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Astronauts head out to restart the sun in Danny Boyle's Sunshine |
Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: Cillian Murphy (Robert Capa), Chris Evans (James
Mace), Rose Byrne (Cassie), Michelle Yeoh (Corazon), Cliff Curtis (Searle),
Troy Garity (Harvey), Hiroyuki Sanada (Kaneda), Benedict Wong (Trey), Chipo
Chung (Icarus), Mark Strong (Pinbacker)
Spoilers: Last act
surprises are discussed here. Although they did put them in the trailer at the time
as well

Mankind’s final fate is in the hand of a team pulled from
across the world’s space agencies, with Professor Robert Capa (played by
Cillian Murphy as a figure inspired heavily by Brian Cox himself in looks and
style) as the boffin whose job is to blow the bomb when the time comes. The
mission, Icarus II, is under the
command of Captain Taneka (Hiroyuki Sanada), with engineer Mace (Chris Evans),
pilot Cassie (Rose Byrne), biologist Corazon (Michelle Yeoh) whose job is to
maintain the oxygen garden, psychiatrist Searle (Cliff Curtis), navigator Trey
(Benedict Wong) and second-in-command and comms officer Harvey (Troy Garity).
Entering the final days of the mission, near Mercury, the crew discover traces
of the first missing mission that carried the first payload to restart the sun,
Icarus I. Deciding two payloads are
better than one, the crew divert to intercept – and of course from there
everything slowly falls apart into increasing chaos, destruction and horror.
Boyle’s film was marketed as a sort of slasher-in-space –
which to be fair it only really becomes in its final act, as the crew
accidentally take on board captain of Icarus
I, Pinbacker (Mark Strong), a man driven mad by proximity to the sun,
deluded in the belief that it is God’s will that mankind perish with the sun.
In fact for the bulk of its runtime – and its primary themes – are really about
the psychological impact of prolonged isolation in space with only a small
group of people for company (a heightened submarine claustrophobia), the
dangers and damage that obsession can cause and the moral complexities that
emerge when the fate of mankind is literally in the hands of eight people.
With an intelligent script by Alex Garland, Boyle’s film is
smart, superior sci-fi which asks searching questions of how we might respond
in the situations this crew are thrown into. How quickly would you make
decisions about who is expendable and who is not when you are mankind’s last chance?
How quickly would you be willing to sacrifice yourself? What moral qualms would
you feel if the fate of the one was balanced against the many? And how are all
these feelings heightened by the intense claustrophobia and isolation of prolonged
space travel, interacting with the same few people day-in and day-out in a ship
of which every inch you would be intimately familiar within the first few
months of a mission lasting years?
It’s a wonder more people don’t go crazy in the film. Boyle’s
film makes excellent use of the terrifyingly awesome, good-like power of the
sun. Its rays are so intense at the range of the ship, that any exposure over
about 2% of its full strength is lethal. But there is something about its
mighty power, its all-consuming presence, that draws characters too it like
moths to a flame. Psychiatrist Searle (impressively played by Cliff Curtis)
already seems to be becoming slowly a slave to an obsession with our star, his
skin peeling from too many hours in the ship’s solar observation lounge.
Pinbacker (a curiously accented performance of intense insanity from Mark
Strong) lost his mind in sun worship, his mind seemingly snapped by coming
face-to-face with the powers of the heaven compared to the mini-presence of
man.
But it’s that presence of mankind that drives the mission,
and lies behind all decisions. Hard-ass engineer Mace (Chris Evans, very good)
seems like a jerk, but he simply applies Spock’s maxim of the needs of the many
to a logical extreme (correctly) objecting to every course of action that
invites unknowns into the equation that endanger the mission. And Mace doesn’t
hesitate at any time in the film when asked to balance his own safety against
the success of the mission. Each crew member – with the exception of Harvey –
places their own survival a distant second behind the completion of the
mission, and the film is littered with moments of self-sacrifice and
self-imperilment.
It’s this humanistic core to the film, of accepting the
world is it and that mankind must be preserved within that, which leads to some
of the film’s more weighted points around faith and religion. The film has
little time for anything away from pure science, and an interest in higher
powers and staring too closely at the bright light, is mixed in heavily with a
dangerous fundamentalism that eventually leads to the film’s only spiritual
figure Pinbacker becoming a psychopath determined to follow what he sees as
God’s plan at the cost of all human life. It’s not a subtle picture of religion
– and the film could have balanced it with at least one of these characters
expressing some faith in some sort of religion on the ship or gently
questioning how humbling being this close to the face of God might feel. The
film has no time for that.
But then I suppose this is really a psychologically intense
mission film, a sort of big-themes action sci-fi that is the sort of ideas
based film you wish was made more often. Boyle’s direction is pinsharp as
always, and the moments of dreamy awe and shattering power of the sun (as
bodies are vapourised, parts of the ship crumble) or the freezing vastness of
space (as one character discovers to their cost) provide a series of haunting
scenes. Shooting Pinbacker with a juddering out-of-focus intensity – intended
to ape the feeling of starring directly at the sun – is effective in making the
character chillingly unknowable. This
moments work very well, as does the superb cast which has not a weak link among
them (Cillian Murphy in particular anchors the entire thing extremely well). Sunshine is a thought-provoking and
blistering science-fiction film that manages to balance big themes and ideas
with horror house jumps and haunting moments of tension.
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