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A bright spot in the sci-fi genre

Danny Boyle's Sunshine takes off
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 18th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Blinded by the light. Cillian Murphy attempts to bomb the sun in Danny Boyle's film.
The sun is dying, and the Earth has entered a final winter. In desperation to save the planet, a mission is launched to fire a powerful atomic bomb into the sun in the hope of reigniting it. But the ship, the Icarus, has vanished en route. So another bomb has been dispatched aboard the Icarus 2.
Sunshine

Directed by Danny Boyle
With Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans,
Troy Garity and
Hiroyuki Sanada

With a crew of seven, the Icarus 2 is nearing its rendezvous with the sun. The ship, protected behind a massive sun-shield, carries the last of the world’s uranium for its bomb. The mission is to detach the bomb from the ship, and have it hover in the sun’s orbit for a brief period before it’s fired into the star’s center, giving the Icarus 2 and its crew a chance to retreat from the blast.
The crew is a tough band of scientists and astronauts. The bomb’s mastermind is a young physicist named Capa (Cillian Murphy). His fellow scientists include Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), the resident botanist in charge of maintaining a large capsule of plants to produce the ship’s oxygen, and Searle (Cliff Curtis), the ship’s “Bones” and shrink.
The ship is under the command of Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada), and is staffed by his second, Harvey (Troy Garity), ship engineer Mace (Chris Evans), Trey (Benedict Wong) and Cassie (Rose Byrne).
The mission, close to its second year, has gone smoothly. With the workaday chores and occasional claustrophobia come moments of wonder, particularly when the crew become, perhaps, the first humans to see Mercury up close. All systems are go — until the ship picks up a distress signal from the lost Icarus 1.
Danny Boyle’s latest film is a taut sci-fi/suspense tale written by his close collaborator, novelist Alex Garland. Their first project was the disappointing The Beach, which was a much better novel than film. But their second assignment together, 28 Days Later, managed to seriously reinvent the zombie genre, pulling it away from the parodic mockery of Shaun of the Dead (however entertaining that was).
Although Sunshine doesn’t quite mark an evolution in space exploration sci-fi, it does a good job of returning to the tone and spirit of the genre’s classics: Kubrick’s 2001, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Trumbull’s Silent Running. Unfortunately, Boyle and Garland  will suddenly add to this mix components from another great work, Scott’s Alien, and this is where the film falters.
As contemplative as the film’s first quarter is, Boyle slyly builds the suspense. Once the Icarus 1’s distress call is received, the mission will begin to slowly go awry. It seems inevitable that if you’ve christened missions to the sun “Icarus,” you’re inviting disaster. Why not have just named it The HMS Hubris? Helios, Savitar, even Louis XIV might have been more promising names, but…
Icarus 1 will bring down Icarus 2 — and is it a mere coincidence that both ships had a crew of seven, the same number as the Nostromo in Alien? The question is, will anyone survive to revive the sun? More importantly, will their massive Manhattan Project detonation prove to be more operational than aspirational if someone can reach the buttons in time?
With terrific cinematography from Alwin Kuchler, and an excellent soundscape built by Karl Hyde, John Murphy and Rick Smith, Boyle’s voyage into the heart of darkness and brightness is impeccably stylish.
The performances are equally good for being perfectly measured. There is none of the bloated bombast and brash heroics of Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow. The Icarus crew, like that of the Nostromo, are all too human, with both the good and the bad that implies. The only false note comes from the studio, Fox, dubiously insisting that all of the actors in Sunshine (a collection of Australian/New Zealanders, Brits, Yanks and Asians) speak with American accents, unlike the international Alien troop.
The ending also seems to be a dictate from the head office, as ambiguity (of whichever of the seven kinds) is apparently not good box-office. Still, Sunshine is an intelligent and compelling film regardless of its few minor flaws.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (18/04/2007):

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