Here's a sci-fi flick from the guy who directed Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, and starring the creepy yet strangely hot Cillian Murphy. It's called Sunshine, and it documents what happens when a rag-tag crew of astronauts and scientists sets off on a desperate mission to replenish the dying sun by detonating a big honkin' bomb inside it.
Now you might be asking yourself, "Crabbie. Why in tarnation would I want to watch a movie about a bunch of dopes in a spaceship flying to the sun to ram a humongous A-bomb up its butt? Especially when I have so many freshly-painted walls to keep an eye on?" Well, you'll just have to take my word for it that Sunshine is worth watching. Of course it helps if you're a total dork who's watched Cosmos so many times he can recite almost the whole thing word-for-word (in a fantastic Carl Sagan voice to boot). This is a sci-fi movie for sci-fi freaks; Danny Boyle the director has gone all-out in cramming as many geek-friendly space opera tropes into this bad-boy as he can. It's like a compendium of every outer space movie made in the last 50 years. If you're a geek like me, you'll spend the whole movie shouting out, "Alien" and "Dark Star" and "Tarkovsky version of Solaris not the lame Soderbergh remake!"
No, I don't shout out things when I go to movies, only when I watch them at home in my underwear with the downstairs neighbor banging on his ceiling trying to get me to turn my subwoofer off. Fuck that bastard too - he listens to Deep Purple full-blast at 11 PM so he can tolerate some low frequency noise pollution.
Anyway, getting back to the movie. Basically the whole thing is a series of catastrophes, sort of like Jim Carrey's career the last few years. Many of said disasters involve the crew members having to make incredibly gut-wrenching moral decisions like whether they should off a guy to conserve oxygen or who should stay behind in the air-lock to open the door so the others can shoot out and return to the ship that's become undocked. Okay, I admit, this sounds horrible. And parts of it are rather silly. But that's sort of how it goes with sci-fi movies - you have to endure a lot of eye-rolling implausibility to get to the good stuff. Most of the good stuff in Sunshine is of the quasi-poetic variety. There are some cool images and bits of new-agey music and occasionally it comes together to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. And then there are other times where you're like, "Wow. Danny Boyle must've watched every single '60s/'70s DEFA sci-fi flick eight times. He's trying really hard to synthesize the crazy psychedelic mysticism that typified the outer space films of that era." A lot of times it just seems like a fake, but other times the movie delivers on its promise of blissed-out geekery.
And did I mention the strange hotness of Cillian Murphy? 3 Chips Ahoy out of 4. The movie is rated R for people being burned up and people freezing in the blackness of space and shattering like crystal figurines (which could suck).
