Sunshine

There's no denying that Danny Boyle is talented. The director of Trainspotting created a pulse-pounding, unnerving scene of heroin addiction with a baby doll that crawls on the ceiling of one Ewan MacGregor. Despite that success, Boyle has yet to make a film that has matched it, and some even argue that Trainspotting was a bit, shall we say, overrated.

So, he's decided to take his next story a little further. Sunshine is his latest film and images of the spaceship and the mission to reignite a dying sun resemble 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, as much as directors want to mimic the visual style of Kubrick, few are willing to do it the way Kubrick did it.

In particular, 2001 drained any interest in the characters. The astronauts are made out to be pretty bland individuals. The details of their lives are fairly unimportant. Kubrick, for the most part, doesn't care about these people as people. And yet, sequels like 2010, or movies like The Abyss which echo 2001, can't help but be drawn to make characters that have weight, characters you care about, doing important things.

It's just too hard to decide your characters aren't important, and the surrounding story will more than make up for it in its odd grandeur. This isn't to say the strategy is flawed. The Abyss is eminently watchable. But it does say that directors and perhaps producers and financiers too are too scared to make a movie where the characters are secondary.

So maybe Boyle will make us care about this adventure, maybe it will be gripping and entertaining, but it won't be because it's trying to evoke the same feelings as 2001, because really, those feelings were more of awe, and less of sympathy for its characters.