UK Release Date: 27-08-2007
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Danny Boyle
Country: GB
Distributor: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

It’s a strong premise for a movie: our Sun is dying, and a team of scientists and astronauts are travelling to the fading star to launch a bomb the size of Manhattan into it, hoping to spark it back into life. One big problem is that the plot is really nothing more than a series of obstacles for the cast of largely undifferentiated characters to overcome, with one hurdle piled atop another to tedious effect. After a while, you simply stop caring whether or not our heroes will save the world and start wondering how such a collection of ill-disciplined, argumentative twits ever got selected for the most important space mission of all time – or why they only brought along one guy who knows how to deliver the payload (doh!), or how Cillian Murphy looks more like a male model than a brilliant physicist… And then 100 minutes have passed and it’s all over.

Basically, Sunshine is another triumph of style over substance from Danny Boyle – if you choose to call the film’s overwrought visual tricksiness and narrative opaqueness stylish. There’s no denying that it’s pretty at times, and that the special effects are out of the ordinary run of SF movies, but this isn’t enough to sustain a whole film. Much of the blame for this can be laid at the door of writer Alex Garland; we know that Boyle can deliver a decent film when he has a good script to work from; in this case, that was never a real possibility.