Sunshine (15)

One of the perks of being a successful film-maker is that you can get to remake your favourite movie. The practice is usually bracketed under the term "homage", because it's not an actual remake, just a series of lifts from all the famous scenes and themes that you wish that you'd dreamed up first.

In his early career Brian De Palma did little else in his films but pay homage to Hitchcock. This year Steven Soderbergh's The Good German cannibalised a few classics, including bits of Chinatown, The Third Man and Notorious, but chiefly it was his way of imagining how he might have made Casablanca. There's nothing underhand about this, by the way - the fact that they're copying is something these directors want their audience to notice. What's disheartening is the inability to transcend their influences and make of them something new.

Which brings us to Danny Boyle's latest, Sunshine, a space thriller that doffs its cap to what is arguably the most imitated film of the last 25 years. Ridley Scott's Alien virtually pioneered the modern sci-fi horror, not just in its fusing of genres (the "lost platoon" crossed with a monster movie) but in its innovative use of lighting, sound and production design.

It is now almost impossible to watch a sci-fi flick, good or bad, that doesn't in some way recall the claustrophobic interiors of Alien's spaceship and the hideous predicament of its crew. Just as soon as we see the eerie corridors and clanging walkways of the spacecraft Icarus II in Sunshine we can be pretty sure that Boyle is giving us the nod: prepare yourself for strenuous running and screaming.

In fact, the script (by Boyle's regular collaborator Alex Garland) even makes a joke about it. As a search party from Icarus II prepares to enter an abandoned spacecraft, one of their number announces that they "might get picked off one at a time by aliens".

The film is set in the near future, when mankind faces extinction because the Sun is dying. An eight-strong crew has been dispatched with a nuclear "payload" to reignite it. Anyone who's had the pilot light go out on their boiler will appreciate the difficulties involved. The characters are drawn from an international mix of half-familiar faces, including Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans (from Fantastic Four, not the DJ) and Cillian Murphy, playing the team physicist Robert Capa (a salute to the photographer?). On the way they pick up signals from a craft that turns out to be Icarus I, lost in the stars eight years before, and collectively face a momentous choice as to whether they should divert their course or plough on to their target.

The rules of the genre kick in soon enough. There will, naturally, be a drastic malfunction on board, desperate decisions will be made, and certain crew members will have to put their necks on the line. The relatively democratic nature of the cast makes it harder to predict which of them will get theirs: I guessed right on the first one to die, but was clueless thereafter. An agonising struggle is entrained between the nobility of self-sacrifice and the natural instincts of self-preservation. When the talking computer calculates their chances of survival and reports that there are too many human beings for the amount of oxygen available, it appears someone will have to "play God" and correct the ratio.

Given that dispatching individuals from the group has become so debauched by reality television, Sunshine does a good job of restoring moral significance to this Darwinian motif.

What really impresses, however, is that the monster of this movie is also humankind's saviour - the Sun. Its awesome power of life and death is superbly expressed in Alwin Kuchler's photography, first as an implacable molten fireball, then as a gorgeous digitised kaleidoscope of golds, reds and yellows. The orbital imagery rhymes with the sudden close-ups of glistening eyeballs, vulnerable both to the sun's blistering intensity and to the unearthly cold of deep space.

Caught between this Scylla and Charybdis, where one false move can lead to being either fried or frozen, it's little wonder that the astronauts' grip on sanity seems so tenuous.

I wonder if the film-makers themselves were suffering a touch of sun when they put together the finale. Up to this point even science know-nothings like me could more or less follow what was going on (the science is mostly speculative in any case, it just has to sound plausible) and Boyle has nicely ratcheted the tension: the moment that Murphy, one of the four survivors, learns from the computer that there's an unidentified "fifth crew member" on board is deeply chilling.

What ensues, though, is something I couldn't even hope to explain. It's a little reminiscent of Paul Anderson's creepy 1997 sci-fi horror Event Horizon - another mystery of abandoned spaceships - when Sam Neill took it upon himself to scare the living shit out of us. Boyle and Garland also try to smuggle in some portentous Kubrick-style reflections on eternity and the divine, at a point when we would be more receptive to a really good chase sequence.

Pulp done with energy and wit can be a wonderful thing, as Boyle proves here, but when it gets highfalutin it only looks dim. For most of its span, though, Sunshine dazzles with its use of CGI and its enveloping atmosphere of disquiet. It's by far Boyle's best film since Trainspotting.