Sunshine: B

Danny Boyle's Sunshine isn't nearly as terrifying as his 2002 smash 28 Days Later, but it burrows just as deeply inside your head. The film is driven by a mission to re-ignite the sun, which has become a dying star in a 50-year-away future; the mission is driven by a team of eight astronauts and scientists - a menagerie of genders and mindsets that become all the more dynamic, all the more unsettlingly fluid, the longer the group is in space. And they've been in space for 16 months. They weren't the first however; that would be the Icarus I (they are, appropriately, Icarus II): an eerily similar mission set out on seven years ago. It is precisely this mission, and the crosspiece of people and cultures that inhabit the ship, that become the narrative focus of Sunshine, but its thematic focus is what...well...shines.

Displayed through a lens composed alternately of character-driven and visually-driven scenes, the intricate interplay of light and shadow, morality and mortality, and God verus Mankind, stands as Danny Boyle's most memorable achievement with his latest film. The other assorted attributes of the film (most of the following, actually, created by scribe Alex Garland) - including the individual team members, the story as a cohesive vision, etc. - are less involved and less involving. It is such that, together these wildly varying (in quality, as well as tone) elements come together only just so. And it is such that the wildly varying fans of the differing genres to be mined here (science fiction, suspense, thriller, drama) come together also just so; united in a fragile bond of awe for this optically stunning, psycologically transfixing, irritatingly aloof movie.

Now that I've hinted at length of the nooks and crannies, let us get down to business. Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his crew, who man a long space-station like ship with a bulbous Sun-simulating shield at one end, are beginning to crack up. Not only do they obviously face the duress of saving all of mankind, but the temptation to more and more succumb to the manufactured tempermants of their self-created world (not to mention the omnipresent aura of a fascinatingly addictive sun) can only be held off for so long. Plus, so it becomes apparent before the first 30-minutes are up, they may need to stop off and rescue the long-lost Icarus I if ever they even want to make it to the sun to deliver their bomb (nicknamed the "payload", an island-sized bomb created and manned by Robert Capa, embodied with weary and willowy grace by Cillian Murphy). Every minute it seems their mission expands to encompass more and more the phrase "above and beyond the call of duty."

The products of such a volatile situational cocktail as the one described above are the eminent subjects of director Boyle's camera and Garland's script (which also features Chris Evans, in a nicely dramatic turnabout, as the ship's engineer). They capture the fistfights that break out; the dubiously moral calls that have to be made; and the noble (and not so noble) fights for survival and command that ensue when the Icarus' mission is turned all twisty by that crazy Icarus I pit-stop. Suffice to say, the grueling possibilities of a stir-crazy crew are played out with finely-calibrated skill and owe more to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris than to more recent sci-fi save-the-Earth muck like Armaggedon and The Core.

Yet if that was all their was to Sunshine - such well-crafted psycho-exmination - than why the so-so rating? My explanation goes to the heart of the matter (and so is inevitable to this film): the duly-followed scenarios of depression and mania and Sun-worship that ensue on-board can only carry a viewer so far. I was left frequently dreaming that their had been a little more meat on the skeletal character structure of the film (disregarding the actors' fine work therein) so that each tense encounter cut a little deeper, felt a little less Sci-Fi and a little more I-Don't-Want-Them-to-Die. Still, Danny Boyle continually reaches into his deceptively large visual bag-o'-tricks to find some mesmerizing new way to capture a chase scene or a view of the sun at full blast; and each new time I was struck shocked - all thoughts of convoluted plots and mediocre pacing erased - at the gravity of the film, of their mission. So, in that the filmmaking team succeeds: they suck the audience into the atmosphere, dread, and fatalism of the astronauts' last-ditch effort, leaving you a little stir-crazy yourself in the process.