All right, I'll look to slam out a proper review tomorrow, perchance, but I thought I'd drop a few thoughts on Danny Boyle's Sunshine. All in all, it's an interesting and kind of artful misfire — the type of movie that doesn't really ignite a desire to ever view it again, but one that you'd recommend to certain friends, if maybe not others.



Loosely categorized as a science fiction thriller, it's set in the year 2057. The sun is dying and a solar winter has enveloped the Earth, whose last best hope lies with the Icarus II, a spacecraft with an international crew of eight men and women. Their mission: to deliver a nuclear device designed to reignite our fading sun. Deep into their voyage, out of radio contact with Earth, the crew hears a distress beacon from the Icarus I, which disappeared on the same mission seven years earlier. A terrible accident throws their mission into jeopardy, and soon the crew finds themselves fighting not only for their sanity and their lives, but for the future of us all.

The obvious benchmarks here are Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and (just a bit) Armageddon, with Boyle's tastes of course tilting toward the more artistic, which accounts for Alwin Kuchler's affected cinematography, shot in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, a first for Boyle. What the movie — which, at its concentrated core, has a relatively bleak-hearted view about humanity essentially being its own worst enemy — most has going for it is that there is no sentimental attachment to its characters, which equals a real sense of jeopardy, since anyone can die at any time. After creating a relatively foreboding sense of mood in its first half or two-thirds, however, Sunshine devolves into an impressionistic action tale. By the time two characters are left sliding around on a giant cube, three words surge to the front of your brain: what the fuck? For more information, click here.