REVIEW : Sunshine (2007)

Written by Alex Garland (The Beach) and directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Sunshine is a sumptuously produced, special effects-ladened SF film from the creative team behind 28 Days Later....  Dismissed by many critics as pretty but derivative, Sunshine is not only a great example of genre film-making, it is also arguably the first great work of cinematic science fiction of the 21st Century.

Set fifty years in the future, Sunshine tells the tale of the Icarus II, a ship manned by an international crew and armed with a huge bomb designed to kick start our dying Sun.  As the film begins, the ship is passing Mercury and already nerves are starting to fray as the computer technician Mace clashes with the laid back physicist Capa while the ship’s psychologist has taken to exposing himself to the light from the Sun.  Suddenly the crew receive a distress signal from the presumed lost Icarus I.  This starts off a series of events that will see things go from bad to worse as a miscalculation results in the death of the ship’s captain and the suicide of the ship’s pilot before the entire mission and therefore survival of the Earth is endangered by the deranged captain of the Icarus I who has survived for years onboard his ship, communing with the Sun and descending further and further into a state of religious mania.

Garland and Boyle are perhaps best known to a genre audience for their updated zombie flick 28 Days Later... .  Upon watching Sunshine, I was surprised at the methodological similarities between the two films.  28 Days Later... is best understood as an attempt at revitalising a long extinct cinematic genre by cherry picking the best bits from previous films and re-inventing them for an audience who might not necessarily be all that familiar with the genre.  As a result, despite its updated running zombies and the film’s careful avoidance of the “Z-word”, 28 Days Later... is clearly full of references not just to George Romero’s immortal trilogy of Zombie films Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, but also the 1981 TV adaptation of John Wyndham’s very British apocalypses Day of the Triffids and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with its isolated amoral military men.  Indeed, many of the negative responses to Sunshine has focused upon the application of this methodology to the canon of classic SF films.

As with 28 Days Later..., it is impossible to watch Sunshine without thinking about other films from the same genre; the oppressive silence of the film’s sets immediately put us in mind of 2001; the demented ship’s captain remind us of Event Horizon; the airlocks and lit tables prompt us to think of Alien and the linked ships and vertigo-inducing space walks look a lot like those of 2010.  Any fan of genre film could extend this list by spotting the endless references to different films and TV shows but the fact remains that Sunshine is not a pristinely original take on traditional SF themes.  Instead, as with 28 Days Later... it is best understood as an amalgam of different ideas taken from other films and repackaged for a new audience for, as with the Zombie genre before 28 Days Later..., the cinematic heyday of films about space exploration is long since passed, its 70’s masterworks airbrushed out of the collective psyche by a stream of bad sequels and the gradual suborning of its outward looking themes into the safer and more contemporary inward “psychological” concerns of the modern day.  Indeed, many critics (both genre and mainstream) have dismissed Sunshine as a derivative work of SF that is more about special effects than interesting ideas.  I think that this assessment is false for two distinct reasons.

Firstly, Sunshine is a genre film.  As well as being a collection of rules and tropes, genre is also an on-going conversation between different generations of authors who react to the work that has gone before them.  As a result, when Charles Stross wrote Accelerando, a book that features a spaceship leaving Earth in order to investigate an alien artefact, people do not hoot at how derivative it all is, rather they recognise that the book is best understood as a reaction to all the books using similar tropes and plot devices to those used in Accelerando.  This is how genre functions.  This is how it evolves.  Indeed, what are FTL drives, cybernetic limbs or magical swords but conceptual heirlooms handed down and re-used by generations of different authors?   ’s use of familiar ideas, plot devices and tropes is no more derivative or clicheed than any other piece of genre art.  It is simply that because film is a visual medium and genre films have a smaller number of sources to draw on than genre novels, we tend to be less charitable to genre films than we do to genre novels (this is also partly a result of the fact that there are comparatively few genre-specialised film critics).

Creativity within a genre is measured not by a piece’s ability to tell its story without using ideas that have been used before, but rather whether or not the author brings a new set of eyes to the old ideas and uses them to tell a different story.  Indeed, my second reason for disagreeing with Sunshine’s luke warm critical response is that I think it has something genuinely new to say about the themes it tackles.

It is common for people to praise SF films for their special effects and Sunshine has predictably received much praise for the excellent (and comparatively low budget) work done by cinematographer Alwin H. Kutchler as well as director Danny Boyle.  However, while the special effects are undeniably pretty, the cinematography also serves to drive home one of the film’s main thematic riffs about man’s place in the universe.

If you consider the history of SF cinema and the depiction of spaceships you’ll most likely remember moments such as the Blue Danube docking sequence from 2001, the epic battles of  the Star Wars trilogy and maybe the battle at the end of Star Trek II : The Search for Spock.  What is interesting about all of these scenes is that all of them place the space ships in the foreground with the rest of space serving as little more than a diamond-encrusted black background for the action.  This style of visual composition tends to mean that we see the universe as a mere setting for the important battles between the huge man-made constructs in the foreground.  Such an approach suggests that man is very much the centre of the universe.  Sunshine is notable for moving away from such an approach by placing the Icarus II on a direct line between Earth and the Sun.  Vice Einstein, the ship is effectly falling towards the Sun.  Such a simple addition to the traditional means of presenting space travel strangely makes a huge difference as Sunshine’s swooping camera work and frequent filming of humans as tiny insects crawling across a vast construction instantly convey not only a sense of scale but a feeling of falling so intense that, as someone who suffers from vertigo, I found myself clutching the armrest so tightly that my knuckles literally turned white.  This is something I did not even feel during the scene in 2010 when John Lithgow’s character has a vertigo-induced panic attack during a space walk.  By making all movement relative to the Sun, Boyle brilliantly conveys quite how small and insignificant human life really is when compared to the unimaginably vast scale of our solar system, let alone the universe as a whole.  Sunshine is the first film to visually convey what Olaf Stapledon was trying to communicate when he said “Great are the stars and man is of no account to them” in The Last and First Men.

Sunshine is not a fresh look at the question of space exploration but rather a return to a debate that has long since been kept off of our TVs and cinema screens.  Whereas the likes of Firefly and Battlestar Galactica use space as a setting for mundane human dramas, Sunshine turns its mind to much larger questions such as “What is Man’s Place in the Universe?” and as such, I consider it the first great work of cinematic science fiction of the 21st Century.

In attempting to address the question of man’s place in the universe, 2001 and 2010 took their cues, obviously enough, from Arthur C. Clarke.  Despite being a humanist and opposed to organised religion, Clarke’s humanism was always one tainted by mysticism as he seemed to believe that the universe was a place far stranger and beautiful than we can understand.  Those species that did begin to grasp the nature of existence would be so far ahead of us that we might as well consider them as gods.  The end of 2010 is not just the dawning of a new era for man but also the creation of a new religion as we look to a senior alien species for guidance (an approach that would later be viciously attacked in Brin’s Uplift novels that saw mankind fighting for independence from its would-be, neo-colonial gods). Alien, on the other hand, suggested that the universe was an astonishingly hostile and unpleasant place and that no matter how advanced and powerful the human race one day becomes, it will always be haunted by monsters that lurk in the darkness, whether or not we create them.  Event Horizon differs from both of these films by not assuming a humanist universe but rather a spiritual one.  In Event Horizon, our knowledge of the universe thus far is little more than the scratching at the surface of an iceberg.  Below the surface is a spiritual world where damnation and hell are very much real and should we venture out too far then we are doomed to pay the price for our spiritual trespass.

Sunshine’s approach differs from all of these.  The film argues that humanity is utterly insignificant in the grand scale of things but reserves special scorn for those who lose hope (such as the psychologist) or turn to religion (such as Icarus I’s captain) in such situations.  Instead, Sunshine ends with its main protagonist Capa existing in a split second that seems to last for hours as he is trapped inside his detonating bomb.  Staring nuclear annihilation in the face, Capa (and the audience with him) are forced to admit how utterly beautiful the destructive and impersonal forces of the universe can be.  After the ship explodes we see a family building a snow man on a frozen terrestrial landscape that includes the Sydney Opera house.  Capa has sacrificed himself but his family live on and as such, his death has meaning because he has saved the rest of humanity from death at the hands of a fading star.

This approach to man’s place in the universe is nothing short of Existential as Boyle and Garland echo Jean-Paul Sartre who, in Existentialism is a Humanism, decried as cowards those who react to the ultimately meaningless nature of life by turning to religion.  If life is inherrently meaningless then it means that we are free to project onto our lives the meanings that we, rather than some sinister creator-god, choose to embrace.  “Existence precedes essence” said Sartre and this is the message that Sunshine seeks to put forward.   Unlike the cod mysticism of Clarke or the empty despair of the Alien films, Sunshine looks into the nothingness at the heart of existence and smiles appreciatively.

Sunshine is a stunningly directed film that marks a long overdue return to the traditional themes and ideas of big screen science fiction.  As with most substantial cinematic pieces, its plot serves as little more than a coat hanger for the ideas and themes that the director and writer wish to confront but Garland’s collection of borrowed plots and ideas makes for a very attractive hanger indeed as the film zips along barely stopping to smell the roses.  Sunshine’s atheistic narrative and breath-taking cinematography make it a deserving addition to the canon of great SF films.  Let us only hope that it does for space exploration what 28 Days Later... did for zombies.

Comments

[Serdar]

I've read a number of reviews that slammed the film in terribly petty ways -- strongly reminiscent of the out-of-hand dismissals lobbed at "The Fountain". I'm now looking forward all the more to when this opens Stateside.

Thanks once again for a great job of reviewing, as always.

[brian]

Er, did you have to mention how the film ends - I haven't seen it yet!

[Liam Hemmings]

It is a visually stunning film and I agree with a lot of what you said.However, one thing that jarred with me was the supposed crew of this vessel: on the whole they looked and acted like a slightly angst ridden bunch of students. From the very beginning I could not accept the premise that this particular bunch were off to save the world. I think Cillian Murphy is a great actor, but in this not the right stuff I am afraid.