"Sunshine" burns out at the end

Here's a free piece of advice for anyone thinking about volunteering for a space mission that is intended to go into the vicinity of the sun. If the spaceship on which you are traveling is named Icarus, don't go. Why tempt fate? This is especially true if a mission previous to yours on a spaceship also named Icarus failed.

The eight astronauts aboard Icarus II in Danny Boyle's "Sunshine" either didn't get that advice, are completely ignorant of Greek mythology or a combination of the two. At any rate, they are sent into space because the sun is burning out and, as a result, the earth is becoming one giant ice cube. It is believed that if the crew of Icarus can get close enough to the sun to fire a seismic device bigger than Manhattan, the device will explode in the sun and create a new star that will re-warm the Earth and save mankind.

Neat premise and for the first half of the film it carries this premise out with stunning visuals and some nail-biting dramatic sequences. I especially liked the claustrophobic feeling of the spacecraft which begins to get on the nerves of its crew, particularly engineer Mace (Chris Evans) and physicist Robert Capa (Cillian Murphy, pictured above). I also liked the greenhouse, which replenishes the ship's oxygen, tended by biologist Corazon (Michelle Yeoh) and the way the crew regarded the sun almost as a deity.

But the film begins to venture off course at precisely the same time as the spaceship does. As Icarus II ventures past Mercury, it picks up a signal from Icarus I. Figuring two atomic devices are better than one, the crew decides (not unanimously, mind you) to rendezvous with the doomed first vessel. Problems begin, however, when navigator Trey (Benedict Wong) fails to re-adjust the Icarus's sun shields and Capa and ship's captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) must undertake a spacewalk to manually fix the shields. You know going into this sequence that only one of these guys are going to get through this assignment alive and you also figure that since Murphy is the bigger star, his character will probably be the one to survive. Still, Boyle handles this scene like a suspense master.

He also creates palpable tension in a scene a few moments later when three crew members have to blast their way from one vessel to another. After that, however, "Sunshine" begins to burn itself out and most of the fault for this must go to screenwriter Alex Garland. I got the feeling Garland wrote himself into a spot he couldn't write himself out of, so he falls back on the old standby of the unexpected boogie man who's intent on killing off the rest of the crew.

It's too bad, because, up until it implodes, "Sunshine" lit up the screen.

Grade: C