Danny Boyle and Alex Garland did a great job with 28 Days Later and after reading a lot about it and having watched the trailer I was really looking forward to Sunshine. I recently caught a viewing of it at the local multiplex and although it wasn’t a masterpiece I did like it quite a lot! You might want to stop reading here if you want to avoid (minor) spoilers.
The movie is set 50 years into the future and follows the crew of the ship “Icarus II” on their mission to save our planet from disaster, caused by the sun dying. The reason for the ship being named Icarus II is that this is the second and final attempt to re-ignite the sun, which certainly adds quite a lot of pressure… There’s a nice mix of international crew members, each with pretty distinct roles and the characters are well developed considering the amount of screen time alotted to each of them. It’s nice seeing Cillian Murphy not being a villain, and he does a great job as the hero of the movie. The pacing is excellent, it starts out gentle and slow with an introduction to the characters and the ship and then starts to pick up speed gradually, ending in a state of panic.
There are some obvious sources of inspiration or references to works such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and although it has been a while since my last viewing of Event Horizon, 28 Days Later to some extent feels like a better version of it.
I do have a few issues with the movie, some parts seem realistic, but other things such as the space ships having artificial gravity and of course the basic premise of a large nuclear fission bomb being able to re-ignite the dying sun are a bit annoyingly unrealistic. The movie also has some horror movie elements (which is why it reminds me of Event Horizon) which works for me, but I believe I would have liked the movie even more without them. Parts of the events are pretty stupid, the ship A.I. needs to be asked detailed questions to give the crew information that should in fact have caused it to raise an alarm, it also permits the crew making stupid mistakes in one instance but then later overrides them competely to protect the ship and the mission. But I am able to ignore these faults and instead enjoy the ship design, the supberb CGI shots of the sun and the really good acting.
My rating is 4 out of 5 stars – buy the DVD when it comes out if you don’t get a chance to view it on the big screen! And for my fellow Swedes: watch out for the shots of winter-time Stockholm posing as a frozen Sydney!