Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

I have a good friend who is about to drive to Mexico to see this, where Fox plans to release it in two weeks. I’m still not sure why they’re waiting so long to bring it to the US, but for now, we’re going to have to ask our buddies overseas to tell us what they think of it.

We ran a review the other day from the Manchester special screening, and so far, everything we’ve been hearing has been mixed-to-mediocre. Let’s see what “Mooch” has to say about it:

In what must have been a life-long ambition of his, the other night Danny Boyle brought Sunshine to Manchester. Proud manc Boyle is a patron of the city's Cornerhouse cinema and always takes his new films there for previews. For anyone who wants to know a regular film geek's opinion on it, I'd like to share my thoughts.

It stars Cillian Murphy (the shrink-wrapped Tom Welling) and is a sci-fi about a small group of astronaut-scientists who have to save life on Earth by flying to the dying sun and re-igniting it with a massive nuclear bomb.

To borrow the review structure from the excellent magazine Little White Lies, I would say my anticipation of this movie was 3 out of 5. I thought it sounded awful when I first heard about it and nothing the director has done since Trainspotting has really made me think his great work was ahead of him, but the hype around the release has been doing its job on me and so I was looking forward to it, just not expecting - in the parlance of our times - a shotgun full of handjobs.

For at-the-time enjoyment I'll give it 4 out of 5. From the brilliant opening minutes that pitch-perfectly set the tone, I was falling in love with this movie. There are some wonderful sequences and a number of tendon-snappingly tense scenes. The visuals are both beautiful and exciting - Boyle, the effects team and the cinematographer have done a stunning job and come up with some really incredible images. It must have presented a whole funfair of headaches for brilliant DP Alwin Kuchler (Ratcatcher, The Claim) but he's certainly come out with distinction. The production design is also top-notch, from the utilitarian spaceship interiors to the fascistic desolation of the bomb itself. Before the screening the cinema's spokesperson bragged about the sound design and she wasn't wrong, it's extremely impressive. The whole thing has the feel of a true blockbuster.

The problems I had with it arise from parts of the script and the editing. Writer Alex Garland has got a lot of great stuff going for him throughout this movie, some excellent scenes and ideas. But the second half becomes mired in too many generic action moments - they pile well-worn peril on top of well-worn peril and the effect is not a thrill crescendo but a part-mitigation of the good work achieved elsewhere (it was supposed to be the moon that's made of cheese). Worse, during these action scenes it is often difficult to tell exactly what is going on, the rhythms feel truncated, it gets pretty confusing.

By and large the characters are not interesting enough and a number of good actors are wasted, although I suppose... wait for it... the sun is the real star (home run! A premium-rate joke clue helpline is available). Elsewhere blandleader Chris Evans, more meh than a wet Wednesday, runs around at the centre of all the cliches. It's as if he's gone rogue and is trying to sabotage the Boyle/Garland mission. Also, frustratingly, not enough is made of the possibilities briefly wafted before us. For example here's a great plot development in the final third, a real 'Oh shit!' moment, but the idea is quickly thrown away when it could have really lifted the film beyond the infinite. There's a really ridiculous moment at the end too which actually could have worked well if they'd presented it as purely metaphysical instead
of filming it like it was really happening, in real-time. Shockingly, they also fail to properly convey the scale of things like the journey, or the stakes of the mission itself. Or even how unimaginably vast the sun is (room for a million Earths in that thing! A million Earths!) but then, y'know, I guess everyone knows its a big fucker.

Finally in the 'In Retrospect' box I'll mark it 4 out of 5. The action cliches dont stay with me, the spectacle and the fascinating ideas do. I only wish they'd pursued these ideas more, done it with more grandeur - its a short movie and I think they should have given themselves another 30 minutes or more to spread things out and really get to the eigth square with the themes and concepts in play. Dramatically the movie would have benefitted from having more room to make the action less confusing as well. It could have been a really great film. There are the obligatory references to and inescapable echoes of many other sci-fi films and while Sunshine is clearly not in the league of Alien and 2001, other nods and winks to things like Pitch Black serve to remind just how far ahead of the usual pack Boyle's movie is. People are mentioning the accidentally half-decent Event Horizon - somehow made by Paul WS Anderson ('Whenever He Directs, We Lose') - but Sunshine deals with their shared elements a lot more interestingly and is a superior flick. Overall it's a very intense experience, I'll definitely be going again and I do recommend it to both fans of popcorn movies and fans of more thoughtful fare.

Boyle couldn't make it for the Q&A after the screening, although it was still fun with a member of the cast and the film's sexy young consultant Brian Cox (putting the 'scene' in 'science') - it was interesting to hear that they were all well aware of the ridiculousness of that end moment I mentioned, but they'd wanted to keep it in because it's so open to interpretation. Unfortunately, hearing such a passionate and interesting discussion about the film's ideas reinforced the sense that more should have been made of them in the film itself. But all in all it has restored my faith in Danny Boyle and in my mind he has cemented his place in the elite gang of versatile, genre-hobo Brit directors alongside the likes of Stephen Frears and Michael Winterbottom.