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Sunshine

The Scotsman

6 April 2007

By Alistair Harkness

Boyle's sci-fi blaze of glory could easily have crashed and burned

Sunshine, the new film from Danny Boyle, has a great B-movie premise: the sun is dying, the Earth is in the grip of potentially fatal solar winter, and a spaceship with a nuclear payload the "size of Manhattan" is hurtling towards our nearest star in last-ditch effort to give it a jump-start. It's the kind of premise Roger Corman might have cooked up for one of his cheapo exploitation flicks in the 1970s. It's also the kind of premise that could have fuelled one of those touchy-feely disaster blockbusters—Deep Impact, Armageddon, The Core—that were all the rage a few years back. It's therefore a relief to report that Boyle has come at this from a more artful angle and made a valiant attempt to deliver a film that's tense, like Alien, and philosophical (and a bit nutty), like Solaris and 2001.

Such cinematic touchstones might seem a little obvious, but they're also understandable (and probably unavoidable). After all, once you've decided to make a movie set entirely on a space ship, you're somewhat limited in where you can go. The good thing here is that Sunshine frequently transcends its influences. Based on a script by Alex Garland, who penned 28 Days Later… for the director—not to mention the source novel for Boyle's high-profile Hollywood flop The Beach—it's another muscular genre effort with brains, brawn and, literally, a big shining star at the centre of it. Like the super-fast zombies in 28 Days Later…, it's this star that helps distinguish Sunshine from the raft of wannabes out there. Where most sci-fi films—Alien included—build up atmosphere using dark spaces and shadows, Sunshine uses retina-searing lighting schemes to create its terrifying and sinister mood. The sun's blinding intensity, its searing heat, its destructive power, are all capitalised upon to ratchet up the tension, while its mysteries, its beauty and its religious significance play a part in the psychological well-being of the film's protagonists.

In the first instance, though, Sunshine does play out along fairly conventional lines. With no Earth-based preamble, it kicks off 16 months into the quest to reignite the sun. We join an eight-strong international crew of astronauts and scientists, all of whom are just ambiguous enough to keep us guessing - for a little while at least - about the order in which they'll start succumbing to the pressures of the mission. They're travelling on board a remarkable space ship, replete with a self-replenishing oxygen garden, virtual reality Earth rooms and a massive computerised sunshield to prevent them burning to a crisp as they near the sun.

The ship is called the Icarus II, which does seem to be tempting fate a little too much. If you're going to be flying close to the sun, it doesn't seem prudent to name your vessel after a mythological character who plunged to his death doing exactly the same thing. It makes even less sense given that this is the second such mission. Yep, as the opening voice over informs us, a previous attempt has already been made to save civilisation, but the original Icarus disappeared in space, its crew never to be heard from again. That is, until Icarus II rounds Mercury and picks up its distress signal...

It's a plot device straight out of Alien, but it also gives Sunshine its requisite dramatic kick as the parameters of the mission suddenly change. Should they attempt a rescue mission or stay focused on the objective at hand? It's an obvious choice, really. As noted by the Icarus II's most testosterone-fuelled crew member, Mace (played by Fantastic Four star Chris Evans), jeopardising the fate of the planet to embark on a potentially futile rescue op is more than a little insane. Yet, in the grand tradition of science fiction, a credible reason is proffered, and the fate of the mission is put in the hands of Capa (Cillian Murphy), the on-board physicist who designed the ship's thermonuclear payload and is the only one qualified to detonate it. Needless to say he makes the wrong choice, and from that point on, things start to go horribly wrong.

Boyle, on the other hand, makes everything go right, negotiating archetypal genre set-pieces with taut, efficient, shirt-wetting tension and providing the kind of inventive eye-popping visuals that films with two or three times Sunshine's modest budget (reportedly £20 million) somehow never achieve.

It's not a flawless film by any means. Some of the characters are a bit too thinly sketched and a few plot points fall by the wayside. The film's final-act twist, meanwhile, requires a substantial act of faith to go along with it. But it's never dull, and Murphy and Evans do enough heavy lifting on the acting front to see it through, with Murphy especially good at shouldering the burden of being responsible for their predicament while trying to rectify the problem. Even as it heads into stranger, quasi-religious territory, Boyle manages to incorporate it into the action framework he has established with relative ease, dropping in subliminal images and barely giving us a moment to catch our breath, let alone interrogate what's actually happening. It's how I imagine the Solaris remake might have turned out had its producer James Cameron chosen to direct it.

But, while comparisons are inevitable, in its own way Sunshine is a remarkable film. Like 28 Days Later… it reignites a played-out genre, making it smart, terrifying and fun again.