Movie Review: Sunshine
- Theatrical release date
- July 27, 2007
- DVD release date
- TBA
- Grade
- B
Tense and visually spectacular, but goes a bit weird in the final act.
In 2057, eight astronauts take a journey to the sun to save humanity.
Every story asks the audience to suspend some disbelief, and in science fiction and fantasy, the suspension of disbelief request can be fairly extreme. For the length of the time it takes to tell the story, filmmakers ask their audiences to believe in, say, vampires, or dragons, or FTL travel. That’s standard. However, once you do that, you don’t get to go back to the well of audience belief and ask for something else. You have your one thing, and the rest you have to play straight.
For the first two-thirds of its length, Sunshine does just that. We are asked to believe that the sun is dying several billion years ahead of schedule and that humans can do something about it with a single bomb. Considering you could fit a million Earths inside the sun, it’s difficult to believe that even an Earth-sized bomb could do the job, let alone one only a couple of miles across, let alone that humans could accomplish this by 2057, but okay, we’ll go with it.
For nearly an hour and a half, we follow the crew as they do their best to fight the effects of the sun on their heatshield and ship. As they hold themselves together as best they can psychologically on what isn’t supposed to be, but very well could be, a suicide mission. As they shoulder the responsibility for the survival of the entire human race and make their individual decisions accordingly. As they rely on each other, and each other alone (Earth being out of contact due to static from the sun) through every trial.
Well, as they say, shit happens. There are more than enough dangers in space to see that this mission isn’t going to go smoothly and launching the bomb is going to be extremely difficult and likely fatal for at least a few. The director, Danny Boyle, who made the excellent if disturbing 28 Days Later, can certainly keep up the claustrophobia and suspense when he wants to, and he makes sure to keep it up by dispensing with any cutaways back to Earth and the astronauts’ families. Instead, the viewer is stuck on the ship just as the crew is. There’s no escape for characters or audience.
The problems and the crew’s solutions aren’t anything we haven’t seen before: you can point to individual bits of Sunshine and see that, intentional or not, they are homages to scenes in Alien, Silent Running, The Abyss, Event Horizon, Dark Star, Pitch Black, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010, Solaris, and probably a dozen others. But it hardly matters, because this film is all about the characters. Though we know very little about them, the actors breathe enough life into them that we very quickly care what happens to them and are caught up in their life-and-death struggles.
Some of the crew rise to cope with the multiplicity of emergencies and are the sort of people everyone hopes our astronauts really are, while others fall into cowardice or insanity. The characters work because they have real personalities with varied concerns, individual responses to tragedy, and different breaking points. We care about them because they seem real, and they face their problems (or not) as we might expect to face (or avoid facing) such tragedy ourselves. Science fiction films where special effects serve the characters rather than the other way around are rare, and always welcome. Kudos to Boyle for that.
However, then Boyle trips. Without giving too much away, let me say the second time the audience is asked to suspend disbelief, it is too much. The movie devolves into an extended chase scene between the surviving crew members and a monster of sorts. However, the point of this is not clear — enough mechanical emergencies and psychological breakdowns have happened to explain any more problems that might occur. Why introduce a lethal complication from a new source when the script has already firmly established several?
Still, this one plot weakness aside, the movie is an action movie cum tense psychological thriller that’s certainly worth the price of a ticket.
Copyright . Published 1 August 2007 in What’s New.
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