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Blinding visuals but lacking any real plot
SUNSHINE
Directed by Danny Boyle
Certificate 15
THE year is 2057. The sun is dying. Mankind faces extinction.
Only a brave crew aboard the space ship Icarus II can save the earth – armed with a bomb to explode inside the sun and “create a star within a star”, to quote the Japanese captain (Hiroyuki Sanada).
They will have four minutes to turn tail and get out.
This implausible premise needs a strong hand at the helm to help us suspend our disbelief, and director Danny Boyle does his best to provide it.
He takes us on a roller-coaster ride into outer darkness, igniting the screen with blinding white light to simulate the heat and brilliance of the sun as it draws ever nearer and incinerates the crew one by one.
The problem is that Danny boy tries to disguise the malfunctions in the plot and characters with a mind-bending display of pyrotechnics and LSD-trippery. A threatening sound-track throbs and thunders. The screen turns orange.
People shout incoherently at one another, and occasionally burst into flames. But in the end, we don’t know any of them well enough to care.
The exception is Irish actor Cillian Murphy as the ship’s doctor and pivotal star of the show.
With his burning blue eyes he could be Keir Dullea’s twin brother from A Space Odyssey: 2001 as he sends his last message home to his Mum: “I hope you’re proud of your son, saving mankind… and so on.” Understated like a true hero.
Indeed he has his own Hal the Computer to contend with – only this time it’s a robotic female voice, somewhere inside the massive jigsaw of a spaceship where you never quite know where you are or what’s going on. |
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