Sunshine  ★★★½

DANNY Boyle has been at the top of his game for three decades.

The British director’s filmography isn’t just full of quality, it’s amazingly varied with entries like Trainspotting, 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Days Later, The Beach and, most recently, Yesterday.

Boyle is also a student of cinema and no doubt the sci-fi horror classic Alien is a film he admires.

Sunshine from 2007, his own take on that sub-genre, is, like Alien, stunningly visualised and efficiently told.

It’s 2057 and Earth’s sun is dying. A team of astronauts is on its way to detonate a nuclear bomb that it is hoped will cause a re-ignition and save mankind.

They are following in the footsteps of a similar team that left on the same mission but disappeared from contact.

Members of the team have various reasons for joining a mission that takes years and could be fatal and these are examined with brevity and precision by writer Alex Garland whose other credits include Ex-Machina, Annihilation, 28 Days Later and The Beach.

Also like Alien, the film benefits from the casting of relative unknowns at the time in its key roles, including Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong and Hiroyuki Sanada.

This also means the tension is always high as you are never sure who could be despatched at any moment.

While the story is good, the film is even more of a sensory experience with exceptional visuals and sound.

Garland and Boyle’s vision is given full cinematic impact by a highly credentialed technical team led by cinematographer Alwyn Kuchler, production designer Mark Tildesly special effects creator David Johns Paul Driver’s visual effects.

The final act is masterful film-making that has Sunshine regarded as a modern sci-fi classic by many.