Meta mission

>> Danny Boyle’s solid sci-fi adventure
Sunshine borrows liberally from its predecessors

by MARK SLUTSKY

Watching Sunshine, the new film from director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), feels a little like watching several different science-fiction movies at once. Boyle borrows so liberally from the sci-fi canon, it’s hard to tell whether the movie is meant as a self-reflexive critique of the genre, or just a feature-length homage to his favourite space flicks.

It’s also hard to tell whether Boyle was setting out to make a straight-up action-packed space thriller or a contemplative arthouse picture set among the stars, because at various points the movie seems to be going for both. Despite itself, though, it does manage to draw you in and let you forget the fact that it’s all just a bit confused.

It’s 50 years from now, and the sun is dying for reasons that are never explained (that’s okay, it doesn’t really matter). Seven years prior, the Earth’s powers-that-be sent a spaceship, the Icarus, to deliver some sort of atomic payload into the sun and re-ignite it. At a certain point, the spaceship ceased communicating with the ground and it was thought to be lost. Now another ship, the Icarus II (Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time? Did they even read the story of the mythical Icarus? That really didn’t end well) has been sent to try again; it’s humanity’s last, best hope.

Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans and Rose Byrne are among the astronauts, and when the ship starts picking up an S.O.S. transmission from the original Icarus, things begin to get a little wacky, and the movie itself shifts rapidly from psychological thriller to slasher flick to psychedelic journey.

There are nods along the way to plenty of the genre’s classics. There’s a strong Alien thing going on—just look at the table the crew eats dinner at—but the most overt, and frequent point of reference has to be 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a lot of 2001 in Sunshine, from the talking computer to the airlock scenes to the cosmic climax. It’s puzzling, because for the most part, Sunshine isn’t a bad example of the genre itself; why Boyle needed to make it so meta is a bit of a mystery.

Sunshine opens this
Friday, July 27

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