Sunshine

last updated 8 January 2015

'œBrightness has never seemed as menacing as it does in Sunshine,' said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. The latest high-gloss genre film from Danny Boyle, who reinvented the zombie movie with 28 Days Later, follows a group of astronauts on a suicide mission. The year is 2057, and life on Earth is doomed unless they can reinvigorate the rapidly cooling sun with an enormous nuclear missile strike. 'œLike those multiethnic platoons of Hollywood World War II movies,' the crew of the Icarus II is diverse. The Japanese captain played by Hirouyki Sanada oversees Chris Evans' American, Australia's Rose Byrne, and Ireland's Cillian Murphy. They won't all live to the movie's end, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. But by then you won't much care. It's hard to work up sympathy for sketchily drawn stereotypes, and Boyle's complicated plot never gets off the ground. 'œInstead of going where no man has gone before, Sunshine inhabits familiar territory' previously explored by Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and other sci-fi catastrophe films. Yet somehow Boyle's visuals and Alex Garland's clever script 'œstill make you feel as if they're blazing new ground,' said David Edelstein in New York. Sunshine effortlessly makes space travel seem silent and eerie, the sun mystical and menacing, and Cillian Murphy's 'œotherworldly blue eyes' chillingly fascinating.

Rating: R