Director Report Card: Danny Boyle (2007)

 

11. Sunshine

“Millions” did not receive much notice in the United States. For American fans of Danny Boyle, what felt like the real follow-up to “28 Days Later” wouldn't arrive until 2007. What made the film more anticipated by fans of Boyle's zombie thriller is that it was a continuation of many of those same partnerships. “Sunshine” emerged from a script by Alex Garland, marking his third collaboration with the director. Cillian Murphy would return as the leading man. Most exciting, the film would see the team that revitalized the zombie movie trying their hands at another stalwart genre: The science fiction epic. All of which is to say that “Sunshine” was highly anticipated upon release in 2007. For a lot of people, it must've lived up to the hype. In the years since, I've often seen “Sunshine” praised by my fellow film nerds. I, however, was so disappointed with the film when I first saw it, that it changed my whole opinion of its director. Has my opinion changed any in eighteen years?

Fifty years into the future, the entire planet Earth is facing a crisis like never before. Our sun is dying. The world is freezing. A space craft known as the Icarus was sent on a mission to reignite the fading star with a nuclear bomb. They failed, disappearing somewhere around Mercury. Now, a second mission is own its way, the last chance the world has for survival. Icarus II is captained by Kaneda, navigated by Trey, and piloted by Cassie. And the mission is not going well. Physicist Capa and engineer Mace are getting into fights. The oxygen garden manned by biologist Corazon is ignited by an intense ray of sunlight. Upon discovering the abandoned Icarus I, the team detours to gather the first bomb from this other vessel, giving themselves two chances to save Earth. Kaneda is killed, Trey has a mental breakdown, and the ship is not left with enough oxygen to complete the mission. They dock with Icarus I to find its crew incinerated within and an unworking bomb. An explosion follows, leading to the death of two more crew members. As the Icarus II carries its sole payload to the sun, more unexpected dangers will threaten a mission that seems increasingly hopeless. 

Garland would be inspired to write “Sunshine” after researching the inevitable heat death of the universe. The writer and director spent a year fine-tuning the script, going through over thirty drafts. Scientific advisors were hired to ensure that the movie was as plausible as possible. This included a professor of particle physics regularly giving the cast and crew lectures on the topic at hand. This makes “Sunshine” a clear example of what is called “hard sci-fi.” There is no fantastical technology like faster-than-light travel, teleportation, or hyper-sleep. No aliens or exotic theories are present. That didn't stop “Sunshine” from being picked apart by real world scientists. The death of our star is due to a Q-ball – a type of theoretical particle phenomenon that I'm definitely not smart enough to explain – being caught within our sun. That wouldn't be possible, apparently, nor could a single nuclear device reignite a dying star. Nevertheless, the film is still a lot more realistic than most movies about space travel and intergalactic disaster. 

As any astronaut or cosmologist or astrophysicist will tell you, space is big. The characters in “Sunshine” are utterly isolated from their friends and family at home, uncertain if their messages are even reaching them. They have been on this mission for years now, disconnected from what is happening on their frozen world. More than anything else, space is incredibly dangerous. This is the idea that “Sunshine” emphasizes the most. A minor miscalculation can cause a calamity. A stray ray of sunlight is enough to ignite the oxygen store within the shuttle. In other words, space sucks. The entire population of the planet Earth is counting on their success but the team is surrounded by peril at every turn. I don't know if there's anything “harder” in science fiction than emphasizing that space travel is insanely dangerous. 

A space mission being constantly beset by misfortune and calamity probably would've been enough to make a suitably dramatic film. Accordingly, “Sunshine” focuses its narrative entirely on the ship. We see very little of how the sun slowly dying has effected life on Earth. However, the script never lets us forget that saving Earth is the entire purpose of this mission. That creates an apocalypse that is ultimately a bit too conceptual to get your brain around. Obviously, we know resurrecting the sun to save all life on Earth is important... But it would've been nice if “Sunshine” showed us that a little more than it simply told us that. A film about the sun fading out, Earth slowly succumbing to increasing cold and unending winter, strikes me as a lot more interesting than a movie about the mission to reignite the sun. With the script so stubbornly refusing to give us a sense of what is at stakes here, it leaves “Sunshine's” narrative without much tension. 

There's another reason why I struggle with becoming invested in “Sunshine.” I don't care about any of these characters. The film has an ensemble cast of about eight characters, which doesn't seem like a lot. However, the script splits time between a few of them, never truly establishing a protagonist to center the audience. Frustratingly, few attempts are made to develop these characters beyond their role on the ship. Chris Evan's James Mace is an engineer and perpetually angry. Michelle Yeoh's Corazon cares a lot about her plants. Cliff Curtis' Searle has an eccentric fascination with sunlight. Most of the rest of the crew don't get that much development, Rose Byrne's Cassie merely being the pilot and Troy Garity's Harvey never emerging as anything more than the second-in-command. Only their positions on the ship, their names, and the various famous faces playing them distinguishes them.

The characters in “Sunshine” are so indistinct that I often have trouble remembering which one is which. The film often has them wearing bulky space suits that obscure their faces, making it harder to remember who is who. That is a big problem when almost the entire film is about slowly killing off the cast. “Sunshine” repeatedly reminds us how many people are on the Icarus II, how many are needed to complete the mission, and how much oxygen is left to support that number. With every additional accident and death, their chances for success diminishes further. Never mind that their odds of actually getting to the sun and reviving it are low to begin with. Understandly, being on a suicide mission to save the entire fucking solar system has left the entire crew in pretty grumpy moods. This means “Sunshine” starts out in a grim place, tonally, and only grows more fatalistic as it continues. When combined with characters that are difficult to be invested in, it makes the entire film feel like a miserable slog. 

“Sunshine” would see Boyle collaborating with cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler for the first time. Küchler was best known, at the time, for his work on documentations like “One Day in September” and low budget dramas like Lynne Ramsay's “Ratcatcher.” It was his fifth collaboration with editor Chris Gill, who had been cutting Boyle's films since “Strumpet” and was crucial in designing the frantic visual style of “28 Days Later.” Gill's quick cuts and Küchler's gritty style do not make for the smoothest combination. This might just be a me thing but I genuinely have a lot of trouble following “Sunshine” simply on a visual level. This might be because “Sunshine” is often focused on creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, sticking us inside the helmets of these space suits and the tight, dark corners of the ship. Or maybe I'm simply stupid or something. Either way, throughout this viewing, I often lost track of where the characters where, the lay-out of the ship, and the position of the vessel in relation to the vastness of the stars and planets around it. 

I'm referring simply to the basic look of the film. That doesn't include the flashy, stylized flourishes that Boyle, Küchler and Gill also include. Upon entering the Icarus I for the first time, split-second images of the deceased crew flash on-screen. That didn't effect my ability to follow the story. In fact, maybe it was a little cool. However, in its last third, “Sunshine” introduces an annoying visual quirk. Every time a particular character is on a scene, the images become washed-out, blurry, pulsating, and distorted. The idea is obviously to up the tension, making the villain seem as if he's effecting the reality around him. Unfortunately, it also makes the movie increasingly difficult to follow. The climax of “Sunshine” left me baffled to the point that I had to re-read the Wikipedia plot synopsis afterwards to understand what was going on. 

You might have noticed I said “villain” above, in a story where the opposing force would seem to be a natural disaster and not an individual. With a little over thirty minutes left to go before end credits roll, “Sunshine” makes a massive narrative shift. Throughout most of the movie, I was under the impression that Boyle's main inspiration where grand, technical space exploration stories like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Silent Running.” Instead, it turns out that “Sunshine” was most obviously inspired by “Alien.” In its final act, the film suddenly introduces a villain. How he gets into the ship is left unexplained. How he continues to pursue the remaining characters seems difficult to determine. How he survives the wounds that turned him from a normal man and into a monster seems implausible. It is a big shift in the narrative that catches the audience off-guard.

And that could've worked. Sure. Bigger swings than that have proven compelling before. Boyle and Garland have made wild shifts in their films before, to varying levels of success. However, what “Sunshine” does after suddenly thrusting a visceral, physical threat into the story is rather baffling. This sci-fi thriller about the end of the world, for some reason, becomes a slasher movie. That's not an exaggeration. The last third is devoted to a hideously deformed villain, who rambles like a lunatic, working his way through the remaining cast and killing them one by one. Like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees before him, he repeatedly pops back up after seemingly being defeated, relentlessly following the final girl and survivor boy. He survives a number of injuries that would've killed any normal person, before finally perishing in a spectacularly gory fashion. Now, I love a good slasher movie. Truthfully, I love a lot of bad slasher movies too. There aren't too many subgenres I have more of a built-in affection for than a trashy, gory, body count flick. However, this sudden shift has always struck me as such a severe change in direction that it leaves “Sunshine” completely unmoored in its final act. 

“Sunshine” starting out as a very high-minded film concerned with highly technical scientific details, only to end up as a trashy genre exercise at the last minute is a trick that was always going to be hard to pull off. Unfortunately, “Sunshine” continues to operate as if it's a profound meditation on various serious topics even after becoming a murder spree. The villain is motivated by apparent visions from God, believing humanity is doomed and it is wrong to try and save us. This ties into the ideas throughout the film, of human spirit's ability to always find a goal that keeps us moving forward. It ends up feeling more like unearned pretensions than anything else. “Sunshine” motions at broader, philosophical themes without making any real statements about them. 
 

“Sunshine” was an expensive film to make, at least by the standards of the kind of movies Boyle was usually making up to that point. Andrew Macdonald had to cobble together the additional funds for the forty million dollar budget from a variety of sources. Ultimately, the film fell short of that goal at the box office. After making “Sunshine,” Danny Boyle said he was no longer interested in working in the science fiction genre, describing production as a “spiritually exhausting experience.” That would suggest that the entire process was not a satisfying ordeal for the director or producer. In time, however, “Sunshine” would win a a cult following. People seem to love it now. I guess I must remain the odd man out on this one. “Sunshine” has big ideas and an interestingly massive scope but the film repeatedly makes decisions that alienate me as it goes along. [Grade: C-]