Sunshine on my window makes me happy like I should be.
URGA MOTW
Sunshine
Two weeks ago, I'd never heard of this movie. And this comes from someone who reads Dark Horizons on a daily basis. Then last week, there was a fair bit of promo on radio & newspaper for this Danny Boyle-directed Sci-Fi movie, purely because Australian Rose Byrne is in it, with her wonderful American accent.
(This film is made in the UK with a Scottish(?) director and an international cast... Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, American, Australian, and presumably a Brit or two and yet they all have American accents....)
There were some good reviews - a Scifi thriller - a crew of 8 people on Icarus 2 are heading towards the Sun to drop a giant bomb in it to re-fire its engines, as it were, so that the Earth won't freeze. Icarus 1 went missing 9 years previously, noone knows what happened to it or why it failed the mission.
Well... this film doesn't really work in any of the genres it could possibly fit. For a Science Fiction film, the science is incredibly hokey even though they start off trying to make it believable. Ok, they have 'gravity' as there's a spinning section of the spacecraft, cool. A giant mirror/shield at the front protects them from the sun's radiation. The generate their own oxygen and some food by a nice little garden in the middle of the ship. But then when the garden catches on fire, they release *more* oxygen to make it burn faster and hence 'out', rather than shutting off all oxygen and letting it die.... Coolant columns for the mainframe computer are very cold, but a human can survive in them for a few minutes with nothing worse than surface 'burns' and mild hypothermia. People freeze in space where there's no water - and ooh, pretty explosions despite the fact that they've *just* established that there's very little oxygen left on the ship....
It's not quite an interpersonal drama/thriller either - for that to work, there needs to be a bit of depth to the characters, we need to grow to know them, so we can either love or hate them. Then there needs to be conflict between them that you can understand the motivations behind it even if you may not agree with one of the characters. In Sunshine, most of the characters seem to be little more than their 'jobs' on the ship, and the conflicts (or rather, manly fistfights) that happen tend to be more of the marking-my-territory kind than anything that's emotionally driven. On the other side of the testostorone-coin, there's a bit of weeping, some hysteria, and some hard moral decisions... all which seem a little forced. There's 8 characters here, but we hardly get to know any of them except for Capa (Cillian Murphy). In 'Cube', there's 6 characters and we find out a lot about them, learn to love or hate all of them and the psychological conflict is much more intense.
It's not even a monster-movie - when we do get our 'monster' that picks off the crew one by one, he's not all that terrifying, there's virtually no mystery about him, and the final climactic defeat is pretty (visually) confusing so you don't really know what's going on. The cinematography during the final climax is so jarring and all over the place, it's amazing we didn't all have seizures.
It's not quite an action movie - a few fistfights, a few spaceship explosions (despite the lack of oxygen) and not very much in the way of fast action.
So... it's a hodgepodge of genres (not necessarily a bad thing) but it doesn't do *any* of them well.
Plus, for a film about the sun, expect to have to spend half the film shading your eyes as they show an almost-white view of the sun, wonderfully incredibly bright and bloody annoying.
For a film that appears to have garnered praise from many critics, I found it very lame... very average. Which is a pity, as it only discourages film studios from making more intelligent scifi.
6/10
Sunshine
Two weeks ago, I'd never heard of this movie. And this comes from someone who reads Dark Horizons on a daily basis. Then last week, there was a fair bit of promo on radio & newspaper for this Danny Boyle-directed Sci-Fi movie, purely because Australian Rose Byrne is in it, with her wonderful American accent.
(This film is made in the UK with a Scottish(?) director and an international cast... Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, American, Australian, and presumably a Brit or two and yet they all have American accents....)
There were some good reviews - a Scifi thriller - a crew of 8 people on Icarus 2 are heading towards the Sun to drop a giant bomb in it to re-fire its engines, as it were, so that the Earth won't freeze. Icarus 1 went missing 9 years previously, noone knows what happened to it or why it failed the mission.
Well... this film doesn't really work in any of the genres it could possibly fit. For a Science Fiction film, the science is incredibly hokey even though they start off trying to make it believable. Ok, they have 'gravity' as there's a spinning section of the spacecraft, cool. A giant mirror/shield at the front protects them from the sun's radiation. The generate their own oxygen and some food by a nice little garden in the middle of the ship. But then when the garden catches on fire, they release *more* oxygen to make it burn faster and hence 'out', rather than shutting off all oxygen and letting it die.... Coolant columns for the mainframe computer are very cold, but a human can survive in them for a few minutes with nothing worse than surface 'burns' and mild hypothermia. People freeze in space where there's no water - and ooh, pretty explosions despite the fact that they've *just* established that there's very little oxygen left on the ship....
It's not quite an interpersonal drama/thriller either - for that to work, there needs to be a bit of depth to the characters, we need to grow to know them, so we can either love or hate them. Then there needs to be conflict between them that you can understand the motivations behind it even if you may not agree with one of the characters. In Sunshine, most of the characters seem to be little more than their 'jobs' on the ship, and the conflicts (or rather, manly fistfights) that happen tend to be more of the marking-my-territory kind than anything that's emotionally driven. On the other side of the testostorone-coin, there's a bit of weeping, some hysteria, and some hard moral decisions... all which seem a little forced. There's 8 characters here, but we hardly get to know any of them except for Capa (Cillian Murphy). In 'Cube', there's 6 characters and we find out a lot about them, learn to love or hate all of them and the psychological conflict is much more intense.
It's not even a monster-movie - when we do get our 'monster' that picks off the crew one by one, he's not all that terrifying, there's virtually no mystery about him, and the final climactic defeat is pretty (visually) confusing so you don't really know what's going on. The cinematography during the final climax is so jarring and all over the place, it's amazing we didn't all have seizures.
It's not quite an action movie - a few fistfights, a few spaceship explosions (despite the lack of oxygen) and not very much in the way of fast action.
So... it's a hodgepodge of genres (not necessarily a bad thing) but it doesn't do *any* of them well.
Plus, for a film about the sun, expect to have to spend half the film shading your eyes as they show an almost-white view of the sun, wonderfully incredibly bright and bloody annoying.
For a film that appears to have garnered praise from many critics, I found it very lame... very average. Which is a pity, as it only discourages film studios from making more intelligent scifi.
6/10