Sunshine Reviews
Top Critic
Nothing anyone does makes much sense, but gad, is it ever gorgeous.
The picture would be nothing, an incomplete Venn diagram, without Murphy.
On sci-fi's crowded table Boyle serves a fresh feast for our eyes, minds and hearts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Sunshine, if a fireball, is one that warns us yet again of the danger of flying too close to the sun.
For Mr. Boyle, a Swiss Army knife of a filmmaker, there's always something new.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
There's a near-tactile pleasure to the special effects in Sunshine that is uncommon in this era of CGI imagery.
| Original Score: 3/4
Other movies may explore the depths of outer space. This movie explores the shallows.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
At a certain point, like a dying star about to pop into eternal nothingness, the movie can't be seen as anything -- it just implodes.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Sunshine comes with the promise of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as imagined by Danny Boyle. Even as Armageddon as imagined by Danny Boyle, it doesn't disappoint.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Sunshine quickly fades from near-brilliance to dim potboiler.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Not as good as you'd expect, but with Boyle expectations are almost unfairly high.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Beam yourselves aboard Sunshine, set 50 years in the future. The voyage works, beautifully.
A sometimes dazzling, but ultimately disappointing futuristic mind-game.
The film is nonsense, and what counts is whether viewers will feel able to lay aside their logical complaints and bask in what remains: a trip in search of a tan.
The pressure to save mankind is enormous, and our attention grows as the tension mounts. Light is used in haunting and powerful ways throughout. But as the film ultimately deviates from its course, the entire undertaking suffers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Sunshine -- despite a title so at odds with the film's tone -- is engrossing, believable and intelligent sci-fi filmmaking at its best.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The overall effect is the creation of something truly unbearable -- and the curious thing is that this unbearableness is apparent from the first portentous voice-over 30 seconds into the film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Every frame wows with exquisite arrangements of light and color; each of the characters' choices is packed with a sense of consequence and urgency that makes us feel as if we're frittering away our lives by comparison.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
So what starts out as fascinating sci-fi becomes just fi, and winds up pulp fi.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Who cares? The characters are so sketchily drawn that it's hard to keep them straight, let alone get worked up about their survival.
The experience of watching Sunshine is one of nearly relentless tension, a sticky-palmed dread that takes on literally cosmic proportions as the story progresses.
We don't know if we're watching a thriller or a sci-fi parable, a utopian dream or a deeply cynical nightmare. But in the end, it may not matter. The whole thing burns out well before the director reaches his final destination.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Boyle's spiritual and metaphysical musings intertwine neatly with his pop sensibility, imbuing this with an art-house intelligence without diluting its summer blockbuster appeal.
...science-fiction fans will like it, and also brainiacs, and those who sometimes look at the sky and think, man, there's a lot going on up there, and we can't even define precisely what a soliton is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
If their [Boyle and Garland] movie doesn't float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
As the ship moves closer to the Sun, and people and things begin to fall apart, Mr. Doyle and his screenwriter, Alex Garland, goose their science fiction with action- and horror-genre beats, increasingly turning up the chills and thrills.
| Original Score: 4/5
Brightness has never seemed as menacing as it does in Sunshine, the nail-bitingly tense science-fiction thriller.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Danny Boyle gets some tension going, and, as the crew members are eliminated one by one, a cosmic despair sets in.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Sunshine has a more ethereal look than the average science fiction movie but, considering the subject matter, it works.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
While the unfathomable burning brightness of the sun bathes the whole picture in flashes of cinematic dazzle, Boyle and his team ground the story in details chosen for their sophisticated, underplayed authenticity.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Funny thing is, Sunshine works despite feeling both over-familiar and over-ambitious.
The early intensity of Sunshine wanes in the third act. The film becomes a ferocious jumble, and rather than a supernova finish, it winks out amid stale New Age notions of the continuity of life and connectedness of all things.
The first hour and change is gangbusters, the last part unnerving enough to get by.
It's in the relationship between the crew and the sun that 'Sunshine' really shines.
An extraordinary film, operating simultaneously at visceral, psychological and spiritual levels as it takes us on a voyage into space with the fate of mankind at stake.
Like a collapsing star, Sunshine initially burns brightly but finally implodes into a dramatic black hole.
