I went to see this movie yesterday, enticed by the title and the promise of spectactular visuals.
Directed by Danny Boyle, it takes place 50 years in the future. The sun is going out and a mission has been launched to try and restart it -- Icarus II. Icarus I vanished. The crew of eight's job is to detonate a stellar bomb and save Earth. That is all that matters.
Before launching into spoilers, I must say that if you have any interest at all in seeing this movie, go see it on the big screen. It is astonishingly beautiful and that alone is worth the price of admission. I was slightly (okay, at times more than slightly) horrified (which is at least partially due to the fact that almost nothing horrifies me more than the idea of being burned alive which is kind of a problem is a movie about a mission to the sun) but still I feel myself drawn to it, fascinated by it, and honestly, once I get over it and can bring myself to watch it again, I think I will end up loving it and for the moment I really want to discuss it. I hope that makes sense, but I don't think it does. Point is, it's brilliant.
You can find a trailer here and the official site here.
Okay, so, spoilers.
To start off, the characters. The crew of eight is wonderful -- perfectly written and cast. They all felt very real. The movie is terse, which is just right. Everything seems, from the from their interactions to their reactions, etc. I could honestly count the whole cast as a stand out, but I was particularly drawn to Cillian Murphy as the physicist, Capa. He was someone I would have wanted to be friends with and Murphy was brilliant. He has this one line, after the pilot asks him if he's afraid. He describes what it will look like and then he says "I think it will be beautiful. No, I'm not scared." And it has stuck with me all day somehow. It's very mundane sounding, I know.
They all die. That's not the spoiler it sounds like, you know they're all going to die and it tells you right out on the front of the movie's official home page. It has videos of all of the characters' deaths labeled No One Survived: Not the _________ (Fill in position on the ship). So death and mortality and how you die is sort of a big theme which I think is interesting in general and also as the Tolkien fans that almost all of us here are.
In the end (*major* spoiler coming up), Capa is alone in the center of the bomb as he detonates it and it goes off exactly as he described and you know what? It is so incredibly beautiful that I could not help but think "What a wonderful way to die."
There were parts of the movie I outright couldn't watch. As I said, being burned to death is something I really can't handle and there is one character who has essentially had all of his skin burned off so I didn't watch any scenes he was in because that was gross. But putting that aside and the fact that I really wont' be able to watch it again for a long time, I am still fascinated by it, by Capa and Searles, the psych officer who found himself strangely drawn to the light, and of course by the sunshine.
The story didn't always work for me. There are things that definitely stretch suspension of belief and there are plot holes but honestly, none of that detracted too much in the end because what got me was the characters and the aesthetics and the writing, not the story itself, the chronology and whatnot.
I walked out yesterday thinking Well there's a movie I'll never see again! But now I can't stop thinking about it.