'Sunshine': A Sci-Fi Thriller With A Bright Future

Danny Boyle, creator of cool anxiety-fests like "Shallow Grave," "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later," doing a space movie ? The mind performs excited, gravity-free somersaults at the possibilities: Ewan McGregor -- once a zoned-out heroin addict in "Trainspotting" -- now floating through the starry heavens in a Chagal-like fever dream? The zombies of "28 Days Later" running amok through spaceship corridors?

Well, not exactly. "Sunshine" reprises the basic scenario of most of Boyle's films -- a subset of youthful characters caught in a rapidly descending spiral. And it unfolds with the same imaginative economy, crisp editing and cinematic chutzpah Boyle has brought to all his films.

But this time around, Boyle goes one better. Working from a script by Alex Garland ("The Beach," "28 Days Later"), he has created a darkly eloquent sci-fi poem. Boyle gives us a spiritual sense of wonder about the cosmos, and the consoling thought that, no matter how far we venture from home, we never lose our deep-seated humanity.

Where the hallowed classics of the genre -- Stanley Kubrick's 1968 "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Ridley Scott's 1979 "Alien," for example -- told their stories with more impressive spectacle, Boyle pulls off an equally powerful experience. He relies on craft, with visual sleight of hand rather than big-budget effects, moving us with an inspired fusion of space-age thriller and spiritual vision, putting "Sunshine" squarely in the arty company of films like Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 "Solaris."

The movie, which stars Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans (the "Fantastic Four" stud), Michelle Yeoh and a rainbow coalition of others, is set 50 years in the future. The sun is dying. We are aboard Icarus II, a space vessel with a wildly romantic mission: to fire its nuclear payload, which, we're informed in Murphy's softly purposeful voice-over, has a mass equivalent to Manhattan, directly into the fading orb to jump-start the light -- and life.

Yet when the eight crew members get a chance to discover what happened to the doomed crew of Icarus I, they take an increasingly terrifying detour.

"Sunshine" unfolds with a fractured quality, with fast-paced, sometimes staccato editing and deliberately restricted views. Like the crew, we can see things only on computer screens, or through visors. And our vision is further obscured by sealed doors, hallway corners and metallic walls. We feel the crew's helpless vulnerability as these sequences provide a hypnotically compelling striptease of exposition that also delivers, with nuance, Boyle's metaphor of man's smallness in the face of eternity.

Beyond the sci-fi conventions of the story, and even the awesome eye candy, humanity remains this movie's irreducible element. When the crew votes on whether to proceed or head for Icarus I, they are really choosing between soul and mind, heart and logic. And for all the cool gizmos and infrastructure around the characters (including an imaginatively rendered hothouse garden that supplies the ship's oxygen), the audience realizes what truly matters in this world, and any other.

Sunshine (108 minutes, at Landmark's Bethesda Row and E Street Cinema) is rated R for violence and profanity.