Anticipating Sunshine.

Sunshine doesn't open in the US for another 10 days, but a few reviews and some anticipatory press coverage are already coming in. "Like the films it grandly and unabashedly pays homage to, Sunshine is serious science fiction for those who prefer to think of space's real possibilities rather than escapist fantasies," writes Gabriel Shanks.

For the New York Times, Dennis Lim meets Danny Boyle, who tells him that he and screenwriter Alex Garland "embraced the idea that Sunshine, precisely because of the vastness of its subject, would be a space odyssey in the most interior sense: a head trip. 'It's like films about mountains,' he said. 'They're not about mountaineering. They're about the mind. Movies about space raise those questions of what we're doing here, and that inevitably introduces a spiritual dimension.'"

Updated through 7/14.

"[D]espite all that talent on display, Sunshine is a philosophical blank slate," writes Jeremiah Kipp at Slant.

Earlier: "Sunshine.," the UK run.

Update, 7/14: "Sunshine is a technical marvel lacking the necessary conviction in its blistering vision of mortality - the film borderlines on masterpiece in its feverish sensory explosion, but is less than revelatory in its deliberate verbal exposition," writes Rob Humanick. "That Boyle's direction - like that of Alfonso Cuarón in Children of Men - is so good as to largely compensate for the unsatisfactory script is indeed a relief, but it also makes one long more for what simply could have been."

Posted by dwhudson at July 10, 2007 6:21 AM