Doctor Who: flying close to the sun. Photograph: BBC
Blimey, did you see Doctor Who on Saturday? I thought it was a triumph: a pacy, tense episode where even though you know that the Doctor isn't due for regeneration any time soon, you (well, at least, I) genuinely thought he was in real peril.
For those who missed it, the Doctor and Martha found themselves on a grotty old spaceship heading for a collision with the sun, and they had just 42 minutes - the length of the episode - to avert disaster.
Now this is where I sat up and thought: hang on a tick, this reminds me of a movie I saw a few weeks ago: Danny Boyle's magnificent Sunshine. That film is set aboard a spaceship heading for a collision with the sun, though the aim in this film is to save humankind and Earth, whereas in Doctor Who it was merely to save themselves.
Sunshine had a graceful, almost poetically beautiful self-sacrifice to the sun; so too did this episode of Doctor Who. The sequence of Michelle Collins as the captain locked in a balletic embrace with her husband as they are ejected from the ship to their deaths was as beautiful as anything in the gorgeous-to-look-at Sunshine.
Sunshine had a malevolent Something mysteriously on the ship picking off crew members one by one. So too did Dr Who. Sunshine portrayed the sun itself as something alive. So too did Dr Who, though in a more literal sense. The computer graphics on Dr Who were stunning, and the spaceship - a filthy old cargo ship on which all the equipment was "cheap" was at least as fabulous as Icarus, the ship in Sunshine. Both pieces were tense, gripping dramas as well as spectacularly beautiful to watch.
However, Dr Who had a (mostly) happy ending, which Sunshine didn't, but it made me wonder if there is some kind of inchoate collective consciousness wafting around in the film-making ether at the moment about the sun. Is global warming, perhaps, making dramatists in London and Hollywood sit at their desks cogitating on the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
