The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Friday, April 13, 2007

Review: Sunshine

Well, we’re not dead yet, not quite, and we do believe The Fake Life can be a home for some fun content, so I’ll be writing a few articles about my adventures in film land over the next week or so and I hope my fellow Fakers will join me. If any of you sexy, enlightened souls reading this have an idea for an article you’d like our message boarders to discuss for five posts before making a joke about MODOK please get in contact with us. Honestly, even if you’re a troll.

In the meantime: here’s a review for Danny Boyle’s latest, Sunshine: it’s good!

The Sun is dying in the future, possibly from watching Solar Crisis on a Friday night in. A crack team of pretty astronauts have been given the mission of flying a very big bomb into the star so as to re-ignite it. Things go wrong. And that’s the plot.

The central concept is daft pseudo-science nonsense, and the narrative set up is hackneyed and predictable but, to be honest, it doesn’t entirely matter. The point of this movie is to create a series of sequences that build up to emotional climaxes, often starting with the tension and fear of a rescue or repair mission and then shifting towards a more transcendent, spiritual space as characters come face to face with their mortality, the infinite, and stuff. Think of that bit in Boyle’s previous film, 28 Days Later, when the main character wanders around a deserted, post apocalyptic London as the music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor rises to a thundering sustained crescendo of intense post-rock awesomeness. It’s like that, but with a few more Spielberg-esque close-ups of people staring beatifically off screen.

And it really works. But only, I feel, if you see it at the cinema. It has the structure of dance music, being entirely devoted to those regular crescendos and, if you are in an immersive atmosphere like a cinema or a club, in the darkness with a massive sound system and part of a crowd sharing the same experience, the effect is overwhelming. This is a sci-fi movie for the rave generation.

Listen to the same tune on your radio the next day, however, and it will be repetitive, predictable and a bit dull.

You’ll notice that same central dinner table around which a crew bickers you’ve seen dozens of times since Alien. You’ll notice that you’ve seen the repair mission outside the ship from 2001 to Star Trek: First Contact. You’ll notice that, for a bunch of highly trained elite astronauts, they all crack up and act like babies at the first sign of stress. You’ll notice that the attempt to introduce a specific antagonist in the third act is a sop to standard Hollywood plotting and never amounts to much more than a distraction from the main action.

And all those things are true, but when you are caught up in the moment, the effect is equally inarguable.

The actors, including Cillian Murphy, the dude that plays The Human Torch and the woman from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon who wasn’t Zhang Ziyi, all acquit themselves well, creating characters and solid screen presences mostly through behaviour while intelligently reciting the mostly techy and expositiony script. Cillian Murphy, who has a face mixing such sharp angularity with such puffy lips he wobbles on the line between utter beauty and terrifying deformity, is particularly suited to staring beatifically off screen.

The script isn’t offensively dumb. The events mostly move quickly. It looks great. Both the threat of space and the ever increasing threat of the Sun’s heat as they approach it are viscerally evoked, and the sense of scale and isolation are only beaten by 2001. And maybe Silent Running.

It’s good then, but very much a film to be experienced rather than coldly observed, which is great for film-lovers, bad for the sorts of sci-fi fans who want to know how light-sabers work.

8 out of 10