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Review: Sunshine

iF Magazine

20 July 2007

By Abbie Bernstein

28 Days Later star Cillian Murphy and director Danny Boyle re-team for a dose of hard sci-fi...

Sunshine may not play as truly hard sci-fi to the literature crowd, but as English-language films aimed at a mass audience go, it is pretty firm.

It's some time in the far future. People are pretty much the same (regional accents included), but the sun is dying and the world is freezing. There's the possibility of creating a new sun by firing a nuke into the heart of the old, but a previous international space mission vanished off the grid. Several years later, a new spacecraft is dispatched to take up the quest. The task is dangerous but not necessarily fatal—the plan is to fire the nuke from a safe distance, then fly the hell away and get back to Earth. However, all sorts of things start to go wrong even before the crew find something very surprising …

… and no, they don't encounter an alien. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland, who previously collaborated on 28 Days Later... and The Beach, have something a bit heavier in mind. The trouble is, to borrow an analogy from their movie, it's not enough just to have something heavy on hand—it has to be driven into the heart with force. Sunshine, while it has visual flair to spare, has a lot of different tones and elliptical plot mechanisms that prevent us from being fully invested in any of the characters.

We can certainly appreciate Cillian Murphy's dedicated, fairly level-headed Capa (presumably named after the famed combat photographer) and Hiroyuki Sanada's courageous starship captain, but while Murphy is fascinating to watch, Capa's stoicism leaves us little room to be moved. Likewise, the transcendent horror and beauty of looking at the sun full on is something we can accept via visual effects and intellect, but it's a bit much to use as the emotional fulcrum of the whole movie.

Then there's the horror aspect, which crops up later on—again, no aliens, but Boyle and Garland have demonstrated in the past they know how to produce some scary human specimens, as they eventually do here. The adrenaline surge is unquestionable, but it connects to the earlier part of the film at an odd angle, taking both the story and the tone in a somewhat new direction that doesn't feel either as if it's the point the filmmakers wanted to make or as if it's there because they felt things needed livening up.

As a result, we're partly caught up intellectually in the scenario laid out for us, processing what's happening with the characters that are individually likeable and uniformly well-played and partly reacting to the threat/promise of jump scares, unable to focus on any one thing, while being carried along at a pace that allows us to notice.

Sunshineis an intriguing film and a smart one, but it ultimately appeals more to the mind and the eyes than to the heart and viscera.