Sunshine
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Alex Garland
Starring: Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Cillian Murphy, Cliff Curtis, Rose Byrne, Troy Garity

I had no idea what to expect from Danny Boyle’s new movie Sunshine. It has been advertised for awhile basically as “The Core 2″, and I will admit the only reason I went to see the movie was because of Danny Boyle’s name – which I guess is no small reason at all. Knowing his knack for trippy visuals and creative storytelling, I felt confident that the marketing was just lying, and doing its best to sell a movie by falling back on clichés, which is often times the case with marketing.

As it turns out, my gut feeling was partially correct. This is definitely not a disaster movie in the vein of The Core or Armageddon. It is a space movie, which has a lot more in common with — and owes a lot to — Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or even The Abyss to some extent. The plot of the movie is barely existent, not to mention completely unexplained and illogical, but it doesn’t matter, since the movie doesn’t rely on it. There aren’t any scenes devoted to technobabble, explaining the why, the how or the who. Instead, we get a depiction of space that is without a doubt the most interesting I have seen since 2001.

The visual style of this movie is amazing. The entire thing takes place in deep space, and it is clear that Danny Boyle and his team were determined to make space worthwhile and interesting and thus make the journey worthwhile. It looks fantastic. The sun obviously is a big part of the movie, and the way they make use of sunlight in some of the exterior shots in the movie is not only creatively interesting but also aesthetically pleasing in a way that makes you not care about whether or not everything makes sense, and at points, the movie nearly takes your breath away. There is a certain scene where two of the astronauts are on a space climb, and one of the most clichéd and overused scenes in all of movie history (which they did absolutely nothing to make interesting from a story point of view) is saved by the fantastic visual accomplishment.

The production design at first seems pretty stock and more or less the usual run of the mill science fiction stuff, but as the movie goes on more and more interesting things are introduced. This movie has the coolest space suits I have ever seen. I am pretty sure that they are based on nothing except a basic reference to real space suits, and the imagination of the director and the production designer, but I really like that. This movie takes place in the real world, but it’s not meant to be a realistic movie. It’s meant to be an artistic representation of something that only exists in fantasy. It doesn’t try and explain and excuse its outlandish elements by having technobabble explaining every tiny gadget in the movie, which I think is a major problem in films.

The music in the movie is awesome. Ranging from low-key piano pieces to very trippy and punked tunes, it never becomes generic or uninteresting. That is another thing that made me think of 2001 as I watched the movie: the use of unconventional music to accompany visuals that become more strange and trippy as the movie goes on. It totally worked for me.

However, the movie is in no way a masterpiece. There are hardly any characters in the movie worth mentioning. Only Cliff Curtis as Searle stood out as being a somewhat interesting acquaintance. The rest seem bland, uninteresting and boring. I didn’t mind any of the actors in the roles; I thought they all performed strongly. Humour is borderline non-existent in the movie. While I do appreciate the lack of a clown character to lighten things up (no pun intended) it obviously doesn’t help when a movie that is already pretty strange and hard to get into lacks any sort of humour.

The main issue with the movie though is the fact that in the second half, an entirely new element is introduced. Not only does it require even more suspension of disbelief from the viewer — it in no possible way makes any sense whatsoever — the way it’s dealt with in the movie reeks of style over substance. The movie doesn’t have that much substance to begin with, and at this point your patience as a viewer, and your trust that you are in good hands, is strained to a point where I can’t imagine many people will hang on. All of a sudden there is this horror theme in the movie, which becomes exceedingly hard to follow, let alone take seriously. It also seems like the movie ran a little too long for its own good, but even at its most problematic moments, there were some awesome scenes which saved it for me.

I can’t really dislike this movie. There was so much in it that I loved, it’s just that at points it felt like nothing had anything to do with anything, since hardly anything is explained, and the plot becomes muddled to the point that you are unsure of what the movie is doing. It just feels disjointed. Aesthetically though, it’s one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. Awesome production design, fantastic visual effects, brilliant music all comes together to make some scenes that are sure to stick around in your head after the movie is done. There are several scenes in the movie that make you cringe with their cheesiness and sometimes you find yourself going. “This path is so beaten…” and the movie in no way tries to make these clichés interesting or fresh. It’s like they felt that in order to make a movie like this they had to throw in scenes like this to try and sell it, and treated them cynically, just putting them in without caring about trying to make them worthwhile.

I think in the end, the good stuff is so good it outweighs any problems I had with the movie… at least enough to make it an overall enjoyable experience. The movie has been totally panned by critics here (not unlike last year’s brilliant movie Lady in the Water) with the common complaint being that it is “a mess (…)”. I would say that this movie is indeed a mess, it doesn’t make sense, logic is thrown out the window at several points, yet it’s done with such a flair, intelligence, subtlety and a knack for good moviemaking that you can’t help but lose yourself to it in the end. — Henrik

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