Sunshine 2007

Directed By: Danny Boyle
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Hiroyuki Sanada, Mark Strong. Benedict Wong, Michelle Yeoh,

Danny Boyle is potentially Britain’s greatest director working today. There are few possible competitors. Shane Meadows and Michael Winterbottom are two obvious choices. But Danny Boyle seems to have mastered the art of switching seamlessly between genres and working with extremely commercial ideas without sacrificing his artistic integrity. Not something that’s easy to do. But Boyle is no master of cinema. Yet he has made Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later, three of the best British films of the last two decades. And yet Sunshine seems to be the film which defines Boyle’s style and ability most adequately.

The science of Sunshine may be pretty preposterous. 50 years from the now, the Sun is dying, and Earth has been plunged into an eternal winter which has lasted for about a decade. 7 years earlier a mission was sent to “re-ignite” the star and now Icarus II, a second ship has been sent to finish the job. Anybody who has seen Alien, Event Horizon or The Core will understand what happens next. But unlike most film of this nature, Sunshine is genuinely good and more importantly visually stunning. The Sun, which has a strange hold over various members of the crew, is a massive, all encompassing light which fascinates crew members taking on the role of deity as the film progresses. This is probably the smartest and most intriguing aspect of the film. No one knows how space travel at that distance will affect humans, being so far away from Earth that it’s no longer visible. The cast also helps the believability with Chris Evans, Cillian Murphy, Gong Li and Hiroyuki Sanada showing great stoicism when discussing the cost of the mission. No life is about to be saved at the risk of the failure. It’s these confrontations which highlight the plight of these people enclosed for years in a small claustrophobic environment, and the set design, whose closest point of reference is clearly Alien. Gradually, as you’d expect things start going wrong. These brilliant minds realise that against the mighty force of nature and the universe their infinite wisdom is useless and its not long before every decision seems to be the wrong one, despite being made for supposedly right and logical reasons.

As decisions and their consequences mount, the test of putting someone’s life above the mission and the effects of these decisions begin to take control of the crew and although they staunchly stick to the mission, the question of what cost human life has and more importantly and profoundly, how do you weigh up that cost when you may never know if the mission is a success, are thrust to the forefront of the story. Characters are forced to sacrifice themselves for the good of the mission and where most films fall flat on their face with uninspiring deaths; Danny Boyle and long time collaborator Alex Garland do a fantastic job of delivering shocking and realistic but also narratively driven deaths for their characters.

Stylistically as well Boyle uses every trick he can think of to create the illusion that we are far away from the laws of physics which govern Earth. Some critics criticised the film for not having a point of reference back on Earth but that wouldn’t have enabled to audience to engage with the themes and ideas the film looks at. The cost of human life can always be weighed up by audiences if we know what life is like back on Earth. This way we have to draw our own conclusions. Boyle and cinematographer Alwin Kuchler create a disorientating experience with out of focus, shaking cameras and along with the haunting music create an environment which only exacerbates the mental torture our characters endure.

The film moves closer and closer to formulaic cliché as the film reaches its climax and the story runs out of philosophical ideas in favour of a tense, explosive finale. This partly works, partly fails, as your reminded of how many times this has happened before and how bad it was when it came. But this is a blockbuster movie. A film which, by its very definition, demands high octane action sequences and a conclusion that feels satisfactory.

Ultimately though Boyle has aimed too low in his attempts to create a science fiction masterpiece. Comparisons to other films of similar thematic ideas such as 2001 A Space Odyssey and Solaris fall short and leave this film lost somewhere in between those heavyweights of cinema and inferior sci-fi horror such as Event Horizon. Boyle should be proud to have added another string to his bow and showed that he can quite easily slip between genres, but his next effort will have to be something much more cinematic mature and unique if he is gain the mantel of a great British filmmaker.