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The Feeble Glow of Sunshine

Daily Yomiuri

14 April 2007

By Atsuko Matsumoto

Floating alone in deep space until you freeze to death sounds sad enough, but being incinerated by the sun would also be a cruel fate. Which would be less painful? The sci-fi movie Sunshine poses this hopefully hypothetical question using a far-fetched scenario—50 years from now, life on Earth is in peril as the sun is dying.

To save the planet, eight experts in various fields are dispatched to the sun on the super high-tech spaceship Icarus II, which carries a nuclear payload designed to reignite the star.

Sunshine is the latest film from Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), again teamed up with producer Andrew Macdonald and writer Alex Garland, and starring Cillian Murphy—the same team responsible for 28 Days Later... (2002). But unlike the smash hit zombie flick, this near-future story fails to offer even a hint of realism at any point.

Although the plot of 28 Days Later... was bizarre almost beyond imagination, showing central London emptied by a horrific epidemic that turns ordinary people into flesh-crazed monsters, the film magically transformed viewers' skepticism into a pure fear that it could almost happen.

Sunshine, however, mainly develops in the dimly lit spaceship and doesn't depict what it's like to live on Earth under the dying sun, making the seriousness of the situation and the crew's endeavor unconvincing.

The production team seemingly put great effort into making the concepts more realistic by littering the dialogue with scientific jargon. But the technobabble just sounds pseudoscientific, especially in the latter half with the sudden appearance of "the additional crew member"—a plot development that will probably leave most audiences baffled.

Because of this unexplained interruption by the extra but key character, a film that was posing as a human drama about the crew's internal conflicts unexpectedly turns into a science fiction adventure of the most routine kind.

The film could have become a good human drama. But to do so, the crew members' characters should have been the main focus, particularly when viewers have to put up with nearly two hours of watching the same spaceship set.

Boyle, however, avoids providing straightforwardly good and evil characters, as seen in other films set in closed environments, such as Cube (1997). Instead, he tries to invest each character with complex personalities—such as physicist Capa (Murphy), who appears to be kind and philosophical, but is simultaneously cold and cruel—but generally kills them off before there's time to make them believable.

Just as in many real-life space missions these days, the cast comes from various backgrounds—Australia, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand and the United States. So that they could get to know each other, Boyle is said to have asked the actors to live together in a student dormitory for two weeks prior to the shooting.

Maybe thanks to this, Hiroyuki Sanada, as Captain Kaneda, carries himself with real commander's dignity during the cinematic voyage. Unlike other Japanese actors featured in Hollywood movies of stories set in Japan, Sanada's nationality is here incidental, allowing him to perform with real ease and modesty. In this, Sanada has pioneered a new field for Japanese actors trying to work at an international level.

Unfortunately, the others on the Icarus II don't stand out, failing to develop their qualities or win over the audience in the course of the story.

So, what is this film really about? Is Boyle trying to tell us that it is folly for mere humans to challenge God's works? More than 10 years after the British director shocked the world with the sensational Trainspotting, many of his admirers might be disappointed to find such a typical Hollywood message amid such a cliched plot.

If the message given by the mysterious additional character is the core of the story, whether or not to find it spiritual, religious or merely cheap is up to you.

Lacking the trademark Boyle edginess that once kept audiences glued to the screen, Sunshine is ultimately hard to digest.