Sunshine

Not unlike a few other science-fiction movies before it, this sci-fi flick features a rag-tag crew of scientists, astronauts and hot girls playing either scientists or astronauts, floating through space, but this time around, toward the sun with a massive bomb in their backside. The mission? Toss the bomb into the sun in the hopes that it will re-ignite that sucker, which is seemingly dying. And oh yeah, if the sun dies, everyone on Earth dies as well, so needless to say, their mission is pretty important. Space stuff ensues.

A decent science-fiction movie which despite its solid overall production would surely have been a lot better had the momentum and ethereal quality of its first two acts been smoothly transitioned into the finale. Unfortunately for us, the film’s third act feels like it belongs in another movie and we’re ultimately left with a pretty uneven motion picture. And speaking of other movies, I’m not sure I entirely disagree with director Ridley Scott who recently said that he believed most “sci-fi is dead”, because they just seem to be recycling the same general ideas, and to a certain extent, this film falls into that category, with remnants of ALIEN, EVENT HORIZON, SOLARIS and a variety of other sci-fi flicks’ plot points floating through it (nice homage to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in the final shot though). Mind you, director Danny Boyle and his fine cast of actors all do a good job of keeping things interesting, mysterious and sharp-looking through most of the picture, but ultimately…the film doesn’t really bring all that much new to the table. I actually think that it would have benefited from a longer run-time, as its current length of 100 minutes just felt a tad short and edited down. Some of the ideas put forth were also quite interesting, particularly in its third and oblique act, but unlike most science-fiction opuses, this one moved at a clip and didn’t really slow down for much (including any insight into specific theories, etc…).

I guess you can look at that as a good thing in the film as well, but there were several scenes in which I clearly remember thinking: “I wish they’d taken a little longer to massage that scene into my brain.” Maybe watching it a few times over might do the trick, but on this first go-around, I wasn’t entirely blown away by the movie, although I could certainly recommend it to all fans of science-fiction, particularly if you also appreciate horror elements. And without giving away too much from the third act, I will say that a certain character also begins to feature certain “effects” around him on the screen, which I could understand within the context of the story, but honestly…they just annoyed the hell out of me! I kept trying to focus on this entity, but noooooo, he was just moving around and shaking all the time. I don’t know…I guess I wasn’t entirely enthused by the film’s direction by that point anyway, so maybe I’m just nitpicking on that character, but I think that also took me a little out of it. The overall story is a good one though, the actors all well identified and played, and while I believe the film would have been stronger with a different type of conclusion and a lengthier run-time (maybe a director’s cut?), it still managed to keep me engaged for most of its runtime and certainly should be checked into by all fans of the mysterious, fictionalized science and space exploration.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian