Review: Sunshine (screened at Utopiales)

Beautifully filmed, often transcendent, Sunshine is the latest and most artistically successful of the Freddy Kruger Nightmare on Elm Street movies, although studio executives have made the smart decision not to advertise this fact. Wise indeed, since this installment is likely to appeal as much to tattered, love-lorn graduate students studying at liberal colleges as to drunken frat boys looking for a cheap thrill. (Note: Some spoilers follow.)The premise behind this particular Kruger vehicle is that five or six or seven rather anonymous astronauts with no distinguishing characteristics or backgrounds besides their faces and an animated Christmas card must plunge a bomb into the heart of the sun to save the Earth. The previous expedition failed, and this is where Freddy Kruger comes in: he's been hiding on the half-frozen, dust-lozenged first ship, and when emergency situations require the remaining crew to set foot on that first ship...well, let's just say Kruger makes his presence known.A note on the special effects. They are spectacular. The way that they make Kruger's skin and flesh a lot more like a pizza than in the past is masterful. The person or persons responsible for the runneling of said flesh under the merciless and withering gaze of the sun--the sun is rather like a film critic in this movie--should receive an Oscar nomination, along with the cinematographer (whose agile work leaps like a living bridge across more than one plot hole).Although some will say that the director Danny Boyle--who previously did the documentary Trainspotting (notable for the first video evidence that babies can walk across ceilings) and the avant garde musical 28 Days Later (notable for playing against type by not having any singing)--has left no room for a Freddy Kruger sequel, one need only look at any of the previous Nightmare installments to see the falseness of this assertion.