Sunshine
Danny Boyle

John Dennen
posted 11 April 2007

This film is mesmerising. Right from the opening image, showing what looks to be a blazing sun. But as our perspective swings around it, we realise that it is a great dish shielding a spaceship from the light of the actual sun. Then we watch the dark disc of the ship heading into the huge circle of the sun itself. It’s like a great, lidless eye with the dark dot of a pupil at its centre, slowly contracting.

What follows is like the Heart of Darkness, only of course it’s a journey into the heart of light. As a piece of filmmaking it’s extremely competent. The characters are well drawn and you actually care about them. The cast does a great job, particularly the ever-reliable Hiroyuki Sanada (from The Ring and The Last Samurai) and a charismatic Chris Evans (last seen in the Fantastic Four, surprisingly enough). The atmosphere is taut and tense. At crucial stages the crew face dilemmas and try to make moral calculations under ever increasing pressure. All the characters have their own entirely believable reactions.

The way the sun is presented on screen is crucial to the success of the film. On the spaceship, Icarus II, there is an observation room that allows its crew to look at the sun through a screen. This is exactly what we are doing in the audience. The film shows us what they see and tries to give us a sense of what they feel. It’s helped no end in this by a wonderful soundtrack from Underworld.

Obviously it is asking for trouble to call your spaceship Icarus, especially in this context. But Icarus is the one who captured the popular imagination. Daedalus, rather boringly, flew at the right height. Icarus flew too close to the sun, melting his wings. A myth is a story that can be repeated generation after generation. It must resonate with something in the human experience. The sun is so essential to life on earth that it’s been worshipped throughout history. It’s embedded in our culture, in our calendar, in the way we think. In the film there is a sense of overreaching, a mounting dread as the ship flies ever closer towards it.

The script, written by Alex Garland, touches on something elemental to us. We all know that staring at the sun for too long is forbidden. The tone is set when we see one of the crew ordering the computer to show him the sun at as bright an intensity and for as long as his eyes can bear. Later he describes the sensation as like taking a shower filled with light. This is the ship’s psychiatric officer, the one who is supposed to be keeping the rest of the crew sane. He proceeds to become the most star-struck of all the characters. With comments like ‘we’re all just stardust,’ he introduces the sense of mysticism in the film. I’m anxious to avoid any plot spoilers, but, suffice to say, some people are going to get fried. When one character is about to be exposed to the sun, others are screaming, but Searle (Cliff Curtis) is asking ‘What do you see?’ These are all scientists who have analysed the sun and think they know how to save it. But even they get taken over by this awe and wonder. The closer they get, the more the sun becomes a mystery.

Danny Boyle and co. have taken great pains to research the science behind the movie. A ‘Q-ball’ is eating at the sun from the inside, which will destroy it and extinguish all life on earth. The idea of the mission is to get close enough to drop a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan, in the hope of destroying the Q Ball and re-igniting the sun. Or something. The Icarus II is humanity’s last chance, because there isn’t enough uranium on earth to build a third bomb.

I’m reliably informed that Sunshine assumes large areas of theoretical physics to be correct. It does make you think though, when you watch someone being fried in the movie, that they’re being broken down to their elemental particles. Dust to dust, they’re rejoining the sun, where everything came from in the first place.

Nobody wants to bandy the term zeitgeist about, but this film does seem to touch on the concerns of its age. The earth dying, the sun a threat and our resources having to be offered up to it. But interestingly science is presented as our hope and not the cause of our problems. Mankind is in a big, threatening universe and the attempt to understand it is vital to our survival. The film’s protagonist is a physicist (Cillian Murphy). In the final crisis it is his character who is told to, ‘find a way, I don’t know how, find a way’

The film bumps up against concepts at the limit of our imagination. When some of the characters stare at the sun, you get the feeling that they are looking at the face of God. It’s easy to find a God-shaped hole when you try to get your head round the physics of the beginning of the universe. We are told that in the sun space and time are folding over. Or something. There’re an infinite number of variables. But the main point is that the physicist on board has to make a guess as to the best course of action. Something that as a scientist he has no wish to do. It is uncomfortably close to the faith and wonder that derails others in the crew. But the crucial difference is that he puts his faith in this human endeavour, despite its seeming insignificance in the face of something so overwhelming. It also prepares us for a final twist, which is meant to be illogical or impossible.

In my opinion the ending isn’t out there far enough. If there are an infinite number of variables then I suppose no one outcome is more unlikely than another. The rug is pulled out from under us, so anything can happen. So why not really push it? The conclusion is almost too comprehensible. The movie has been so good up to this point that I was completely prepared to go with it. I just wish the filmmakers had taken the chance to really blow my mind.