The more Danny Boyle films I see, the more he moves up my "worst directors" list. I didn't think Trainspotting was anything spectacular, I hated 28 Days Later, and I hated Sunshine. Of course, three films out of eight (not including his television work) isn't enough to put him at the top of the worst directors list, but it's enough to make me dread seeing any more of his films.
Sunshine seems like a low budget independent film. Most of it looks bad--the cinematography, most of the special effects, the stuff that we're supposed to think is in space and not models. The performances tend to come across as slightly above amateur. The dialogue is often ridiculous, insular and jargony. Boyle directs his cast (or lets them, at least) to act pretentiously serious and melodramatic. All of the above are actually problems with all of the Boyle films I've seen to date.
But the biggest problem is that Boyle simply does not know how to tell a story here. Too much is unexplained. Too much is just skipped. Too much is like a bad acid trip (with an emphasis on bad).
As sci-fi, Sunshine doesn't have much to do with real-world science. Now, as fiction, I don't think that it has to have much to do with real-world science. But if it's going to have fictional world science, it needs to give us some grounding on what the "rules" of the fictional world are. Otherwise we're just in the dark, and events are more or less random. Of course, you could take Sunshine as more of an impressionistic work commenting on things like science vs. religion or commenting on man's obsession with everything from sun worship to authority, control, collecting/hording, ideologies, etc., but the problem is that it's not very satisfactory on those more abstract levels, either, and it's also too loaded down with techie jargon and plot developments to work on that level.
Sunshine seems like a low budget independent film. Most of it looks bad--the cinematography, most of the special effects, the stuff that we're supposed to think is in space and not models. The performances tend to come across as slightly above amateur. The dialogue is often ridiculous, insular and jargony. Boyle directs his cast (or lets them, at least) to act pretentiously serious and melodramatic. All of the above are actually problems with all of the Boyle films I've seen to date.
But the biggest problem is that Boyle simply does not know how to tell a story here. Too much is unexplained. Too much is just skipped. Too much is like a bad acid trip (with an emphasis on bad).
As sci-fi, Sunshine doesn't have much to do with real-world science. Now, as fiction, I don't think that it has to have much to do with real-world science. But if it's going to have fictional world science, it needs to give us some grounding on what the "rules" of the fictional world are. Otherwise we're just in the dark, and events are more or less random. Of course, you could take Sunshine as more of an impressionistic work commenting on things like science vs. religion or commenting on man's obsession with everything from sun worship to authority, control, collecting/hording, ideologies, etc., but the problem is that it's not very satisfactory on those more abstract levels, either, and it's also too loaded down with techie jargon and plot developments to work on that level.