Sunshine
Directed by Danny Boyle
Now available on DVD
IN THE YEAR OF No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford–a year that redefined the American western–it was easy to overlook Sunshine, 2007’s preeminent science fiction flick. Missed by most due to the lack of a wide theatrical release, Boyle’s high-minded think-piece combines the claustrophobia of Alien with the transcendentalist ideas of 2001: A Space Odyssey and, unfortunately, the final act of Event Horizon.
The plot is simple enough: Fifty years from now our sun is losing its warmth, and the Earth’s only hope of not becoming a frozen wasteland rests in the hands of the Icarus II’s multicultural crew of astronauts and scientists. They must restart the fusion process by detonating a Manhattan-sized atomic bomb in the star’s heart–needless to say, things go less than swimmingly. It turns out that this is the Earth’s second attempt at jumpstarting the massive orb; the first mission mysteriously disappeared. When the crew happens upon the original ship, lingering in orbit around the sun but well short of its payload’s delivery point, a choice must be made: divert from the mission and rendezvous with the first ship, or continue on their merry way.
Refreshingly, the decision to salvage Icarus I is not based on the desire to rescue those aboard the other ship. The easy way out–the method by which the screenwriter could have secured the audience’s sympathy on behalf of intervention and its hatred for any character opposed to it–would have been to send a distress signal indicating the crew was still alive and in need of rescue. Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland traverse a more interesting moral path. Instead, the ship is rerouted in order to procure the other vessel’s massive nuclear payload; as the resident physicist, played by an intense Cillian Murphy, succinctly puts it, “Two last hopes are better than one.”
After boarding the disabled ship, however–and in the process irreversibly damaging their own–the crew of the Icarus II realizes that mental, not mechanical, breakdowns accounted for the first mission’s failure. Faced with both an implacable (and implausible) foe and mounting technical difficulties, the crew–guided by an impressive Chris Evans–are forced to contemplate unthinkable sacrifices in the name of humanity. With the exception of 300, there wasn’t a film more dedicated to the notion of self-sacrifice for the greater good in 2007 than Sunshine.
This is Boyle and Garland’s third collaboration; Boyle first directed the adaptation of Garland’s novel, The Beach, in 2000, and the pair reteamed in 2002 to reinvent the zombie genre with 28 Days Later. Sacrifice–at times personal, at times demanded of others–dominates their cinematic collaborations: Evans’s character in Sunshine braves the vacuum of space sans suit in order to protect the life of a crewmember more vital to the mission; the leader of a secret island community in The Beach offers attackers a human sacrifice to maintain her little village; the main character in 28 Days Later (also played by Murphy) is expected to sacrifice the sexual innocence of a teenage girl under his care to receive protection from a band of soldiers. As Boyle said in the DVD’s director’s commentary on an unrelated matter, “You try to make the films as different as possible, but they all end up being the same.”
Extra features wise, Sunshine offers two commentary tracks: one by the director, and the other by the film’s scientific adviser, Dr. Brian Cox. Boyle’s commentary is a refreshing change from that of many directors, who seem, at best, bored by the notion of talking about their films. His love for the medium also shines through in his introduction to another extra feature, two short films with no connection to his work. As Boyle enthusiastically notes, “One of the wonderful things, I think, about DVD extras is that you can get the chance–and more people should do it–you can put little short films on, which gives a chance for short films [to be seen]. It’s impossible to get them distributed, you know, because they’re so short. So you can put them on DVD extras.”
Sunshine isn’t a perfect film, and it doesn’t quite make the pantheon of serious science fiction cinema–Ridley Scott’s Alien, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris–Boyle cites in his commentary. But the plusses of this DVD (including a gorgeous score by composed by John Murphy and techno group Underworld that, for legal reasons, will likely never see the light of day independent of the film) far outweigh the negatives.
Sonny Bunch is an assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
