The sci-fi thriller Sunshine reunites versatile British director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Millions) with screenwriter Alex Garland and producer Andrew Macdonald, both of whom last collaborated with him on 28 Days Later . . . . That film was one of those lucky instances when a gifted filmmaker comes to a genre fresh and brings to it such powerful ideas that he leaves his thumbprint (as Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining). Released in the UK about a year after the unsolved anthrax attacks in New York and Washington D.C., 28 Days Later . . . tapped into the uneasy zeitgeist with its kinetic, Romero-esque story of a “rage virus” escaping from a research lab and sweeping across London with terrifying speed. Sunshine does for sci-fi what 28 Days Later . . . did for the zombie movie–its tale about a manned space mission to the sun preys on our growing fear of obliteration as we confront global warming.
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On a literal level Sunshine contradicts the prevailing climate-change scenario–the year is 2057, part of the sun has gone out, and the earth is engulfed in perpetual winter. But on a visceral level, no other film I’ve seen has made such a palpable on-screen presence of the sun’s deadly heat and blinding light. The eight international astronauts of Icarus II have been sent to reignite the dead area with a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan, and as the movie opens they’re approaching Mercury, whose surface temperature can exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit. “In movies, normally you use darkness to create fear and terror,” Boyle recently told MTV’s Kurt Loder. “But [this movie] is based on light. . . . We tried to rob the audience of the colors orange and red. We didn’t have any of those colors inside the ship. And then when you went outside the ship, you suddenly felt all this orange light.” As the ship’s heat shields deflect the sun’s rays, they whine like stressed metal.
For all its celestial musing, Sunshine is expertly plotted and paced, the science driving the narrative as one complication leads to another. The crew intercepts a message from Icarus I, which disappeared seven years earlier on an identical mission, and discovers it’s a mere 15,000 miles away. After the physicist supervising the bomb (Cillian Murphy) concludes that they’ll have a better chance of accomplishing their mission if they collect Icarus I and its bomb, the ship’s resolute captain (Hiroyuki Sanada) orders the crew to change course. But the navigation officer foolishly does so without altering the incline of the ship’s heat shields, and as the temperature skyrockets, the oxygen garden bursts into flame. As their supply of breathable air dwindles, the astronauts confront the reality that some of them will have to be sacrificed for Icarus II to deliver its nuclear payload and save the earth.
Directed by Danny Boyle | Written by Alex Garland With Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, and Michelle Yeoh
