Click to watch

Trailer for "Sunshine"

Danny Boyle’s sci-fi extravaganza Sunshine is rather obviously intended to be a sharply distinctive, rivetingly dynamic, genre-busting film. It’s really much more representative of a couple of modes well embedded in contemporary cinema. Sunshine is shaped by a driving, explosively punctuated energy and it evidences considerable borrowing from the movies’ recycling bin.

Boyle’s films have relied upon pile-driving momentum since his breakthrough hit Trainspotting, and this tendency has strengthened over the last 12 years. Sunshine is a virtual culmination of this career trend. But if it’s consistent in this respect, it’s something of a departure in another: its debt to a large number of other space-trek movies. This may be, in part, the unavoidable result of working in a generic vein, but Boyle and his screenwriter, Alex Garland, seem to have borrowed heavily, and perhaps unthinkingly. Boyle may have been wrongheaded in the past but he was rarely derivative.

Sunshine’s premise is briefly introduced at the film’s very start, and then never discussed again. “Our Sun is dying; Mankind is facing extinction,” intones an unidentified voice (probably belonging to Cillian Murphy, one of the movie’s stars).

Sunshine’s present is 2057, and just why the Sun is giving up the ghost isn’t addressed. (The filmmakers have helpfully provided journalists with a very short essay by British astronomer Brian Cox, which offers such vital facts as the Sun’s core temperature, its essential composition, and its estimated age.)

To prevent the Sun’s demise, along with life on this planet, an excruciatingly critical international mission is launched to deliver a nuclear payload that, it is hoped, will explode on the Sun’s surface and reignite what Dr. Cox calls its “giant nuclear fusion reactor.” The eight-person crew on the spacecraft seems a trifle small for such a desperately crucial and dauntingly complex mission, but Boyle and Garland probably needed to restrict themselves to a small dramatic focus.

They soon begin to reduce this small crew even further as a series of tragic and mysterious crises intervene. These begin when the ship detects a strange signal from a previous mission, sent for the same purpose, and not heard from for seven years, its members presumed to have perished. For what seem important practical reasons the mission is diverted to find the first spacecraft and its nuclear payload.

It’s a little surprising how obvious the spirit and specific plot devices of any number of previous space-rescue movies are in what follows. From the calmly supervisory ship computer, a feminine descendant of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Hal, to the movie’s endgame Caliban-like intruder who recalls Forbidden Planet from a half-century ago, Sunshine seems heavily indebted to earlier inventions.

This dependence is at odds with the filmmakers’ apparent belief in their own inspiration. Sunshine is infused with a metaphysical self-importance. Boyle and Garland want to give the movie’s mission a cosmological significance.

Boyle does succeed in imparting a feeling of tremendous solar spectacle to several of his movie’s sequences, as if the Sun’s unimaginable power was bearing down on the ship’s crew, and on us, physically and spiritually. But this never becomes much more than a brilliant design and special-effects achievement. Sunshine’s awkwardly insistent philosophical tone becomes a drag on the movie.

The last time Boyle and Garland got involved in a heart-of-darkness project, in The Beach, they got bogged down in wet-behind-the-ears assertions of significance. Now they’ve come up with a stunningly visualized, but increasingly confused and clunky space epic. Boyle’s wild kineticism becomes more and more distracting, rendering the film visually incoherent as it nears its bloody conclusion.

Initially hamstrung by lame dialogue, the actors are eventually lost in the rush. Rose Byrne as Cassie, the ship’s pilot, is probably intended to be developing a mutually sympathetic relationship with Murphy’s Capa, the on-board physicist, but this is barely indicated before the movie careers off to other frantic matters.

What Boyle has created is a sort of ponderous pulp. Sunshine is an original, stunningly beautiful package filled with bombast and banality.