Sunshine (2007) – Review

During his genre-hopping days, Danny Boyle had already tangled with stripped back thrillers (Shallow Grave), brutal comedy drama (Trainspotting), quirky rom-coms (A Life Less Ordinary) and even game changing horror (28 Days Later), so it was probably to no ones surprise that he eventually got round to tackling science fiction.
What we got was Sunshine, a space based mission movie that once again twinned Boyle’s vibrant style with a script by Alex Garland, but it’s a sci-fi venture that never really gets mentioned much anymore in comparison to other, epic, space odysseys – which is weird considering how much in common it has with other, more lauded, films.
I mean, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is an obvious touchstone (or touch-monolith), but its impossible to watch Boyle’s tense thriller without feeling at least a bit of deja vu.

It’s 2057 an the earth is in a bad way thanks to the fact that our sun is slowly dying and gradually sending the world into a second, fatal ice age. In the fact of utter extinction, mankind put together a mission that would see an interstellar vessel, the Icarus, ferry a gargantuan bomb to the fading star in the hope that the massive detonation will restart its core and literally fire it back up it its former glory. The main problem is that seven years ago, the mission mysteriously failed without anyone knowing the reasons why, and so we join the international crew of the Icarus II as they attempt to take a second crack at reigniting the sun.
However, while still only 30 million miles away, the strain is starting to affect the crew in various ways. The crew’s psychiatrist, Searle, has become addicted to bathing in the sun’s light (at a mere 3.1% of it’s full power of course), while belligerent boy scout and dedicated engineer Mace keeps getting into frustrated brawls with physicist Capa due to clashing personalities and enclosed spaces and the rest of the crew have to just deal with the tension.
However, once passing Mercury, they pick up a transmission they’d never thought they’d hear, a distress beacon from the original Icarus mission which stirs debate among the eight crew members. However, while agreeing that this can’t possibly afford to be a rescue mission, having two bombs to launch into the sun will be better than one. However, after making the proper adjustments to their course, a simple oversight starts off a chain of events that not only jeopardises their entire mission, but also means that even if they succeed, there’s not enough oxygen to make the journey back after dropping the payload. However, after docking with the Icarus I, the crew of the Icarus II hope to replenish some if their depleted life support, but after discovering that the earlier mission failed due to sabotage, things start getting all the more sinister.

Sunshine is a film with a lot of ideas and nowhere enough room to showcase them all, but that doesn’t stop Boyle and Garland from trying as the beleaguered crew of the Icarus II face all manner of messed up issues plus a whole bunch of existential dread in order to try and complete their mission. Spread out between the impressively accomplished cast, they have to tackle no less than emergency repairs on the outside of their heat shields, suicidal tendencies, oxygen failure, getting stranded on the other, disabled Icarus, short straw discussions about self sacrifice and even a wild final act that hints at sabotage and then suddenly veers into horror territory. Any two, maybe even three of these threads would have been more than enough to sustain the plot, but the filmmakers attempt to squeeze in as much incident as they can, while trying to tease out the trippy metaphysics and the result come across like a schizophrenic meld of 2001 and Armageddon. However, while the movie also tries to throw in references to other, more thoughtful sci-fi films like Silent Running, Dark Star and the blue collar tangibility of Alien, Sunshine weirdly acts at thematic, connective tissue between Paul W.S. Anderson’s cult chiller, Event Horizon and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar – which wasnt even released until seven years later.
Both feature crews in the middle of deep space, but if you added the horror of Event Horizon to the scale of Interstellar (or vice versa) then Sunshine is what you would undoubtedly get.
For the most part it works extremely well. Boyle’s layered, chameleon-like directing style fits sci-fi like a glove as he veers between coldly calculating shots of the Icarus II gliding through space with its giant, heat resistant panels held out in front of it like Captain America’s shield, before going somewhere far more erratic during its climax. The ship’s design, CGI and sets are magnificent and on top of that the cast contains probably the most solidly reliable bunch of names imaginable.

Led by a glacial Cillian Murphy in a pre-Oppenheimer role that still has him mulling over the theoretical nature of big explodey things that’ll change the course of history, he’s joined by the likes of Rose Byrne, Hiroyuki Sananda, Michelle Yeoh, Cliff Curtis and Benedict Wong, but putting in the most memorable performance turns out to be Chris Evans, who takes his bullish, American astronaut role and somehow makes it nuanced, three dimensional and likable as he’s the short tempered guy on the team who actually is willing to sacrifice everyone’s life – even his own, to ensure the success if the mission.
However, all the tense moments of disaster narrowly averted and big, far-out concepts, Sunshine ultimately bungled the landing by straying a bit too far into Event Horizon territory and ends up a slasher movie of all things. With the arrival of Mark Strong’s burnt stowaway from the Icarus I, things go weirdly a bit Hellraisery as the deranged Pinbacker claims that after talking to God for seven years (actually the glare of the sun), he’s been tasked to end the human race and thus scupper the shit out of the mission. It’s a decent idea on paper, but with some deliberately shimmery and out of focus camerawork and some jittery editing, you get the idea that were suddenly, fully into metaphysical territory which only serves to unbalanced everything that’s come before. It also doesn’t help that your not entirely sure what exactly is going on as reality seems to warp as the sun gets ever closer and by the time Boyle fully emulates the star child stuff from 2001, you’re utter flummoxed, and not in a good way.

And yet, as much as it snaps you out of the movie, it doesn’t lessen the impact of the film as a whole, which not only looks utterly stunning, but carries the appropriate amount of weight once the sacrifices start mounting up.
Maybe not in the inner orbit of greatest sci-fi movies of all time, Sunshine has enough going on to demand that it gets its time to bask in the… well, you know.

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