Half-baked

Sunshine goes into eclipse almost from the start. It is the year 2057, and the sun is dying. A...well, wait, I think even the most impassioned environmentalists would put its a millennium or two from now, but, OK, I'll roll with it.

As I was saying: A team of scientists aboard the Icarus II is dispatched to jump-start the flickering orb by H-bombing it. The craft, which is essentially an interstellar weapon of mass destruction, is tended by eight testy crewmembers, and is a replacement for a first vessel that mysteriously vanished seven years earlier. The...

Oh, now, come on. Too much. In 2050, manned spacecraft will be heading to the sun on missions of mercy? I'm still waiting for Los Angeles to begin crumbling as spectacularly as it does in 2019-set Blade Runner. As it is, NASA is having trouble getting much right except sex scandals, and I'm not sure privately funded efforts will be up to that sort of speed less than 45 years from now. Set Sunshine, which Fox Searchlight opens tomorrow, 200, 300, or 500 years from now and I might more easily swallow the basic premise. As it is, the plot does not compute.

The director, Danny Boyle, and screenwriter, Alex Garland, collaborated more successfully on the horror hit 28 Days Later. The new film, for all its tinsel beauty and pretty golden spacesuits, is a series of escalating wrong choices. Rightly, they dispense with the visual homages pretty quickly. Ethereal mysteries of space? 2001, check. Bomb on a ship? Dark Star, accounted for. Grumbling crew? Alien, present. Blade Runner and the space greenhouse-set Silent Running are also culled as Sunshine tries to radiate outwards. The movie has actors, like Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, and Rose Byrne (still in Boyle's genre spin cycle after the underrated sequel 28 Weeks Later), who can handle more than the one emotion per character Garland has given them to play, but they are suitably workmanlike. The production is undeniably handsome, as attractive as films costing two or three times its relatively modest budget. And John Murphy and Underworld have composed a dreamlike score, part techno and part cosmophonic, that is prepared to accompany a more soaring achievement.

But Sunshine crashes. Not, like Icarus, because of its hubris, its taking of risks, but because it plays it way too safe. There is a lot of talk about the mystical and transformative power of the sun, and some compelling sci-fi imagery to go along with it. But once the Icarus I is found, and recovered, in a predictable turn and a suspenseful scene, the movie concentrates exclusively on the sun's scarring, destructive side. What started as a film of ideas--shaky ones, not very good ones, but ideas nonetheless--becomes just another trip to the slaughterhouse, as the crew is dispatched in grandiloquent ways that Boyle has said he and Garland had fun devising. Good for them. Anyone looking for more than that, though, will be severely disappointed, particularly with the goofy third act, in which a slasher/monster element is introduced that drags the entire film down to an undemanding C-movie like Event Horizon.

And them there is the coda, set on a frozen Earth. It looks very beautiful, like a literal Christmas in July--but shouldn't it look awful, not so peaceful and pristine? And wouldn't the reignited sun cause widespread flooding and catastrophe on a planet that is functioning without it? [I'm not saying if the movie does or does not end that way, but think about it.] Sunshine gets all hot and bothered about the end of the world, then shows us a world that has learned to cope. If we don't need the sun, why have the filmmakers concocted a movie like Sunshine? Better to skip it and, if in New York, take in the restored version of the daft, risk-taking, visionary and truly classic Metropolis at Film Forum instead.