[betablue2]

So-- sarcasm alert here, always good for a first post-- Underworld wrote "the majority" of the music... except for the main theme, the "separation theme," the "falling into the sun theme," etc.-- that is to say, ALL the primary musical cues. Cool. Sure.

I have one of the hundred "Sunshine" CD-R packets that John Murphy sent out, and I find it interesting that he included "28 Weeks Later" as a bonus disc but not "28 Days Later." Having read an earlier post in this thread regarding a possible falling out between Murphy and Danny Boyle around the time "Sunshine" was crawling its misbegotten way toward release, a theory: Murphy is rightly upset regarding the mix of tunes and artists on the album. Whoever designed the soundtrack for "28 Days Later" did a beautiful job: Murphy's material, the material from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)," and even the Smith-sounding poppy tracks over the end credits blend together extremely well. In contrast, the musical design of "Sunshine," as reflecting its poorly conceived story and shaky script, ranges from the lovely (I'm including UW's in-film instrumentals as well as Murphy's music here, so don't bother flaming me as a Murphy elitist) to the downright embarrassing: here we find "Peggy Sussed," which falls on the end credits with all the grace of a Steinway grand piano dropping onto a carton of eggs, and the absolutely unsuitable I Am Kloot song, for which Danny Boyle campaigned. (Side note: it could have been worse: Boyle originally wanted "Avenue of Hope" at the BEGINNING of the movie, which would have stopped the film's pacing dead in its already-wobbly tracks.)

So I can see why John Murphy was keen to get his own take on "Sunshine" out before the "official" release hits iTunes. Call it "Pearl Harboritis": yet another orchestral score chopped off at the knees by the insertion of a grotesquely inappropriate pop track over the final credits. (Here, again to shift some of the blame off UW, the I Am Kloot song is the more hideous of the two end-credit pop tracks: Look, Danny, if you couldn't make the audience care about Alex Garland's wafer-thin dimbulb characters during the film, trying to make us care at the end by cooking up a fan-vid quality clips homage with a crappy song pasted on top is not going to make things better.)

And a point of trivia for those whose brains haven't already exploded with fury: the studio's official name is Twentieth Century-Fox. Note the placement of the one hyphen. We're not dealing with a fox from the twentieth century; what we have is the merger of two film studios in the 1920s: "Twentieth Century" and "Fox." The century may have changed; the studio's long-registered, long-recognized name has not.