Sunshine

Title: Sunshine
Cast: Cillian Murphey, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Cliff Curtis
Director: Danny Boyle
Writer: Alex Garlan
Studio: Fox Searchlight

The story goes like this: the year is 2057 and the sun is dying. A crew of Earths best and brightest are sent into space with a device to help jump start the sun and create a "star within a star" to save humanity. We join the crew of Icarus II just before they are crossing over the point where those aboard will lose all communication with Earth. The astronauts send their last warm messages of hope home, with promises of rescuing the planet and a safe return. Early on, we learn that there was a similar voyage attempted about seven years earlier, with the crew of Icarus I disappearing without a trace. Just as the second crew is celebrating their passing of the planet Mercury and their last final steps towards completing their mission, they receive an eerie distress call that is deciphered to be coming from the long lost Icarus I. The decision must be made- does the crew continue on and complete the mission and disregard the S.O.S. or do they try to attempt a rendezvous with their sister ship and try to rescue any surviving crew members. And that's where things start to go wrong.

Much has been made regarding Danny Boyle's genre hopping. From Trainspotting to The Beach to 28 Days Later to Millions and now Sunshine, the gent just doesn't seem to be interested in making the same movie twice. As far as I can tell, this is being celebrated more than it's being debated. It's refreshing to sit down to a movie by a familiar director and not really know what you are going to get out of your cinematic experience. With Sunshine, Boyle has attempted the epic space thriller, and all in all comes out with all guns blazing.

The cinematic direction of Sunshine is perfect for a movie made about deep space. It feels immediate and lonely, claustrophobic and uneasy. This is the perfect movie to see in the theater as watching it in complete darkness only adds to these tensions and worries. If one were to wait and watch this one on DVD in the comfort of their living room with the lights on and their feet propped up on the couch...well, it just wouldn't feel the same.

The acting is rather well. Cillian Murphey plays Cappa, they physicist who is forced to make the big decision- continue with the mission or meet up with Icarus I? Adequate supporting performances come from Michelle Yeoh and Chris Evans (Fantastic Four's Human Torch). It's nice to see Evans in a different role, although it's easy for one to note that it seems like he might be starting to be typecast in movies that seem to always want to turn up the heat.



It feels like space thrillers go one of two ways. Either you have the straight forward panic mission, where everything that goes wrong is more or less explainable (Apollo 13), or you have the types of movies where the plot is thickened by some fantastical element that could only happen in the outer regions of the universe (2001: A Space Odessy, Solaris or the more or less forgotten Event Horizon). The twist in Sunshine is it's kind of a mixture of the two and thats what helps to set it apart.


photos copyright belongs to Fox Searchlight