What I enjoy about Boyle’s work is that one never quite knows what character will prevail and what character may just be a decoy. I suppose Slumdog Millionaire made the hero quite explicit, but Boyle’s best traits are sometimes appreciated when one doesn’t quite know whom to trust, and when all hell will descend upon a film. If in doubt, watch Trainspotting for a morally ambiguous but brilliant character study by Boyle. One can sense that someone has hit rock bottom, junkies die every day, and the quest for nothing inevitably brings nothing, so the audience watching Trainspotting has no idea how the various characters will find a way out of their death-worship lifestyle. Which is exactly what brings down Sunshine just a tad as the film shifts into its final stages. One can clearly see who will prevail, and who will be vanquished, and how they will die and how they will live in their final moments. Unike in 28 Days Later or Slumdog Millionaire, the audience hasn’t really been given enough emotional content to invest in these characters. If you don’t care, you don’t care, and that ain’t always a perfect little Zen koan, but it definitely rules the day in literature or the cinema.
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However, that can appear to be a minor quibble in a film which has some rather modest goals, executes its visual styles in a defiantly unique way, and generates a new-found respect for the awesome power of an enormous star—dying, or otherwise. I am waiting for Danny Boyle to make his true Apocalypse Now, THE film that combines all of his hyper realistic sci-fi/horror/post-superman/triumph of the common man in an insane society tendencies without completely losing touch with what makes his work so interesting, so captivating in an era where to hope is to dream of big ideas that work. Boyle shoots scenes that shock and repel, excite and entice, and he directs films that get one to care about the story, even if one is a bit ambiguous about the various characters. In Sunshine, he explores isolation, survival, and the legacy of a star’s haunting impact, and more often than not, he succeeds without compromising his vision.
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4 Responses
Sick Movie…..Agreed
I didn’t even notice when you orignally wrote this that Alex Garland wrote this movie as well. I’ll definitely check this out. After I first read the Beach, I told myself I was gonna read every book he ever wrote, but the Tesseract was mediocre and the Coma sucked.
I have to agree with your thoughts on Slumdog. One of the problems I had with it was at a certain point you realize the two main characters are never going to be in deadly danger…