This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Action, Drama, NEW ON VIDEO, S, Science Fiction, Thriller/Mystery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: Cliff Curtis, Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Mark Strong
Danny Boyle, the director of 28 Days Later, and producer of 28 Weeks Later returns to the director’s chair for this small scale, story-driven science fiction thriller. The effects are modest, but well done and the performances are quite good. The story starts out as quite engaging, though a little far-fetched, but comes apart at the end to reduce what had been a pretty solid sci-fi effort to a mediocre attempt.
The setting is a space ship, the Icarus II, in the not-so-distant future. A crew of 8 is on their way to the sun, which is dying. Humans have come with a plan to plant a giant bomb on the surface on the sun. The theory is that this giant explosion will re-ignite the dying star and, thus save all of humankind. How come Hollywood’s scientific plans always include a bomb? Anyway, that doesn’t matter. This crew is piloting their ship, the second to attempt at this risky plan to get as close to the sun’s surface as possible, before sending the bomb. This sounds like Armageddon, but it is nothing like it. The small crew, as you might expect, soon find themselves faced with difficult decisions and, since they are out of radio contact with Earth, they have to come up with their own answers.
The Sci-fi crowd will welcome this movie with open arms since it beats re-runs of Deep Space Nine and how many times can you watch Revenge of The Sith? This isn’t a bad movie and will be enjoyed by the genre fans and others will likely find it decent, well-acted entertainment. The ending gets really far-fetched (well, impossible, I think, actually) and hard to follow, but I enjoyed the movie anyway, though I probably won’t be adding it to my home video collection.
