives are completely expendable compared with their goal of saving the entire species from an icy death on a frozen planet. The deaths come one by one, but who cares as long as one of them lives long enough to drop that nuke in the Sun? Self-sacrifice to save the world has effectively been done before, closer to home, in Armageddon, and Sunshine fails to bring anything new to the party.

It has far greater potential than an Armageddon or a Deep Impact, but this remains unfulfilled. A spacewalk sequence to repair the outside of the ship succeeds in building tension, only for the remainder of the film to be given the most superficial treatment imaginable. Crew members’ mental issues and the moral dilemma faced in weighting the life of one crew member against the fate of humanity are glossed over in a manner reminiscent of the “plot” of your average pornography.

By the film’s climax the actual story has disappeared entirely up its own bottom to be replaced by incomprehensible-but-stunning visuals and a corking soundtrack. But it’s fallen apart long before the pretty pictures and music steal the show.

Fears that Underworld and I Am Kloot’s score is also effectively the death knell for remotely serious sci-fi are all but confirmed halfway in when Sunshine metamorphoses into a slasher flick, presumably to pander to a market made up mostly of teenagers and your stupider variety of adult. (Though premature ejaculation is fairly typical of Boyle. 28 Days Later certainly does it, and even the seminal Trainspotting flounders a little in the second half.)

Aside from that litany of criticisms – and despite wanting to dislike it – it’s not actually all that bad. As far as a couple of hours’ mindless entertainment goes, it does the job fairly well.

It’s just that it could have been so much more. That realisation that, like David Cameron or a footballer’s wag, it might seem alright on the surface but there’s nothing underneath – that while it might look alright, it’s actually just shite – brings to mind some of Boyle’s earlier work, a line from Trainspotting which he would do well to heed. “At one point you’ve got it, and then you lose it, and it’s gone forever.” Beautifully illustrated. Chris White