In Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) the premise is that the sun is dying, so seven scientists have to fly a one-chance bomb “the mass of Manhattan […] containing all of the earth’s mined fissile material” into the sun, to “start a new sun inside the sun.” Slight drama ensues when the crew “detects a beacon” from the ship that disappeared on the prior mission attempt, and decide to call an audible to go check it out. It’s kinda 2019-funny that the premise here is “the planet is gonna freeze because the sun burned out” – talk about getting your movie’s climate change disaster endgame scenario upside down. Compare with The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which if I had to choose between just these two movies, is probably a little more on the money.
What results in Sunshine is a body horror/existential dread/outer space crew meltdown/outer space ship logistics/zombie slasher/psychedelic trip movie. This result is interesting not because it’s particularly capable in any of these individual genres, but because of how it grossly combines them to try to create a movie that’s “about” what it’s like to fly into the sun, on both a psychic and visceral level. The movie’s images even warp and distort the closer to the sun the mission gets in a formal parallel of the increasing cosmic hideousness of the crew’s situation. The movie is “good” to the extent to which “enjoy this movie about flying into the sun to your death” is a bonkers premise, and to the extent to which it does everything it can to amplify that central journey/idea, but “bad” in the many ways in which the script and action fail to support it. Apart from as embodied philosophical outlooks, the characters are barely there, and because it attempts so much, parts of the movie frequently free undercooked.
Sunshine‘s body horror aspect is its most pronounced. Throughout the movie, you’re gonna see unflinching (but highly theatrical) depictions of willful engagement with personal physical suffering, often bent around some idea of personal sacrifice as a cost of group survival. People get incinerated by sun rays, a guy freezes to death in coolant, another guy freezes to death in space with “ice freezing and cracking” sounds as his eyes freeze, and then his arm shatters when he floats into something (“Sub Zero Wins… flawless victory… fatality“). I had the strong sense watching all this that Boyle made 127 Hours (2010) because he thought he could do something better with this kind of horror material in a more-limited structure, but unfortunately for both movies, it’s not the suffering that makes either of them good, it’s the anxiety and dread of the premise itself. Feel like “would this movie be better without most or any of the characters” is probably a relatively personal yardstick, but I’d watch a remake that’s just one person on the ship, with no side mission shenanigans, and they gradually freak out more and more as they fly into the sun, and that’s it. I’d also watch a prequel that takes place on earth, and depicts the global logistics of collecting all the world’s nuclear matter and somehow making it into a giant bomb that somehow gets attached to a ship in space.
The year is 2057 and the sun is not doing so hot. An international crew has been dispatched with a mission to fix it and save humanity. Their plan… shoot it with a bomb. The specifics of how exactly this is going to help are pretty loose, though the script by Alex Garland (Dredd, Annihilation, Ex Machina) has enough movie science in it that the idea as-rendered is innocuous enough if you’re willing to go along with it. Even if you aren’t, I’d recommend giving it a go anyway, as this scenario sets the stage for a group of people flying directly at the sun while stakes get higher and margins of error get slimmer the closer they get; a delicious recipe. Having the sun pull them in while the danger rises puts a nice tactile spin on the whole “that which giveth taketh away” vibe.
That vibe is a very nice spot to be, and when Sunshine is working in this pocket it’s great. The design of the ship is as well-realized as I’ve seen in sci-fi, with a spacesuit that floored me with both it’s bizarre design and how functional it actually seemed to be for its task. The movie has a particular eye for all types of light, both in showing it and working it into the texture of the film (in one of my favorite instances the chief psychiatrist consults the ship’s AI about the right dose of undiluted sunlight to blast himself with). There are a great many shots of the sun as well, contrasted excellently with inexplicable light sources on the ship itself. This occasionally creates something of a Space Dogme 95 lighting scheme on the ship, which was one of my favorite things about the movie.
There’s a lot about Sunshine that’s extremely fresh feeling, working from this backbone of “heat is our chief troublemaker in space” as opposed to the more typical cold void. To its credit the movie doesn’t commit to some of the more obvious moral problems this kind of situation would afford. There’s initially quite a bit of hand wringing aboard the ship about the dichotomy of personal morality vs. commitment to a greater cause, which has its place, but which the film recognizes in it’s own context boils down to some pretty obviously black and white situations, and thus waves away. This is exemplified by the Chris Evans character, who gives a great performance, which ties an unyielding devotion to pragmatic solutions to omnipresent anger, in a way that’s both scary and mostly extremely reasonable. Most films would make this “the villain,” but here instead this guy is permitted to be complicated character.
Sunshine waves away a few other easy avenues of meaning that would have been easy to go down, but unfortunately doesn’t really settle on anything for itself. Ultimately that makes it a movie about some people bombing the sun but having a bad time doing it. Once the hard times take over in the workplace setting, and the movie pivots to “shit show in space” territory, I had a hard time caring. Earth would be saved, or not; something that the film had failed to convince me I had any stake in whatsoever. The characters’ interpersonal issues are replaced with performances of the gasping / wide-eyed-terror combo. Cillian Murphy pulls double-duty in this territory, and while an interesting-looking guy and an ok actor, is extremely ill-suited to looking distressed in this manner. He looks kinda puffy and odd when he’s upset, which is too bad, because there’s a lot of puffy odd Cillian in the end. Couple this with the inclusion to add a straight-up villain and a lot of what’s interesting about the movie gets erased in the third act.
Although I had soured by the end of the movie I feel like it’s important to impress that there are scenes I still remember clearly several days later. What’s good in the film was fascinating and often extremely beautiful, and at this point it’s overpowered my memory of being disengaged in the end. So if you don’t mind something that’s not perfect and has many fully realized moments of wild inspiration, you could do a lot worse than Sunshine.