Set the controls for the heart of the sun, cosmonauts – and I mean literally. Here's the trailer for Scottish filmmaker Danny Boyle's new science fiction epic, Sunshine, coming to your local movie palace in March. Boyle is the genius behind one of the best horror/SF movies ever made, 28 Days Later, which managed to be smart, politically astute, and scary as shit. He also directed Trainspotting, which I didn't like nearly as much. I'm thinking that Boyle may be the film equivalent of Iain M. Banks for me, which is to say I love his science fiction but don't really groove on his more realistic artsy stuff (though admittedly Boyle is always kind of surreal, and so is Banks).
The point is, Sunshine is science fiction of the very best sort: the sun is dying for no good scientific reason, but nevertheless provides a gripping plot device that allows Boyle to stick a bunch of high-strung space geeks in a can and shoot them at the visual glory that is a freaked-out sun. Just from the preview, I can already tell this the movie is going to grab you by the shorthairs and smash your head into a moving truck. Which is good. The only weird part is that the soundtrack, at least in the trailer, is lifted directly from Clint Mansell's score for Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream.
Also, note to Danny Boyle: Why not team up with your Scottish SF-writing homeboy Ken MacLeod and make me the happiest dork in the universe?
