Sunshine: Let’s Contemplate the Flaming Metaphor in the Sky - Reactor

Sunshine (2007). Directed by Danny Boyle. Written by Alex Garland. Starring Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, and Michelle Yeoh.

Regular readers of this column know that I tend to be forgiving when it comes to silly science in sci fi films. I don’t mind movies that have bad science or impossible plots or outlandish premises. Sometimes I seek such movies out! I went to see The Core (2003) in theaters, on purpose, when I was a geophysics graduate student. It’s a terrible movie. I laughed a lot.

Also, as somebody who is both fairly scientifically literate and a sci fi writer, I love the challenge of thinking about ways to make ridiculous ideas plausible. That sort of creative problem-solving is fun, even though sometimes the best solution is just to handwave it and decide not to explain.

All of which is to say: I really, truly, genuinely do not mind that the premise of Sunshine is “the Sun is going out.”

It’s ridiculous, yes. You don’t have to be a solar physicist to know that. It turns out there is some backstory to the setup that never made it into the movie. The explanation comes from some of the weirder corners of quantum physics: the Sun’s death can be blamed on a Q-ball, a theoretical “lump” of bosons formed during the Big Bang that could “eat” the Sun from the inside.

Just so we’re clear, this is not something that would happen, even if Q-balls are ever proven to be real, but there’s scientific handwaving, then there’s quantum scientific handwaving, so it’s really not important. We’ve all gone along with far sillier things in sci fi films.

The Sun is going out, and people have to throw a bomb at it to fix it. That’s the premise of Sunshine.

We join eight astronauts aboard Icarus II, the second mission to attempt jump-starting the Sun with an enormous bomb, after Icarus I fell mysteriously silent. This second mission carries a “stellar bomb” designed by physicist Robert Capa (played by Cillian Murphy, years before he win an Oscar for playing another bomb designer in another movie), who is also along for the ride. When the crew pick up a distress signal from Icarus I, they decide to go and check it out, mostly in hopes of acquiring a second enormous bomb in case the one they are carrying doesn’t work.

Of course, things start to go wrong. The captain (played by Hiroyuki Sanada) dies, their garden—and therefore their oxygen supply—is imperiled, and when they finally reach Icarus I they learn its crew is dead and they can’t use its bomb as a backup anyway.

When the crew is down to its last four members and determined to finish the mission, they get a surprise visitor in the form of the captain of the first Icarus, Pinbacker (played by Mark Strong beneath so much burn makeup), who tries to sabotage the mission, as he sabotaged his own, because he thinks the Sun is a god and it’s better to let humanity die than throw bombs at god. Or something like that; the details are a bit muddled. The character is explicitly a representation of a specific type of extremist that really only exists in fiction. (Real extremists mostly don’t become raving Sun-worshipping space lunatics; they just get elected to Congress and systematically strip people’s rights away.)

But Pinbacker fails, and the mission of Icarus II succeeds, with Capa surviving just long enough to set off his bomb. There is a brief tag at the very end to show the sun growing brighter in apocalyptically-snowbound Sydney, Australia, so we know humanity will be all right.

I know this movie has many ardent fans and defenders, so we’ll just get this out of the way: I wanted to like Sunshine a lot more than I did. Even typing up that brief summary, I kept thinking, “Man, there is so much fun stuff in here, but…”

I don’t hate it! I like a lot of it, loved some parts of it. It has a lot going for it. The production design by Mark Tildesley and cinematography by Alwin Küchler are gorgeous; there are many scenes and images that are downright breathtaking. The cast is fantastic across the board, which should not be a surprise with that roster; a pre-Captain America Chris Evans is a particular standout as the guy everybody should listen to even when he’s being an asshole. There are some wonderfully tense moments and events, from rational moral quandaries to good old-fashioned jump scares. A lot of people have trouble with the tonal shift of the ending, but it really doesn’t bother me. I gasped with delight when Icarus (voiced by Chipo Chung) told Capa there was an extra person on board.

There’s so much in this movie that’s incredibly well done, but it doesn’t quite come together into something truly great. It gets in its own way and ends up missing the mark. That’s so much more frustrating than a film that never comes close at all. I can easily enjoy and move on from a mediocre movie that was only ever going to be mediocre, but a movie with moments of brilliance that don’t quite gel is going to bother me forever.

After I watched Sunshine and started reading about it, I learned a curious thing: Based on things they’ve said in interviews over the years, it sure seems like director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland carry the same frustration.

Before we get into that, I’m going to cast us all back to my own teenage years in the mid-1990s, when I was a not-sheltered-but-certainly-not-worldly teenager living in a hotbed of white Middle American conservative evangelicalism. I did not come from a strict family, but my best friend did. Even so, this was the ’90s, and we were good kids, so her parents didn’t ask too many questions when we went to see a movie at the mall one weekend. Before the internet, the only information we had for choosing a movie was newspaper reviews and scattered word-of-mouth. Which is how we ended up watching Trainspotting (1996) without having any idea what it was about except, maybe, something about Scotland?  

A little ways into the film—you all know exactly when this happened—my friend leaned over and asked if we should leave. I think she wanted to, but I wasn’t about to go anywhere, so we didn’t. We stayed for the whole movie and walked out of the theater raving, with absolutely no regrets, because Trainspotting is awesome. (I’m pretty sure my friend lied to her parents about what we saw that day.)

Like a lot of people, Trainspotting was my introduction to the works of Danny Boyle. It might be kind of hard to remember now, as the context of what people find shocking in pop culture has evolved since 1996, but everybody had something to say about Trainspotting when it came out, from the pearl-clutching moral scolds to the exultant cinephiles. It was Boyle’s second movie, following the 1994 crime film Shallow Grave, and it launched him into the ranks of directors people would pay attention to.

Among those paying attention were the producers of the fourth film in the Alien franchise, Alien: Resurrection (1997), who approached Boyle as a possible director. Boyle was very interested, but he has since said he didn’t feel ready to take on a project that would require so much visual effects work. In retrospect, one can see how going from The Worst Toilet in Scotland to the Alien franchise might be a bit daunting, so we are forever left wondering what a Danny Boyle Alien movie might have looked like. (After a few other big-name directors turned it down, Alien: Resurrection was taken on by Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.)

Boyle instead made A Life Less Ordinary (1997), which nobody saw, but it earned him and producer Andrew Macdonald enough for them to buy the rights to The Beach, the 1996 debut novel of twenty-six-year-old English writer Alex Garland. (I’ve never read The Beach, nor have I seen the film based on it, because I had a college roommate who was obsessed with Titanic and I refused to watch anything with Leonardo DiCaprio on principle.) Garland didn’t write the screenplay for The Beach, but it did serve as his introduction to Boyle, and he went on to write the screenplay for the first of the three movies they would make together.

That film was, of course, the much-beloved 28 Days Later (2002), which is largely credited with having revitalized the zombie horror genre—although Garland himself has given that credit to the 1996 video game Resident Evil (which was also adapted into a film in 2002). He also cites John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids as inspiration, and I was going to make a joke about how much I want Garland to make a movie about terrifying plants, then I remembered that he’s already done so because Annihilation (2018) exists.

(Confession! I’ve also never seen 28 Days Later, or Weeks, or Years. We’ll probably do a zombie month in this film club at some point, and I will have to watch all the zombie movies I’ve been avoiding for most of my life.)

Nobody was really expecting a depressing zombie movie-slash-political allegory to hit it big, which in retrospect seems like a big miss on the part of people who thought they had their fingers on the pulse of pop culture. But 28 Days Later was a huge success, and Boyle and Garland got to work on their second film. (The third wouldn’t come until many years later, with this year’s 28 Years Later.)

Garland has described a few sources of inspiration for the ideas behind Sunshine. He was fascinated by the idea of the heat death of the universe, which I find extremely relatable. Who among us has not sat around contemplating the heat death of the universe? It’s one of my favorite things to do. He’s been quoted in some articles as saying he was also intrigued by “an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based, atheist perspective,” although I can’t find the original context of that statement. It’s probably out there somewhere, but Garland talks about his ideas and his work frequently and in-depth, and ain’t nobody got time to sift through all that on a weekly column deadline. So I don’t know what article he was talking about or what specific perspective he was drawing from, although I do think it’s clear from other interviews and his full body of work that he is, and always has been, interested in putting his characters up against science-derived challenges that don’t care about them or their survival.

Garland and Boyle spent a year or so revising and rewriting the script, and that’s where things get interesting. According to things they have said, they never quite got the writing to where they wanted it to be. In an interview in 2015, Garland spoke rather plainly about his disappointment with the film: “But what I really want to underscore strongly, is the most significant failings in Sunshine, from my point of view, were not in Danny’s direction, they were in the script.” He also said, “The difficulty was more in agreeing on what the problem was, but disagreeing on the solution.”

They both very strongly wanted the movie to say something, and they both came into it knowing they could make tense, disturbing sci fi horror that says something, because that’s what they had done in 28 Days Later. But it proved more difficult with Sunshine. Garland wanted a more ambiguous and less optimistic ending, while Boyle wanted to provide some hope while still engaging with the sense of responsibility and obligation the characters feel. They both wanted the story to contain themes of religious allegory—the whole “the Sun is viewed as a god” thing is not subtle—but the handling of that facet ends up mostly shoehorned into the abrupt slasher-movie shift at the end, to the point where there are viewers who come away certain the ending takes a supernatural turn.

Their disagreements while making the film led to the two of them falling out for a while, although it seems to have been fairly low-drama falling out by movie business standards. They have since made up; Garland reached out to Boyle when he was making Ex Machina (2014) to get his opinion on the film, which eventually led to them realizing they did want to work together again. That’s how 28 Years Later happened.

I don’t know what Sunshine would be like if they had been able to agree on the story they wanted to tell and how to tell it, and then worked out all the writing tangles to get there. I don’t think it would have been hugely different, because it’s already skillfully made, beautiful to look at, and enjoyable to watch—but the storytelling still has cracks.

I don’t generally exert a lot of effort nitpicking films, because I don’t find it very enjoyable. But sometimes I catch on something that simply doesn’t fit into the framework of the movie, something that is so distracting it affects how I watch the rest of it, and that’s what happened here. Some people might be surprised to know that it has nothing to do with Pinbacker’s surprise appearance at the end. I actually love a surprise interloper on a spaceship! I think that could have worked just fine, slasher-flick stabbings and all, with some changes to what leads up to it.

No, the cracks that bothered me came much earlier, right when Icarus II began having all of their problems.

The film mostly puts a great deal of effort into plausibility, even while fully aware it was stretching the boundaries of science. The actors were required to read about physics and learn about living in space, NASA engineers and psychologists were brought on, and particle physicist Brian Cox was consulted about the more esoteric aspects of the physics.

And the thing that bugs me in that context is that I simply didn’t believe that changing course would be done by the navigator (Benedict Wong’s character Trey) alone. In the middle of the night. While everybody else was asleep. Without anybody or the ship’s computer checking his work. Without following a checklist of steps, even though we all know astronauts have technical checklists even for using the toilet. Without the captain or pilot (Rose Byrne’s Cassie) present. Without the entire crew watching tensely to make sure things go smoothly, because they are all aware of the import of this choice after they discussed it in depth.

I just don’t buy it, and from the dialogue used to justify the scene it feels like the filmmakers don’t buy it either, and that annoys me. It annoys me because that meant I spent the rest of the movie unwillingly conscious of the puppet masters pulling the strings to maneuver the characters into danger. I am well aware that this is an ungenerous way to watch a movie. Characters are storytelling devices maneuvered by the writer for specific reasons. But I really wanted Sunshine to be better about setting up those reasons.

I will say, however, that learning about how and why Garland and Boyle struggled with the story made me appreciate it more. Every story has a puppet master, and movies have several, but usually when we see evidence of the string-pulling it’s down to mundane movie business stuff, such as making more money or satisfying a studio or fitting mainstream audience expectations. It’s a lot more interesting, and a lot more illuminating, when the strings are visible because two very skilled and thoughtful artists are pulling in slightly different directions, with goals that don’t quite overlap, and both know that attempts at compromise are weakening what they are trying to say.

What do you think about Sunshine? It’s a film that still generates strong reactions, even nearly twenty years later, and I understand why! What do you think about that much-debated ending?

Next week: We’re almost finished with our cinematic tour of Bad Things Happening in Space, but we’ve got one more to go with the Swedish-Danish film Aniara. Watch it on Kanopy, Hoopla, Roku, and more.