Spaced out

despite having a few such titles among my favorite movies, science-fiction is not a genre I am particularly enamored with, to say the least. Too often I find these movies focus too much on the technological and futuristic aspects, jettisoning character development in the process. No such problem with Sunshine. The basic plot premise (50 or so years in the future, a team of astronauts are sent to the dying sun to try and reactivate it) and the strong team behind the movie (director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland) had this pegged as one of the can't miss releases of the year for me, and I wasn't disappointed. In fact I saw it twice this weekend, something I had never done before and usually associated with Star Wars or Lord of the Rings fanboys. But this movie really spoke to me, on a core emotional level. It was far from perfect, but the fact that it had some flaws (mostly in the last 20 minutes) made me relate to it even more, if that makes sense. At the heart of the story is an interesting exploration of how man deals with his humanity, and even though some of the plot points near the end were a bit questionable, they never took me out of the movie.

From a cinematic POV it had many different qualities, from an assured direction and cinematography, to terrific acting by all involved (Cillian Murphy was great as always, but the real revelation to me was that Chris Evans is actually a pretty decent actor. Oh, and Rose Byrne did make me a bit weak at the knees) and a great ambient-y score by John Murphy and Underworld. But what really made the movie successful, in my mind, was that all of the action took place on the spaceship, with these 8 characters. Very little time was spent explaining exactly what the problem with the sun was, or pontificating about the fate of humanity, with the complete focus being on the mission. For someone who's always been interested in these types of questions, albeit from afar, the blend of action and contemplation provided by this film was exactly the type of setting I needed to turn off my sci-fi oblivion.