Reviews

I wanted to like it, I really did. But here's the thing - the real Barrow is 60% Native Alaskan. Yet, if you watched this film, you'd think it was 95% Caucasian. There's a couple of token glimpses of Inupiat kids near the start, and there's one character who's allowed to loiter in the background til he gets his head chopped off with an axe. But this is a film with no interest in what life in an Arctic community is really like.

Which - racism aside - might be fine in a stylised genre movie, if the coolness of the basic premise was delivered on. But it isn't.

Barrow - isolated on the far northern edge of Alaska, with a month of sunless darkness - is attacked by vampires! Sounds great, but the trouble is, there is very little sense of landscape, the barren midnight wastes from which attack might come. Everything looks like a back lot or a digital set extension, apart from a couple of location scenes. The story has no interest in where the vampires came from or why they are here.

And I got no feeling for the life of the town before or during the attack. The little people are disposed of during one long aerial shot of vampire carnage. What remains are just a couple of white cops, and some other similar people whose main job is to exchange scared looks. I kept wishing the denouement of the film would be when a bunch of hard-as-nails Inupiat stormed out of their houses and saved the cast, but no such luck.

And as for the 'darkness' bit - the whole film looks like it is enacted under supermarket strip lights. Is that moonlight? Why are the town's streets so brightly lit, when the sky is shown as midnight black and cloudy? Why, in an abandoned house, with the windows boarded up and the power cut, is everything as bright as day? I sense the dead hand of some exec here telling the DP and the colourist to brighten everything up. Which was the worst decision possible. Fear of the dark is possibly the strongest human fear. But this film should've been called '30 Days (or was it 3?) of Over-Lighting'.

So many reasons to love this movie, and so many reason to hate it...

First of all - the concept is great. Full-on apocalypse, decent attempt to provide some topical justification for the infection, reasonable cause and effect in the main story. But only up to a point. Because, try as I might to run with this film, I just keep tripping over puzzling directorial and script decisions. Over and over again - about every five minutes - there's something in this movie that just makes you go - "Hold on, that doesn't make sense?!"

Just a few examples (so many to choose from!):

• Why does Cillian Murphy run through the house shouting "WE HAVE TO LEAVE!!!" at the top of his voice? Er - dude, whispering would make more sense! But no, someone has deemed that it would be more exciting and cinematic to have them running around shouting at the top of their voices. Makes no sense. I'm starting to lose interest.

• Why park the taxi so far from the petrol tanker? Why not drive up close, keep everyone together, and FILL UP THE TANK OF THE TAXI ITSELF!!??? Rather than just a can? Oh yeah - so we could get a pointless couple of shots of the girl doing a handbrake turn. Right.

• Why does Cillian Murphy (in ridiculous "terminator" mode) set free the infected guy in the yard (cutting the chain with totally implausible blast of machine gun fire) when he's just as likely to attack the girls as he is to get the soldiers?

• Is it really feasible that the young girl driving the taxi MEANT to reverse the cab up to the infected guy so he would then smash through the rear window, grab the bad major and kill him? JUMP THE SHARK, JUMP THE SHARK, JUMP THE SHARK!!!! Insulting to the audience. A Jackie Chan/Sammo Hung fight sequence has more credibility.

You see - it's just a slow decline from a great premise and a dynamite first 20 minutes to an ending that can't come too soon. There's so much to love - the DV camera work, the stark lighting, the great angles, the nutty details like the girls in ball dresses in a rain drenched manor house while mayhem erupts around them, a main character who is spaced out on Valium during said mayhem, the sequences in silent, dead London, the blood puking, the basic attempt to make a gritty original SF horror action movie that pulls no punches etc etc.

Like I said, there are so many reasons to love this movie. But I can't - it annoys me, there's always the feeling that the makers are saying - "Yeah, OK, this bit doesn't make sense but no one will notice because it looks cool!" Nah - it doesn't make sense, and it's annoying.

Having said all that, to be honest, I'd recommend that anyone interested in the genre would see 28 Days Later. Just prepare to be irritated.

But... as it happens I have seen 28 Weeks Later, and it's a much better movie. It rocks! AND, it more or less makes sense! You see? You CAN have your cake and eat it.

Thoughts having just seen Sunshine:

If you go to the trouble of getting the cute, sympathetic female lead all the way through to the final act, give her things to do at the end beyond saying something lame like "Just do it".

No more scenes with space crews sat around a table, passing jugs of drink etc PLEASE. The whole hard-bitten crew in claustrophobic ship accommodation thing is getting really old - 2001, Alien, Aliens, Mission to Mars, Event Horizon, Sunshine. All look and feel nearly the same in this area. Yawn.

Clear on-ship geography is really important. I had no idea where I was half the time in Sunshine, and it made me stop caring. Big sweeping exterior camera moves all over the place are just a cheat, and they make things look small and fake.

Action with the protagonist in a space helmet is problematic. Hard to see his/her face at the same time as anything else.

If you're trying to make a hard SF film, don't insult your audience with illogicalities and bad science. Eg right at the start - he is looking at the sun with 2% filtration (something like that). All is very comfortable. Then he dials it up to the limit of 3.1%, and everything is scorchio! But hold on - that's only 50% more?! This is where I got a bad feeling about the script and direction on this movie. Another one was this business about being "in orbit" suddenly. Come on - if you are on a mission into the heart of the sun, you don't suddenly end up in orbit. If things aren't clear to a non-technical audience, then your story is bad. Don't assume you can just run vaguely-technical s**t past them, as if it doesn't matter.

If you are going to end up with a main hero protagonist at the end, identify him early on, so the audience can start to invest in him/her asap.

Hopefully spaceship exterior styling and interior design can have moved on a bit from the NASA/2001/Ridley Scott mishmash we saw here.

Elements of culture and hints of backstory are important to locate a story in the future. We get virtually no clues here.

The whole ship's computer thing is also a bit old.

If you have a neat little idea (eg the green shoot that Michelle Yeoh finds) - knit it properly into the ongoing story - or dump it. If you just pop it in for the sake of it, and then throw it away, it just becomes a frustration.

A weak and pointless villain is worse than no villain at all. Especially if he's just the same as the one from Event Horizon (itself a weak and derivative movie).

I didn't HATE it, but I didn't much like it either. It felt like an exercise in hard SF by people who don't actually like hard SF themselves.