Friday 27 February 2009

Sunshine

HEY MR. BLUE SKY!

Danny Boyle is all over the news right now. He recently made a fairly low-budget film about the Indian version of 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' set around shanty towns and gangsters. It was called 'Slumdog Millionaire', and just a few days ago, did very well.

Boyle is also well-known for directing 'Trainspotting', but a film that seems to have been roundly forgotten about, despite receiving very good ratings, was 'Sunshine'.



Set 50 years in the future, the Sun is dying, and a group of astronauts and scientists are taking a specially designed bomb to reignite it, after the first team failed in mysterious circumstances, 7 years previously. All is going well until a slight miscalculation puts the whole mission in jeopardy, and some very important decisions have to be made...

The film is good in that it shows a realistic view of a crew in trouble. There are a few heroics, but a lot of crew members just lose it, go insane, become suicidal, and want to protect their own hides instead of focusing on the greater good.

Unfortunatly, in my eyes at least, the good is far outweighed by the bad, strange, and the downright confusing. Shots are over-edited, and cut together like a music video from the late 80s, switching to a diagonal shot, an epiliptic fit-inducing jumble of frames referring to flashbacks, flashforwards, and apparantly images that didn't appear in the film at all.

I am not a genius, but I like to think I am fairly intelligent, and have a good attention to detail, but I could not follow this film. I wish I could tell you more about the later part of the film, but I can't! I watched it twice and still know nothing of what happened past an hour in!


VERDICT - MY BRAIN HURTS

3 comments:

  1. I loved Sunshine, but it's not an easy film to watch. But when was the last time someone made a proper hard sci-fi film?

    While it's been so long that I've forgotten the main plot, I do remember that it's all about the sun and its stellar role as both life-creator (once it's re-ignited) and destroyer.

    That's where the slasher guy comes in - he's become obsessed with the sun as destroyer and has decided that we're not worth saving...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, but it all just seems a bit messy. I knew the story, but its presented as if the editor has ADHD

    ReplyDelete
  3. Really? I totally didn't notice that at the time - in fact, I'd have said the opposite, that it was slow to develop, which tends to be a classic element of these kinds of films.

    ReplyDelete