Sunshine

I went to see Sunshine last night. I was intrigued by everything I'd read about it as I've always been a bit of a fan of science-fiction cinema and wanted to see how a 21st-century take on the genre would look, sf films really need to be seen on the big screen.
Well, it was impressive. It falls apart a bit towards the end, but redeems itself in the final scene. For me, it was a distillation of the most notable sf films of the last 40-50 years - I counted allusions to 2001, Silent Running, Planet of the Apes, AI, Dark Star, Alien and Solaris, not to mention Pink Floyd's 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun', and experts can probably point out others. But there's no shame in that - they're all worth referencing. And there plenty of new, 21st-century elements, such as anxiety about climate change, which gave the film a fresh, invigorating quality and prevented it from being simply a collection of recycled cliches.
Visually it was tremedous, even more so for the effects being created in an East End warehouse on an astonishingly low budget. It really put several expensive and bloated effects-laden films to shame. The actors, most of whom I hadn't heard of, found it difficult to rise above anonymity, apart from Michelle Yeoh who always commands attention, but the star was, as is always the case in his films, Cillian Murphy. What an interesting actor he is turning out to be! His extraordinary pale blue eyes and chiselled features are simply magnetic, and you can't, and don't, look at anyone else when he's on the screen. He's not conventionally good-looking at all though, in fact he can look very weird, and this means he's had some interesting parts. He was excellent as the the IRA soldier in The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and in Batman Begins he showed that he could also play villains convincingly. He's an actor who has been the star of every film he's in, even when he's not actually playing the leading role, and I'll follow his career with interest. So far, he's played interesting parts in a broad range of films so it'll be fascinating to see if he can keep it up and resist the temptation to do worthless blockbusters.
I wasn't really sure about the last half hour or so of Sunshine - it was somewhat incoherent and I lost the plot a bit (literally!). I could see what the film-makers were trying to do and say, but it wasn't held together strongly enough narratively to really make it work. I read somewhere that Boyle's films have a tendency to go a bit psycho at the end, and this was no exception, but the film redeemed itself, I thought, with a lovely final scene. We're back on a cold, dark, dying earth - Icarus II (the spaceship has succeeded in delivering its payload (a nuclear bomb which has to detonate in the heart of the sun) and the sun dimly appears, and the camera pans back to show an icebound Sydney Opera House, a nice touch. OK, we'e seen scenes like this before in other films, but it never fails, and has additional resonance in an era when the concept of climate change has a tangible reality.