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Sunshine directed by Danny Boyle, starring Cliff Curtis, Rose Byrne, Troy Garity, Chris Evans, Cillian Murphy. Rating M – Violence & Offensive Language

Director Danny Boyle, whose previous turns have resulted in the films Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, mines a rich vein of sci-fi tradition, drawing on elements from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Alien and Dark Star.

Wrtten by Alex Garland (28 Days Later), Sunshine is about the crew of the Icarus II, a spaceship on its way to the Sun with an important cargo. The Sun is dying and their mission is to kickstart it by detonating a bomb inside it. Back on Earth they actually need some global warming, which makes a nice change.

Thing is, there was an earlier mission, involving the first spaceship called Icarus, which got most of the way there before mysteriously halting and losing contact.

So the crew of Icarus II are getting closer to both the Sun and the first Icarus when things start going haywire. First they deal with an external maintenance job that requires suiting up and venturing outside the relative safety of the ship, and later, they discover what went wrong with the earlier mission by boarding Icarus the first. What follows isn’t so hard to pick.

This is a film that tries to blur the boundaries of science and religion. Icarus, as the Greek legend goes, flew too close to the Sun and his wings, made from wax and feathers, melted. Apart from the fact that perhaps he should have used a more heat-resistant material for such a flight, the old myth says much about Man’s arrogance in venturing too far beyond known science or wielding more power than we can handle.

But Sunshine isn’t so successful in asking the metaphysical questions. It certainly attempts to pose questions in a similar fashion to 2001, and much like Kubrick’s film, doesn’t really offer any answers. Instead, what we get for most of the running time is a good, grounded, well-thought out sci-fi film that relies on the notion of space travel as we understand it today. Unfortunately in the last third it turns into a monster movie, as an astronaut is found to have been in counsel with his god for far too long and just plain lost the plot.

It may stand as a thinking person’s sci-fi film — the crew members of Icarus II are definitely sucked into a personal journey of no return involving madness and mayhem — but it’s mostly just in the visual spectacle camp, a glorious CGI tribute to that molten orb in the sky that gives us life. Just don’t stare at it too long.