Cillian Murphy, and gorgeous visuals

Jazz Age glamor boy and literary patron Harry Crosby spoke of aspiring to "a sun-Death into sun." You'll get that in Danny Boyle's hallucinatory sci-fi thriller Sunshine—along with experiencing some of the most gorgeous space visuals ever on the way to it. But if you compare it to Kubrick's Space Odyssey, you'll realize that it's not the quantity of such visuals but how they're used that makes a truly great film. Sunshine hasn't Kubick's extraordinary sense of pace (who does?) and many of the most striking images seem a bit wasted because they're tossed off too quickly or in too chaotic a progression. Nonetheless, this is another "ultimate trip" and for science fiction fans it may be destined for cult status.

Yes, as has been said by others, this movie takes strong hints from Tarkovsky's Solaris and Silent Running and from films about a threatened earth. It's not so much notable for originality of design as for sheer, mind-boggling beauty. At some point you just start to forget about the plot details, which are intentionally mysterious when ghostly elements enter toward the end, and just sit back and enjoy the hallucinatory eyeball-popping trip. And Kubrick aside, there are techniques of imaging and editing adeptly used here that were clearly unavailable when 2001 was made. Nerve-wracking suspense and sadness are elements, and so is silliness, but the gorgeousness of a terrific sound and light show is what dominates.

There are actors involved though. This is a space mission to save a dying sun by flying close to it with a nuclear bomb payload that will spark it up again so the earth will not succumb to permanent winter. And so there's a crew on board, with Asians and women (no blacks). At the heart of it all is Cillian Murphy, who burst on screen naked and newborn in Boyle's 28 Days Later. Though that was his 17th film and he has yet to have his great role, he has since become an international star. Murphy is the human key to Sunshine's ethereal and and magical qualities—why, it's hard to say, except that he's a luminous and uncannily relaxed performer with extravagant gifts. It can't be just the striking cheekbones and schoolgirl blush or the liquid blue eyes, but he is special, and he can become anybody, a maniacal terrorist (Red Eye), an evil fear-monger (Batman Begins), a clumsy hoodlum (Intermission), an Irish freedom-fighter (The Wind that Shakes the Barley), a bouncy transvestite (Breakfast on Pluto). The man has range.

And he can play, apparently, a physicist named Capa who's the one indispensable person on this mission to the sun. We can believe that even though he looks more like a schoolboy, because there's a steely passion about him.

The story is implausible. What shield could allow a manned space vehicle to fly close to the sun? Why would a crucial mission, the planet's last hope, take a detour when something turns up? How could men shift from pod to ship without space suits? But by the end of it Sunshine has reached a level of the fantastic on which anything can happen, and the visuals make it unimportant. It's only in the early scenes when the whole crew is still together than the dialog seems pedestrian and lame; there's clearly been some bad casting that underlines this fault. The casting director chose Murphy and then went on holiday. The visual staff never took a break.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.