This overheated sci-fi flick just about avoids crashing and burning, writes Donald Clarke

GENRE FILMS do, of course, tend to remind you of each other. That's the thing about genre. But that class of film in which a gang of glum space travellers drifts toward oblivion seems bound by a particularly rigid series of conventions. They sit bickering round a dinner table that may or may not go on to host the birth of a savage extra-terrestrial. They send faintly mordant video messages home. And so forth.

The opening acts of Sunshine, the first collaboration between director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland since 28 Days Later, consistently call to mind scenes in such classic films as Alien, Dark Star,  Silent Running, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris (both versions). These sections of the picture do, however, work rather well. Conventions become conventions for a reason.

It is 2057 and the crew of the hubristically named Icarus II have been brought together as part of a plan to counteract the dying of the sun. Their ship is transporting an enormous disc of fissile material, which, they hope, will, when detonated, cause the faltering star to reignite.

Filmed in a spookily antiseptic environment, featuring appropriately deadened performances from its glamorous cast, Sunshine does a very good job of making us believe in the unlikely mission. Attention has been paid to such often-overlooked logistical quandaries as the production of oxygen in space and the need to recycle water. Each of the team has a well-defined purpose and the relationships have frayed in ways that suggest unwanted confinement.

One might argue that - even in 50 years time - it would be hard to assemble a group of physicists, botanists and engineers quite so dazzlingly buff, but fine actors such as Cillian Murphy and Rose Byrne do enough to persuade us that we are not observing the chill-out zone in a fashionable nightclub. All things considered, Sunshine creates an environment that stands favourable comparison with those in the distinguished predecessors listed above.

And yet. When the Icarus II - rather like calling your submarine HMS Sink, isn't it? - approaches its destination, the film gets itself hopelessly tangled in too many incompatible plot strands. The coming catastrophe begins with the crew facing an agreeably chewy conundrum. They encounter the Icarus I, a similar vehicle, presumed lost, floating hopelessly in space. Should they risk the survival of an entire planet to rescue a handful of men and women, who may, in fact, already be dead? Eventually, Prof Cillian points out that the risk is worth taking to secure a second explosive payload.

All this is fine. But the careering narrative chaos that follows knocks the picture off its bearings. We are presented with one moral poser too many: who should be sacrificed to save oxygen? There is a suggestion of sabotage. An elegantly toasted maniac from Icarus I, now a religious maniac, begins causing trouble for the new crew. By the time the bomb is finally nudged towards the sun, the story has been burnt to cinders by exposure to too large a fissionable mass of questionable plotting folderols.

Still, Sunshine is never less than gorgeous-looking and, augmented by a seductive, throbbing score, offers endless delights into which the viewer can indulgently sink. That tasteful minimalism is extended to the depiction of the dying earth which, rather than hosting a wave of CGI disasters, is represented by one scene set in a frozen Sydney.

So, oddly for a film taking place almost entirely in outer space, Sunshine just about gets by on atmosphere.