[SkeniaInhilla]

I wasted my money on this film last week. It had potential, but Danny Boyle botched it (no great surprise really).

Suffice to say that what follows could spoil your viewing experience, but it might also save your money...

Okay, the Icarus II is on its way to Sol to save the world and all that. They soon discover that Icarus I, the first, failed attempt to reignite the sun, is still intact and sending out a mayday. So it is decided to rendezvous with the craft, giving them potentially double the chance to save Earth.

Readjusting course is a tricky proposition though. If it wasn't for solar distortion making communication with Earth impossible, you could well imagine an entire building full of NASA nerds sweating bullets over the maneuver. At the very least you would assume that every person on Icarus II would be involved in the task. But this is a Danny Boyle film, so while the crew is distributed at all quarters of the spaceship, one lone crewman performs the necessary adjustments. He calculates and re-calculates the coordinates, but oops - he forgets just one important thing: to also adjust the sun shield!

All hell breaks lose, and with it all believability gets sucked out into the vacuum of space. Which is a great shame, for the film had established an interesting dynamic between the crew members, Hiroyuki Sanada as the captain was enigmatic, and the lovely Australian girl Rose Byrne was a pleasure to look at. There was almost an Alpha Centauri like vibe amongst the diverse members of the crew, and it reminded me what a great film that material could produce. If only Peter Jackson was into SMAC...

The visuals were also good, with cool blue interior shots contrasting nicely with the hot and orange exterior shots. The cinematography was also blessedly free from shakey cam.

In the end the film degenerates into an Event Horizon pile of fecal matter, which is climaxed with an ending so preposterous and unintelligible, it doesn't even make good comedy. Danny Boyle must be a very charismatic man, because I can't explain otherwise how he became a film maker.

Sunshine might have been good if the end of the world senario was entirely eliminated, and instead a more subtle story was put in its place. Why not just have the craft on a mission of exploration? There would be more time to get to know the crew and become attached to them. Their relationships and conflicts could be fully fleshed out. And when a bit of drama, perhaps a stray meteor or something, was introduced, the audience would actually care what happened. Unfortunately subtlety is a quality in which Danny Boyle is totally deficient. He instead attempts something that only a Kubrick, a Ridley Scott, or a James Cameron could successfully achieve - and he utterly fails.