Sunshine (Cert. 15, 107 mins)
Stars: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, Hiroyuki Sanada, Mark Strong
Directed by Danny Boyle
WHEN Southport artist Frank Hampson created the strip cartoon Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, for the Eagle comic in the early 1950s, his first story was about a missing spaceship and Dan’s rescue mission.
The missing spaceship story has since become a cliche of science fiction, constantly being reworked. Sunshine is the latest.
Indeed, there are so many familiar sci-fi story lines in the film that a feeling of deja vu quickly overcomes you.
Set 50 years in the future, the sun is dying out and a spaceship Icarus has been sent to detonate a special bomb in the sun to create a new star and save the world. But the ship has vanished.
So here we are with Icarus II loaded with a similar bomb but one which has used up all the elements on earth used to create it. So this is a final mission. The Bruce Willis film Armageddon also proposed a bomb as a way of saving the world (that time to blow up a wayward asteroid) while Icarus II has some similarities to the Alien spaceship complete with a crew of “characters”. Alas, few of those on the ship (and most of them looking as if straight out of high school) make much of an impact, apart from, perhaps, Cillian Murphy, from director Danny Doyle’s earlier cheap sci-fi thriller 28 Days. One thing Sunshine does not look is cheap. Using most of the hi-tech stuff available to film-makers these days, the space ship is a wonder to behold, including a complete rain forest inside to keep the crew fed and lots of flashing lights (Dan Dare had to make do with dials and a big red button). Naturally, the script by Alex (The Beach) Garland, who also scripted 28 Days, throws lots of problems in the way of the space crew and it soon becomes clear they will not all survive – at one point, they realise they will have to cut down on the crew if they are going to make it to the sun with sufficient air. |
