Sunshine

With the sun prematurely burning out and the Earth sinking into fatal hypothermia, a team of eight brave astronauts is off to save humanity—in a ship called Icarus II, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, who together raised the zombie flick from the dead with 28 Days Later, now rocket headlong into to the quasi-arty science-fiction thriller, with pretty, precious and willfully predictable results. Cillian Murphy as the ship’s physicist (yeah, OK) is what’s best here, and not just because his otherworldly blue eyes evoke that freaky fetus from 2001. Murphy’s is a necessarily humanizing performance in a film whose other actors have little to do, or offer, and whose only natural-seeming dialogue is spoken by the onboard computer (it at least is supposed to seem machine-like). Boyle has inspired fun contrasting the frozen void of infinite space with the fierce, incinerating violence of a stellar furnace, but before long lapses into his familiar horror-flick shock tactics. Alas, it’s true what they say: Stare at it too long and you’ll really hurt yourself.