Hardly dazzling

Having heard good things about Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, I was rather disappointed when I finally got around to seeing it last night. Admittedly, missing the first forty minutes in order to watch episodes of Family Guy new to BBC Three was not ideal but I quickly picked up the thread. Now, I generally like the work of Boyle, Cillian Murphy and flavour of the month Rose Byrne, yet this production left me distinctly Earthbound.
There was plenty of religious vocabulary and quasi-religious themes to the fore but this merely felt like drapes over the whole concept to give the veneer of depth that wasn’t really there. Heliotheism has a long cultural and historical tradition, most famously in the era of the Roman Empire, when the soldierly were particularly attracted to that form of worship. However, while setting up the scenario, the film made no attempt to explore the background, bar a few swipes at psychology. In musing on the religiose aspect of his production at the time of release, Boyle mentioned that scriptwriter Alex Garland was an atheist – it shows with the ‘sun-god’ very much nuts and bolts in the physical world, rather than something transcendent. What it left me thinking most was “So this is where they got the inspiration for that Carling advert from (‘You Know Who Your Friends Are’).” It hasn’t advanced much beyond Star Trek V and Doctor Who has covered similar ground with a lot more interest in 45 minutes.
Halfway through the movie, it mutates from sci-fi exploration to a kind of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in space. Worst of all, the climax is denuded of drama for its final two minutes.
There are clear references to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (the mysteries of deep space), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (apotheosis) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (crew get bumped off one by one by lurking monster). Another influence has to be Event Horizon which was a horror movie that was not very scary. The trouble is the lack of freshness this gave to the whole film in that broke no new ground. The subliminal images were initially incredibly spooky but were overused and lost their potency.
This is not to completely rubbish Sunshine (although, leaving aside scepticism about ‘reigniting’ the sun, space never reaches absolute zero of -273 degrees Celsius) – it was okay, but I never really felt I had missed much with those first forty minutes.