Fifty years from now, the sun is slowly dying, earth has entered a final ice age and humanity is doomed.
Well not quite. Mankind has put all of its resources into a single spacecraft, Icarus II. Not so much a spacecraft as a propulsion unit pushing the mother of all bombs through space, manned by a crew of 8.
Icarus II? I hear you ask, yes, it’s the second mission designed to kick-start the sun into working again, the first attempt failed after contact was lost. No one knows what happened to Icarus I. That is until Icarus II closes in towards the sun and the crew intercept Icarus I’s distress signal.
The plot may be thinner than the ozone layer, but Danny Boyle has managed to craft masterful pieces of celluloid excitement out of the unbelievable before, and with shades of 2001, Alien and Event Horizon he manages to pull it off gain.
Be warned however as this is no Armageddon, the film is paced like a homemade go-kart. The type with out an engine. You push it as close to the cusp of the hill and gingerly sit down in the seat. You slowly and carefully inch your self forward, the wheels start to turn, but momentum is agonisingly slow. Forward motion seems to take forever and then gravity kicks in and time slows down as you are propelled down the steep bank into the unknown.
A movie such as this takes an effort to keep watching, but rewards you with a mesmerising performance and edge of your seat, heart thumping thrill ride in the later stages, and never lets up until the credits roll. It’s at this point that you look back up the hill and realise all the effort was worth it.
The movies strengths also lay in the quirkiness of some of the crew, in particular our own Cliff Curtis and takes a solid look at what isolation and facing your own mortality can do to the human spirit.
Food for thought “The point about darkness is you float in it … Darkness is the absence of something … Light envelops you. It becomes you.” –Searle (Cliff Curtis)
Reviewed by: Jonathan Read. Rating: M – Contains violence and offensive language. Duration: 107 mins. Genre: Adventure, Sci-Fi. Actors: Cliff Curtis, Rose Byrne, Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Mark Strong, Hiroyuki Sanada, Paloma Baeza, Benedict Wong, Troy Garity, Chipo Chung, Archie Macdonald, Sylvia Macdonald. Director: Danny Boyle. Distributor: Roadshow. Release Date: Available Now.
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