The initially imposing sci-fi drama Sunshine is
actually pretty simple, once you get down to it: Boil away the artful
special effects and the futuristic technobabble, and you’ll find the
reliable, familiar theme of man against nature. The catch, here, is
that “man” is a team of smarty-pants scientists, and “nature” is the
unforgiving sun, which looms over our protagonists, threatening, at
every moment, to incinerate each of them into nothing more than a cloud
of white-hot molecules.
The latest from director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland
(who previously collaborated on the mostly awesome 28 Days Later and the pretty crappy The Beach), Sunshine takes place 50
years from now, with a barren Earth frozen by a solar winter: The sun
is dying, and humanity finds itself staring down a cold, dark death.
Humanity has just one plan, and it is desperate and flawed: Loading a
huge bomb onto a spaceship, the Icarus II, a small team of
scientists will attempt to jumpstart the sun.
To give away more of the plot would be a disservice; suffice to say
that (A) things go wrong, and (B) Boyle and Garland use their
relatively simple concept to delve into themes ranging from religion to
sanity to sacrifice. But mostly, Sunshine is a tense, drawn-out
thriller—much of the film is spent watching characters face horrible,
impossible situations, and the rest is spent watching them live with
the aftermath of their decisions. Boyle is patient and clever, and it
all plays out with a sense of both inexorable doom and dumb hope. None
of this would work without Sunshine‘s solid cast, led by the
always-excellent Cillian Murphy and featuring sharp performances from
Rose Byrne and Chris Evans.
Sunshine‘s not perfect: For a weird spell in the third act,
Boyle decides to try out his skills as a horror director—briefly but
effectively morphing Sunshine from a smart sci-fi thriller into
a dumb teen slasher flick. But that’s a brief blemish on an otherwise
impressive, gorgeous, and nerve-wracking film.
