Wednesday 11 April 2007

"Sunshine"

  • Some days before I saw the movie, I had no plan to see the movie Sunshine unless I could find out something about the movie that interested me, of course this was a scifi movie of a fairly large budget and there was not much to read about or see in the magazines of any interest. Actually I had heard a rumour that there's something a bit supernatural in it, but on the other hand, I had never failed to ignore a Danny Boyle movie yet. Actually I had seen the director wandering around a bookshop a year or two back and this did still did not inspire me to see his movies. I don't know what would have happened if he did make Alien Resurrection, but he didn't, so at that point there were no point for me to dwell on What Ifs.

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  • well, I was coaxed into watching Sunshine. One reason is that I had no specific desire to single out ignore Danny Boyle's movies specifically although I have a tendency to do so as I notice that none of them in the past had drawn my interest, and well Sunshine had drawn my interest and I would have been a hypocrite if I had failed to see it because it looked visually interesting, and I have seen some scifi movies for even a less of a reason in recent times.
  • As it goes, it was was a very visually beautiful film, and I left the cinema very sad that there wasn't much of a story, and no interest for me to explain anything that did seem unexplainable, and maybe there is indeed a problem today with trying to write a new sci-fi movie story of this kind. I switched off my interest as soon as they stepped aboard the other vessel in the movie and never turned it back on again.
  • Also I was very critical about the ship and expected it to be better designed if they were going to be going into the sun because one slightly wrong move in the direction it was pointed was likely to cause a lot of problems for the ship. Well, I suppose I don't have to bother watch it again, and I don't have any desire to collect any of the interviews dealing with the movie. This might have been a movie perfect for other people

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  • I did see this movie on Tuesday 10th April. Actually I had the intention of avoiding it as I do for some reason avoid anything that Danny Boyle has directed since the subject matter usually doesn't interest me, but the subject matter of this movie seeming to be a big looking scifi movie grabbed my attention and I went to see it with my beloved Jemima, we had decided that it was going to be a complete and utter failure of a movie and our intention was to somehow appreciate the complete failure that we would believe it to be. I admit that it was a beautiful film, but once they stepped on board the other space craft, I lost complete and utter interest in the events that followed and afterwards we were both almost in tears over what seemed like a fact that there was nothing left to make an interesting new scifi movie about these days, plotwise.
  • These film makers keep trying and use scripts that seem only half formed and we get things such as failures such as Event Horizon setting the modern standards. Looking for something new, it also didn't help me that I watched "Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea" a week or so ago which dates back from the mid nineteen sixties and featured a submarine crew with the intention of sending a nuclear missile into the Van Allen radiation belt witch caught fire. The plot also involved a man with severe burns who was brought into safety from an iceberg because he had spent so long under the burning sky had gone a step further with his beliefs and turned into a religious zealot who felt that it was wrong for the Seaview crew to disrupt the work of God who obviously wanted to end the world , obviously he wanted to stop the missile from being fired off to save the Earth. Also a mistake costing the lives of two crew members because of an attempt to fix outside the results of some trouble the submarine ran into because of the effects caused by someone's attempt to sabotage the mission led to the saboteur a crewmember having a nervous breakdown and taking his own life. Just too many similarities fused with parts of other movies and maybe I couldn't have done any better. Well, maybe there is a re-occurring religious zealot saboteur who has suffered from horrendous burns to take note of as a figure that will turn up time after time in Western culture as a kind of a bogeyman due to the collective consciousness, or indeed Western society is lucky it, wont have to put up with him in another film again. Another thing about the movie, it didn't help me that the director overdid it for me with his Alien tributes.
  • Well, I like a good scifi movie with a director who has a lot to talk about with his speculations in relation to the substance of the movie and couldn't find anything in the interviews of interest other than talk about the use of colour in the movie so maybe what was the real movie for me were the shots of outsides of the space crafts and the rest was just superfluous substance.
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  • for some reason had the urge to watch a 1960s movie called Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea the week before, it was a fine movie for it's time, but when I watched "Sunshine" the following week, I was distressed about how three major plot elements seemed very much lifted from Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and redressed. Myself and the maiden (the most otherworldly Jemima Tryon (also known as Solar Pixy) with whom I watched the movie were very upset by this, it just spelt out that people have great trouble writing really new material. As soon as they got aboard the place where the uninvited guest came from, I just turned off and wondered what I was doing in the cinema watching this film. I could have used my time better painting the toenails of the maiden who watched the movie with me than watching this film at that point.
  • But all the exterior shots were very beautiful. I went ahead seeing the movie fully informed that I wouldn't find it that interesting, and as it goes, whenever I see a Danny Boyle photo or see him wandering around a bookshop in London, or even read an interview with him, I'm hit by waves of disinterest (which might be just what Danny Boyle wants from the public, so I could well be playing into his little game there, he had me fooled all along). I think that the title of his movie A Life Less Ordinary did make more sense when I would call it A Lifeless Ordinary. But Sunshine was the first movie of his that I saw, and maybe it might well be the last.
  • But I acknowledge that it might well be hard to make a movie these days, and that Danny Boyle did have an interesting idea for the unwanted visitor that he couldn't get the money to shoot, in terms of glowing interior organs. I suppose also Alien's plot elements were borrowed from past movies and the act of borrowing and redressing elements from Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea is the natural thing to do for Sunshine's script writer, it might even be a brave move. When Sunshine comes out on DVD, there is a possibility that I might buy it for reasons similar to why i bought Event Horizon.
  • It's probably a terrible time for new sci-fi ideas.

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