FullMetal_Atheist Blog

"I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel. In these dreams,
I'm there, implicated in some kind of ongoing
circumstance. All indications are that I belong to this
dream continuity."
   So wrote the nameless protagonist of Haruki
Murakami's novel Dance, Dance, Dance of his supernatural
encounters in a room of the aforementioned hotel. Words
that could just as easily have come from John Cusack's
paranormal debunker in Mikael Håfström's adaptation of a
Stephen King short.
Cusack is Mike Enslin, skeptical ghosthunter and
remaindered novelist. Haunted by his own ghosts, and the
kind of spirits that come in a bottle, Enslin travels to
Manhattan to spend the night in the, supposedly, haunted
 eponymous room of the Dolphin Hotel - site of over
fifty assorted suicides, murders and deaths attributed
to 'natural causes'.
This, of course, is something of a throwback to those
old 'writer spends a night in a haunted house' movies
that many of us would watch on late night TV as kids - a
subgenre which, surely, reached it's peak with Robert
Wise's original, supreme The Haunting.
Sam Jackson is the hotel manager who tries to talk
Enslin out of it but this is really Cusack's film. Like
other recent horrors (Bug, Vacancy) most of the action
takes place in a single room.
Unfortunately, Cusack's performance alternates between
sonambulism and gurning hysteria. Jackson, in what's
really an extended cameo, phones in his performance from
the hotel reception and, in one bizarre scene, turns up
to enigmatically scold Cusack from the room's minibar.
By the time blood starts leaking from the walls and
plumbing you feel the movie has descended into haunted
house cliche, with only the incessant sound of Karen
Carpenter's 'We've Only Just Begun' providing any real
horror.
The, laughably simplistic, attempt at theological debate
doesn't help matters, either. As if the recent The
Reaping wasn't bad enough, here's another atheistic
skeptic getting their just desserts - this time, with
the added guilt trip of a terminally ill child whose
father denies her the glory of a heavenly life eternal.
It's all rather a shame really. With a decent cast and
it's old skool scenario 1408 could have been a
contender. Sadly, those looking for some creepy Stephen
King haunted hotel thrills had best dig out that old VHS
copy of The Shining.

Sunshine, the latest collaboration between director Danny Boyle and novelist Alex Garland, is a sci-fi flick that proudly wears its influences on its gold lamé spacesuit sleeve. It's production design and cast of international astronauts are straight out of Alien. It has a plot that can't help but remind the viewer of a more cerebral take on Armageddon  or The Core and there are passing references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and that films antithesis, Dark Star, along the way. Perhaps the movie it borrows most enthusiastically from, however, is Peter Hyams largely forgotten and underrated 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Sometime in the near future, and for reasons unspecified, our sun is dying. A crew of eight are sent, aboard spacecraft Icarus 1, to deliver a huge nuclear payload in an attempt to reignite the star. Then something goes wrong, Icarus 1 loses contact with Earth and, seven years later Icarus II, with another crew of eight is sent with a bomb "the mass of Manhatten Island" in a final attempt to save mankind.
Quite why anyone would name a mission that has to fly close to the sun 'Icarus' (let alone doing so twice) and expecting things to go smoothly remains a mystery throughout but Boyle and Garland, aided by an impressive ensemble cast (including Malaysian superstar Michelle Yeoh and Japanese Sanada Hiroyuki - perhaps best known in the west for his role in all fouru Ring films)
 do wonders with a tight budget and even tighter direction. Cillian Murphy, who starred in the same teams pseudo-zombie shocker 28 Days Later is Capa, the young physicist charged with overseeing the delivery of the payload, Chris Evans is the clearthinking second-in-command who realises every one of them is expendable for the greater good of pulling off the, purely theoretical, trick of rekindling the dying star.
 In an early, telling, scene there is debate as to whether the mission should take a detour in order to search for the missing Icarus 1. When a crew member suggests taking a vote Evens points out that 'This isn't a democracy' and elects Capa to decide. It's a great scene because, like several others in the film, it shows clearly how science works, how informed decisions are made within the scientific community and, later in the film, how logic and clear thought will always trump religious dogma (Interestingly, Murphy has spoken openly how working on Sunshine set him on the way to atheism).
Having said that, some of the science in the film itself is highly debatable, if not downright daft. No reason is given for the sun's burnout - you may be reassured to know we have at least 4 billion years before it goes all Red Gianty - and a bomb with the mass of Manhatten would be woefully inadequate to kickstart the star back into action, anyway.
However, the film's real trump card is the Sun herself. Sunshine finds a truly spiritual beauty in the power and ferocity of the star that is, at times, highly moving. The crew's comms officer (Troy Garity) is so taken with the celestial body that he has sunburn from spending so much time on the observation deck. Boyle and Garland draw a clear line directly from what are the Earths first belief systems - those of sun worship - to the nontheistic scientists aboard Icarus II.
Unfortunatley, these comparisons are part of the - quite severe - problem with Sunshine. For the first two thirds this is a riveting, exciting human drama, and an unusually adult science fiction film. Then, in the last act it all goes horribly wrong. I wouldn't want to spoil the film for anyone tempted to see it (and you absolutely should see this film) but the film makers throw an element into the story that not only makes no sense whatsoever but goes a good way to undermining everything that has gone before. I can only imagine it was done in an attempt to attract the young teen crowd who might go to see this expecting it to be Alien  or, god help us, Event Horizon. The only other explanation is that Alex Garland simply doesn't know how to write final acts for Sci Fi pictures (Exhibit A: 28 Days Later). Whichever it is, I felt quite angry that the last third of such a fine film plunged into slasher movie tackiness - a real shame because smart, thought provoking and ultimately inspiring science fiction films have never been in shorter supply.