A rare misstep for the genre-hopping filmmaking team of director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald, Sunshine is their frustrating foray into deep-think science fiction. It’s the first genre to trip them up. Cillian Murphy plays one member of a crew en route to the dying sun, which they plan to “jump start” with a massive bomb. Things go catastrophically wrong, of course, leading to all sorts of techno-adventure, as well as the idea that lethal exposure to sunlight is the only path toward enlightenment. Boyle may manage some astonishing visuals – he and cinematographer Alwin H. Kuchler have a field day playing with light – but the overall narrative and the staging of it seem to overwhelm him. Distressing flickers of incoherence here and there serve as foreshadowing for the chaotic climax, which doesn’t resemble Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as much as it does The Shining.
