Sunshine

Sci-fi movies are rarely good because they are usually weighed down by ridiculous plots. Director Danny Boyle’s Sunshine fails as a sci-fi film, shines as a psychological drama and then crashes to the ground as it turns into a horror flick.

Sunshine follows eight astronauts on their ill-fated mission to re-ignite the sun. Seven years ago another group of astronauts had attempted the same mission but was lost in space, all presumed dead.

The first third of the movie is slow and very Alien-like. The eight astronauts have been in flight for a few years and are getting close to the sun. We see their mundane everyday life on the spaceship. There are a lot of scientific mumbo jumbo explaining the background story and setting up the premise. I don’t know if any of those scientific terms make any sense to real-life scientists, but at least writer Alex Garland does build up a consistent technical logic at this point of the movie.

The interesting part really starts during the second third of the movie. The crew receives a distress signal from the first spaceship. They are faced with the dilemma of whether to approach the other ship or continue on their own course. Here each personality starts to emerge and the tension among the crew members slowly reaches a boiling point. The decision-making process is nerve-racking since each one can be a life-or-death choice. Garland and Boyle are clearly fascinated with exploration of human nature under duress. How do we take responsibility for our decision? Does good-for-all-mankind justify killing one person? What is man’s relation to God when we have means to explore all these new territories in the universe? How do one feel and act when he finds out that they may never be able to get back to earth? Boyle has a couple of on-the-edge-of-your-seats action scenes as the astronauts conquer one obstacle after another, but mainly this part of the movie is really more of a psychological thriller than a sci-fi picture.

Unfortunately, during the last third of the film, Boyle and Garland go back to the most recent genre they had explored together: horror as in their last collaboration 28 Days Later. They completely lose all the credibility they have built up by that point and actually seem to have given up making sense. The movie becomes a slasher in tradition of Scream combined with Boyle’s quick blurry editing. It is almost visually impossible to distinguish what is going on screen.

Boyle has an international ensemble cast for Sunshine. My favorite Japanese actor from my favorite Japanese samurai movie The Twilight Samurai, Hiroyuki Sanada, plays the captain of the ship. Cillian Murphy is the physicist, Michelle Yeoh the biologist, Chris Evans and Troy Garity the pilots. No one really shines or sucks here. They all struggle with the technical lingo they have to utter, but are reasonably convincing in emotional situations.

One big attraction in almost all sci-fi film is the spectacular images and cool gadgets. In Sunshine, understandably we are exposed to a lot of, what else, bright sunshine. After viewed once or twice, the brilliant sunlight feels a bit redundant and stale. If you are into knives, you may enjoy the blade-twisting knife as a fantastic future contraption.

In the end, Sunshine is likely to end up just another solar eclipse in the vast movie sky.