Sunshine

Review By: Benjamin Lee
BenjaminLee@TheCinemaSource.com

Mercilessly yanked off the release schedule a mere month before it’s much anticipated release back in April, the sci-fi thriller Sunshine has finally been deposited in a rather unlikely slot – amidst the brainless fluff of the Summer season. On first glance it appears to be its rightful home. A visually stunning action flick set in space. Or that’s what the publicity department at Fox Searchlight would prefer you believed.

Releasing Sunshine at the height of the silly season seems to be a major error in judgement. There are certain assumptions that accompany films released between May and July. Needless to say all assumptions one might have about Sunshine are quite probably wrong. It’s not a ‘look how many bangs we got for our buck’ blockbuster, it won’t please everyone in the family, it doesn’t contain any perfectly awful one-liners and it hasn’t got a soundtrack full of soft rock anthems. It may be set in space but we’re in Solaris territory here, not Armageddon.

The plot follows a team of specialists who are sent on an unlikely mission. We’re 50 years in the future and the Sun is dying. The direct result is of course that the Earth is also dying. In order to save the planet, the Sun needs to be revived. Following in the footsteps of a previously failed attempt, the group (including Cillian Murphy and Chris Evans) encounter a stream of life-or-death situations both from outside and inside their ship. As the crew slowly dwindle, the remaining survivors are pitted against an enemy they never imagined they would have to encounter.

Okay so maybe comparing it to the subdued, cerebral mysticism of Solaris wasn’t a totally fair comparison. Sunshine does possess a ruthless pace and director Danny Boyle yet again shows his flair for staging an exciting action scene. But what I was trying to say before is that there's something about the way that Sunshine unfolds that is so refreshingly against the typical formula for the genre.

Instead of imagining how a movie would tell the story of a desperate mission to save the planet, the filmmakers instead imagine how an actual mission to save the planet may look. So there's no time for an inconsequential romantic subplot or for some incongruous comic support, Sunshine gets straight down to business. It’s rare for me to actually praise a film for being humourless but in a situation where your life is on the line, along with the rest of humanity, you probably wouldn’t be cracking too many jokes.

The dialogue is all very terse and the characters all act believably, each of them fully aware from the beginning that their lives are not important in the grand scheme of things. It’s this conceit which is one of the most fascinating throughout the film. At what stage do you start to give up hope that you will survive and instead hope that what ...