Reviews

If I was American, I'm sure I would have enjoyed this film - it's beautifully made, has incredible effects, great acting, amusing characters and an intriguing story.

But... it's just a bit too sickly sweet and schmaltzy - and presents a far too rose-tinted, American-nostalgia-focused account of twentieth century history for a foreigner like me to appreciate. This isn't a criticism - it's an American film after all - more an observation from an outsider's perspective.

I suppose a British equivalent might be the film "Zulu" - great fun to watch if you're a Brit, but kind of insulting if you're a Zulu - and complete pap as far as history goes.

It also didn't need to be three hours long. I'm guessing that pretty much half the run time of the film could have been left on the cutting room floor without any effect on the continuity of the story-line - and we would have been spared the inanities of scenes like the series of coincidences leading up to the road accident: pointless, flashy film making all to make a trite point summed up by the phrase "stuff happens".

Anyway, I can definitely imagine bigger wastes of three hours of my life and there's always the amusement of waiting to see if the baby Brad Pitt will end up disappearing forcibly into someone's womb at the end of the film....

Sunshine: the basic building block for all life on our planet; the energy source that allows plants to photosynthesise and produce oxygen so that we can breathe, that lights our days and warms us - an indisputable good? Not so for the crew of Icarus2, a spacecraft sent to revive a near-future dying sun through the delivery and detonation of a massive nuclear device. For the assembled pilots and scientists, the sun is something to be marvelled at from behind heavy filters on the ship's viewing platform, but also something terrible to be feared and avoided at all costs.

The first thing to say about Sunshine the film is that it is not "great". There are too many flaws in the plot, too much cliché and the rescue mission to Icarus 1 seems forced - when the possibility that this might happen was raised in the film, was anyone in any doubt that Icarus 2 would, indeed, change its course to meet up with Icarus 1 and that this would be the source of the crew's downfall? The justification for the diversion given in the plot does "kind of" work, but we all know that the writer wanted to send his characters to Icarus 1 and then thought up the reasons why they might need to do so afterwards.

But I think all this can be ignored for one simple reason: - this film is absolutely and incomparably and "tears streaming down the face" beautiful. The Sun is, itself, a central character and the obsession that the crew come to have with its beauty and terror is made utterly believable and understandable to the viewer. Moments like when the crew assemble in the viewing room to watch Mercury pass across the front of the sun are simply stunning and, if there was nothing else in the film of interest, would still make it worth going to see.

**Spoiler**

I was a little confused, initially, why the film-makers felt that they had to introduce the "religious monster" captain of Icarus 1 into the plot - a few reviewers have suggested that this was to make a fairly clanging point about religion vs. science. But the more I thought about it, the less significant the religious element seems to be. What I was left with was a sense that this character represents what happens when human arrogance is combined with powerful, but imperfect, scientific knowledge and abilities. The crew of Icarus 2 believe they have the power to revive a dying sun - to change the destiny of the universe - the captain of Icarus 1 is introduced to show us just how pathetic and insignificant we actually are when put before the awesome power and terrible beauty of a star.

So in conclusion, definitely go to see this if you enjoy watching films that paint beautiful images and make you think, but don't go expecting water-tight scientific explanations for plot points or anything new in terms of "space sci-fi".

If, by going to see this film, you're expecting a slick, action-packed, Hollywood-style thriller, you will be disappointed. There's no flashy CGI, Bruce Willis does not appear in a vest and the hero and the villain do not mysteriously lose their projectile weapons at the end of the movie, in order to be forced to take each other on in hand-to-hand combat.

However, if you would like to witness an idea of what a world might be like twenty years from now, if we don't successfully address current issues such as population migration, industrial farming practises, our falling birth-rate, global warming, our poisoning of the seas etc, then this film is worth a watch.

Yes it's dark, gritty and depressing and no, there isn't any explanation given as to why the world in the film has ended up the way it is (some people have criticised the film because of this) - but read the news and use your intelligence and it's not hard to imagine how it might happen.

*Possible Spoiler* The sequence in the refugee town is one of the most beautiful pieces of cinematography I've ever seen - imagine the grimy, battle-torn city at the end of Full Metal Jacket, combine it with a fire-fight sequence on a par with the start of Saving Private Ryan and check out the looks of utter stunned disbelief on the faces of the soldiers as they hear the sound of a baby crying for (probably) the first time in their lives. The film is worth the price of admission for this scene alone.