Sunshine (15)

Outer space may be the last place left for the religious impulse in cinema. Stanley Kubrick's 2001 was the first film to equate space travel and the spiritual sublime, with its enigmatic ages-of-man ending. It was followed by Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris which, though ostensibly set somewhere in the great beyond, was really an exploration of "inner space", of love, memory and a very Russian conception of the soul; Steven Soderbergh recently attempted an admirably quixotic remake. Other, more strictly generic science-fiction films have also explored an awareness that's not necessarily mystical as such, but certainly existential, depicting space travel as a condition of desolation and exile, and reminding us that it's awfully big and cold out there: notably, John Carpenter's Dark Star, and Douglas Trumbull's prescient eco-drama Silent Running.

Now there's a British attempt at transcendental sci-fi: Danny Boyle's Sunshine, scripted by novelist Alex Garland, his collaborator on 28 Days Later. The one-line premise: set the controls for the heart of the sun. Fifty years hence, the sun is dying, and a spaceship loaded with explosives has headed out from Earth in a last-ditch attempt to reboot the failing star. The vessel, somewhat recklessly, has been named Icarus. The name is symbolic not just for the mission, but for the film, as if to signal that Boyle and Garland are also working with impossibly high stakes: plucky Brits taking on a big-scale genre project, an undertaking so ambitious that they too risk getting their wings fried.

All in all, the film-makers emerge with pinions intact: I don't suppose James Cameron or Michael Bay will feel very threatened, but that's not the point. Narratively, Sunshine barely convinces, but it does lay on an arresting CGI light show. Early on, one of the astronauts takes an unguarded look at the sun, a revitalising "shower in light", even though Icarus (the name of the ship's talking computer as well as the vessel itself) warns of "irreversible damage to the retinas". You may well worry about your own retinas, as we're constantly blasted by intense light of assorted digital textures: up close, the sun is a writhing, rustling field of flame, the universe's biggest, trippiest lava lamp.

Director of photography Alvin Kuchler also explores light in more subtly dazzling ways: dust motes swim in a green haze; an extreme close-up of an eye reflects colour like a Christmas bauble. As in Minority Report, translucent graphics hang shimmering in the air; in the snappiest piece of illusionism, the ship's "Earth Room" displays 3D images of the Old Planet, with a forest on one wall and an ocean splashing on another. The camera hangs rapturously on gleaming golden surfaces, such as the bulbous spacesuits, and an umbrella-like canopy made of a million shifting leaves.

But all this can be overpowering, and it comes as a welcome relief when the film plunges us into the dark, as the astronauts explore a dead, dust-filled spaceship. Not only do our eyes get a rest, but Sunshine's brash hyper-modernity also takes a breather, as it veers into old-fashioned adventure. Entering the ghost ship, one character jokes, "We might get picked off one by one by aliens." Perhaps this line represents a moment of self-conscious decadence in the genre: a science-fiction film in which the characters have watched Alien. Sunshine certainly knows its antecedents and doesn't attempt to hide its debt. The voice of Icarus is a female cousin to 2001's HAL, even shifting down a couple of octaves, like his, in a moment of crisis. The spaceship's oxygen-making mini-rainforest also echoes Silent Running. But you do get a disturbing sense of a genre having run out of new narrative ideas: you feel the film is less about the last gasp of the sun, than that of space-travel cinema itself.

Despite its dreamy beginnings, much of the film opts traditionally for action rather than awe. Malfunctions pile up, human errors get made, crisis follows nail-biting crisis. But there's so little going on in terms of character that you barely care when terrible fates befall the crew members. Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong, Michelle Yeoh and Hiroyuki Sanada offer different degrees of tight-jawed determination, but we never really know who they are. The only character touches that really signify are somewhat crude: one person makes a noble sacrifice, another loses nerve, and there's a clash between two young bucks, played by Cillian Murphy (left) and the American actor Chris Evans.

Sunshine's religious dimension explicitly re-emerges when the mission's success is endangered by a fanatic who's been out in space too long and wants to be "alone with God". The presence of the Sublime is signalled in the finale by juddering discontinuity in the editing, and an image stretched as though the projectionist had suddenly switched lenses. The presence of the Almighty, or just an almighty headache? Decide for yourself. I can't help feeling that a simple burning bush might have been more affecting than this all-out forest fire. Like their astronauts, Boyle and Garland are on a mission: to prove that a big, bold, intelligent, UK-made space epic is feasible. They've succeeded, up to a point: Sunshine is dazzling, but not quite a blinder - your eyeballs may be singed, but don't expect any long-lasting effects on your cosmic consciousness.

j.romney@independent.co.uk