Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Voyagers now in theaters and Stowaway on Netflix next week, we’re looking to the stars for five days of space movies.
Sunshine (2007)
It’s a joke or a tragedy or maybe a little of both that HAL 9000, the neurotic AI antagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is more human than the humans he’s eventually pitted against. Dave, the machine’s adversary, is a remote representative of our species, and his chilly scientific remove set the tone for a whole genre of men and women floating across the great black canvas of the cosmos. Sunshine, like nearly every Hollywood voyage into the void from the last half century, owes a debt of visual and conceptual influence to Stanley Kubrick’s unforgettable vision, including the presence, naturally, of a PA-system computer companion. Yet in sharp contrast to its famous predecessor, this is a distinctly warm-blooded space odyssey—one animated by the fascinating tension between director Danny Boyle’s enduring interest in everything messy/beautiful about our kind and the ruthless fatalism of frequent collaborator Alex Garland’s screenplay.
Sunshine has the spooky veneer and technobabble of so-called hard science fiction, but it’s really more of a rip-roaring, nuts-and-bolts thriller with some intriguing philosophical baggage. The film is set almost entirely aboard Icarus, a spacecraft bound for the sun. The crew (played by an ace ensemble that includes Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, and Hiroyuki Sanada) has been tasked with restarting the dying celestial body by launching a giant bomb into it—“creating a star within a star.” Their mission unfolds as a daisy chain of breathless cliffhangers. Just about all of them are the products of human error; the decision to drift off course and rendezvous with the first ship sent to accomplish their task creates a domino effect of miscalculations, moral dilemmas, daunting obstacles, and impossible decisions.
At its glowing core, Sunshine is about that age-old squaring of personal against collective need. Each of the astronauts is forced to reckon with a staggering paradox of consequentiality: The future of mankind rests on their shoulders, yet their individual lives are fundamentally expendable, entirely subordinate to the success of the mission. Dwindling oxygen and a dearth of space suits create hierarchical crises, forcing constant tough conversations about who’s more valuable. Rarely does big-boom American sci-fi confront its characters so forcefully with their own mortality and the imperative of sacrifice; by the midway mark, the stakes are entirely on a whole-species scale.
Time has scarcely dimmed Sunshine’s sensorial pleasures: It remains a gleaming, jaw-dropping spectacle, with effects that have aged gracefully and some truly striking big-screen imagery, like a shot of fragile bodies hurtling through space from one open airlock to another. At times, the film leaves you as awestruck as ship psychiatrist Searle (Cliff Curtis), whose growing obsession with witnessing the full, blinding splendor of the sun portends an inevitable tilt into space madness. The score, too, is remarkable—even those who have never docked with this vessel might recognize its most stirring theme, now a staple of trailers looking to invest a forthcoming blockbuster with the promise of emotional power. Boyle, famous for “Lust For Life” chases and the influentially sprinting dead (he even brought a caffeinated restlessness to the plight of a man trapped under a rock), fruitfully tempers his need for speed: This is the best of both words, the director slowing his roll for moments of meditative grandeur while also bringing some of his signature urgency to the genre.
About the ending. Even Sunshine’s most fervent defenders tend to grant that Garland takes the film in a less cerebral direction—what looks for a while like a brainy sci-fi monolith becomes an interstellar slasher at the finish line. Yet this feverish finale, in which Boyle ultimately decides to just go ahead and do his version of Alien, too, is plenty scary and exciting and ravishing, the mad dashes down corridors abstracted into a nightmarish blur. Beyond that, it scarcely breaks with the overarching concerns: A violent standoff at the center of the galaxy is the film’s most primal expression of the war between epic selflessness and self-serving pursuits. Has there ever been a more solipsistic sentiment than a desire to be “the last man alone with God?” As mission-sabotaging priorities go, that eclipses even HAL’s all-too-human motives.
Availability: Sunshine is available to rent or purchase digitally from Amazon, Google Play, Apple, YouTube, Fandango Now, Redbox, DirecTV, and VUDU.
73 Comments
Terrific review. It’s thrilling to see Sunshine get some of the long-postponed admiration it deserves. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen when it premiered, and it was an unforgettable experience.
This was the movie that made me a believer in Chris Evans’ talent. Before that, I had only seen The Perfect Score and Fantastic Four and was pretty nonplussed. He’s so good in this though, and then came Push and Scott Pilgrim and he just kept on going.The movie itself wasn’t my favorite, largely due to the ending, but it is unquestionably beautiful and well-acted.
There’s a lot to like about it. The self sacrifice aspect is kind of unique. How many movies can you name where the protagonists admit they’re doomed before the midpoint?
I think our films have programmed to really not like an ending like that- we always want the fantasy to end with the possibility of getting out, and the idea of “what do we do when there’s no possible good ending” is hard to process in a dramatic film.
Which is why The Break Up is my favorite romantic comedy.Maybe second, next to Down With Love.
Never watched either of them, but I do love Ewan McGregor!
Blame Hollywood. We’ve been forcefed a diet of constant “get out in the nick of time” but this? This is a film about a star. There was no way in the cosmos they were going to get out. Which makes their motivations and actions that bit more realistic – yes, they could stop trying, but they’re doing it for the billions on Earth who are slowly freezing to death. Fuck you, Hollywood. Sometimes the good guys lose.
I have no problem with a downer ending (I love Rogue One), but the problem with Sunshine’s ending isn’t that it is depressing, it’s that it turned a very thoughtful movie into a Friday the 13th style slasher.
Oh yeah, that aspect is probably the worst part of the film. I wouldn’t call it Friday the 13th bad, not even Event Horizon bad; I think the most generous equivalency would be that it’s I Know What You Did Last Summer style slasher. I don’t really know how I’d doctor that script, though, what would you replace that conflict with?
Came to say the exact same thing about Evans in this.Also I remember being blown away by the sound design. Still one of my favorite theater going experiences… right up there with Aquaman on acid.
Good point about Evans. Sunshine is his finest work, I think.(Nonplussed means confused, btw)
It also means unconcerned, unperturbed. But mostly in North America. Seems to have deviated in the early 20th century, and is now widely used to mean both things. Coming from Canada, I was actually surprised it meant confused.
Much like “beg the question”, “nonplussed” is a popular bête noire for language prescriptivists. Usage of it to mean “unperturbed” is common in North America but not elsewhere. Just like when the term was initially borrowed from the Latin in the 16th century with a slant meaning, language continues to evolve irregardless 😉
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/08/nonplussed.html
Indeed, even in the link you provided the NA usage seems to be popping up in the U.K. and Australia. When I was double checking my facts, I found some sites stating that in more recent years more authors out of English speaking Europe are using it in this way as well. It’s kind of funny, because as I said I never knew it meant confused, but I don’t really see the definitions as contradictory. It either means you’re so bewildered you can think of nothing to do, or you care so little you are indifferent to it, and thus do nothing.“…language continues to evolve irregardless 😉” Haha, cute, and very true.
I don’t even remember him in this. Snowpiercer is the scifi movie I know him from.
I actually quite like the shift towards almost Event Horizon style Horror at the end… except that it feels a little rushed. I think they needed to do more to establish the feeling of being “locked in” with this man (this monster), perhaps by having more screens open to the sun so that the light itself became almost like something chasing them, penning them in, etc.I dunno, if anything it feels like they could/should have done more with that, and by leaving it a little threadbare did the end of the movie a disservice.Still really like the film though, obviously.
This is a pretty good take, but at that point, I’d rather have there be some incomprehensible light-assembled avatar of the Sun toying with them, because at least that would demand creativity in the execution. What we got was way too straight-forward.
A solid-light sentient sun avatar would’ve made more sense than a guy whose third degree burns grant him super-strength. I adore this movie anyway for being kind of the opposite of Armageddon, and for taking on themes most movies wouldn’t touch. Still, after a whole movie about how the biggest challenges of the mission are psychological—dealing with pressure, doubt, and the fear of failure when the stakes are the highest imaginable—having the final obstacle be a religious zealot who physically assaults people was an anticlimax. And Danny Boyle trying to gussy the end run up with special effects to make Pinbacker seem like more than just a crazy guy with third degree burns muddied things up and was just annoying, because in the end, he’s just a chattier Jason Voorhees. I think that Pinbacker’s threat was supposed to be as much psychological as physical, but that’s buried under such a thick layer of Danny Boyle “stylish” filmmaking that it doesn’t come through at all.
yes, this movie struck me while watching as the classic kind of movie where they had a great premise, good characters, solid plot up to the end, but no ending. It is called the “Stephen King problem”
Huh – I’d call that a “reverse- Stephen King problem”. I generally find that King stories have unlikable characters and drag on for way too long, but then do something really interesting in last few chapters/pages.
Yes, I thought the movie was heading towards the sun is alive but wanting to die ending, hence that’s why the crew of the Icarus I willingly incinerated themselves on the observation deck.Pinbacker was … well, we already had Weir on the Event Horizon ten years beforehand, hadn’t we?
I thought we were going to get a meditative look at how the sun was alive but wanting to die and that’s why the crew of Icarus I willingly incinerated themselves on the observation deck.But then Pinbacker happened. Kind of disappointed because we could have so much more (we already have an Event Horizon!).
As far as I’m concerned, this is a perfect movie up to the crew’s return from the ghost ship. I have to disagree, Dowd, that there’s anything particularly exciting or scary about the final act. You can practically feel Danny Boyle ripping the steering wheel from Alex Garland’s hands. And that “nightmarish blur” felt more to me like it the editors’ desperate scramble to find a way to make the antagonist scary. But however successful you think it is, you have to admit that it’s a tragedy we didn’t get Garland’s full vision.
Given that Garland wrote 28 Days Later and the novel The Beach is based on, and that he’s collaborated with Boyle repeatedly (and presumably not by turning in a script and then never speaking again), I’m not so sure that there’s some never-filmed #GarlandCut that better reflects his vision. Also, Garland has directed made, what, two movies? One of which… kinda does end its slow-burning psychological exercise with a bunch of scary violence? I don’t think he’s a tragically superior filmmaker to Boyle in the least. (I like them both a lot.)
https://www.indiewire.com/2015/07/interview-alex-garland-reflects-on-his-career-sunshine-28-days-later-sequels-subjectivity-more-262030/
How do you feel about the end of “Sunshine”? Because I know a lot of people have problems with that film.
I do, yeah.Is that a writing compromise, or—
No, it’s holistic. Sometimes when I’m talking about collaboration with collaborators before we work together, I say, “Don’t get this wrong.” When I say collaboration, I’m not saying you’re going to do it all, I’m saying we’re going to collaborate. It will be a partnership, and that’s the beauty of the collaboration. They make it better, and ideally, you also help in making it better. It’s people working together, not working totally separately.That’s also true when things go wrong. When things are elevated, it’s because of a group of people working together, and when things start to fall down, it’s for the same reason. What I can see in “Sunshine,” is I can see unresolved tensions. I can see different movies being made simultaneously. And I can see things that simply could have … It’s so dangerous for me to talk about this.Then I guess I have to ask you, because you haven’t mentioned his name: Danny Boyle. You guys have made some great films together and I would love to see you make more.
I don’t think we will.Really?
No. But I learned an enormous amount from Danny and I respect him hugely. He’s a real director. He’s a real film director. Not all directors are real film directors. He is. He has stunning strengths and abilities. We’re not always completely compatible, because ultimately, what I want to do is put an agenda first. Everything is in service of an agenda. And Danny has a terrific instinct toward viscerality and compulsion.Of course, viscerality and compulsion, if you’re making ‘28 Days,’ then you’re both in a perfect sync and perfectly riffing off each other as collaborators. “Sunshine,” in my mind, was closer to “Ex Machina,” tonally in it had a more reflective quality.Ok, I see then where you might be at odds.
And sometimes viscerality and reflection were fighting for space on that movie. It was like a balance issue. 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. They predated the shoot or editing, and what we were never able to do was to fix the problems in the script. Because we had a different methodology in terms of how that fix might happen. And, it would be completely wrong for me to either state or discreetly imply that the issues in “Sunshine” that exist rest at Danny’s feet. That’s not how I see it. The difficulty was more in agreeing on what the problem was, but disagreeing on the solution.I wouldn’t argue that Garland is a superior filmmaker, but he’s definitely better-versed in the genre.
That’s really interesting — I had no idea they had any kind of creative falling-out, and had assumed they weren’t making movies together because Garland got the bug to do it himself. That said, Garland pretty specifically avoids saying that he had some grand vision for a better ending. Agreeing in the problem but disagreeing on the solution is such a concise, insightful way of putting it that also sort of sidesteps the typical writer-versus-director clashes we’re sort of trained to look for, and take sides in.
I’d also say, even if Garland was dissatisfied with this ending, it’s also not wildly different from elements of 28 Days Later or even his “more reflective” Ex Machina (which I just rewatched last week for… well, check out today’s Watch This!), which has a super-stabby ending! So, you know, sometimes writers can be sorta full of shit even when they’re talented and smart. I personally think it’s weird how bad a rap some films get for trying to be visceral; as we see with something Cherry, it’s not nearly as easy as it looks!
The main thing I remember about this (other than being surprised that the Fantastic 4 guy was pretty good) was noticing how bad so much of the set design was: there were lots of scenes that looked like it was filmed in an old warehouse that nobody had bothered to dress up. It stuck with me, because I don’t usually notice that sort of thing, and really took me out of the movie.
I haven’t seen this film, but watching the preview, something just struck me. Tell me if I’m right or wrong… there’s just something wrong about the cast. They seem to look too much like a bunch of attractive actors playing astronauts, rather than… well, astronauts.
Professor Brian Cox is the inspiration for Cillian Murphy’s character and they look alike.
………OF COX!
When particles and antiparticles collide!
cackled in my bed lol.
You could say that about any movie.
Brain Cox says that they cut out the part where they explained the issues with the Sun as an errant Q-Ball entering the sun and eating it from the inside and replaced it with idiocy about the sun needing to be restarted. The Bomb was designed to overwhelm the Q-Ball, NOT restart the sun. When I watch the film, I substitute the idiocy with the Q-Ball explanation.
Huh, I wish I had heard that before.
Ahh so that’s how we separate them:Brain Cox: Astrophysicist, Keyboard player from D:Ream and my mother’s dreamboat. Brawn Cox: Actor noted for playing bad guys and hard men including the first Hannibal Lekter, Operator of the 6th busiest burger van in Dundee.
Q-Ball?
From the wikipedia page:
In theoretical physics, a Q-ball is a type of non-topological soliton. A soliton is a localized field configuration that is stable—it cannot spread out and dissipate. In the case of a non-topological soliton, the stability is guaranteed by a conserved charge: the soliton has lower energy per unit charge than any other configuration.
As I understand it, it’s a super-stable collection of bosons that can’t be disrupted easily. So I guess Cox is saying that it could be like Ice-9 and sort of infect the sun, so it can no longer conduct fusion? And a focused blast before it gets too big could overcome the stable low-energy state?
So I can kind of understand why they didn’t try to explain that in the movie. Personally, my solution would have been to say there’s a micro black hole detected approaching the sun which will soon start to consume it, but if they move quickly they can use the nuclear bombs to knock it away into space. Yes, it wouldn’t really make much more physics sense, but a black hole eating the sun is something movie-watchers could get pretty intuitively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ball – technical answerhttps://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4eyp37/eli5what_is_a_qball_physics/ – ELI5 answer
Yep. The Q-Ball was a much better plot device than sun-kindling. They could have used the Q-Ball theory and even had a more visual cue for the audience instead of the sun is getting weak and shit.
In all the discussions of scientific inaccuracy of the film, one thing goes missing that bothers me: the treatment of Trey. In the DVD commentary Brian Cox said that it was scientifically accurate because scientists don’t tolerate mistakes, which may be true of theoretical physicists, but I can tell you as a field scientist, you have to expect and plan for mistakes. Idiot proofing is your best friend. The idea that no one would have double checked his work in an important operation is unthinkable. You have to build safety and redundancy into everything. And after the fact, you don’t shun the person who fucked up (assuming they were absolutely trying their best) no matter how mad you are. You need that person to keep on being a part of the team and doing their work.
Username checks out
It’s a great Elvis Costello song about the good US of A
One of my all-time underrated favorites. Great cast, great pacing, direction, atmosphere, cinematography, sound, etc. And I even liked (loved?) the “slasher” twist during the final stretch. Shrug.
I know nobody cares but me, but I believe you meant “solar system” when you said “galaxy”.
I love that the spaceship in this movie is called Icarus II. Because Icarus, the first fly-close-to-the-sun spaceship, didn’t work out for some reason.
Even better, they called the first ship Icaus I.*Really* tempting fate there and fate took the bait!
I’ve decided the higher-ups behind the project named it Icarus as an in-joke because they knew the crew had to die, and assumed a bunch of scientists wouldn’t get a classical reference…
*Icarus IGodDamnIt
I have this movie on blu-ray, I really love Danny Boyle films and this was no exception. But (spoiler alert) while I get that no garden=limited oxygen=they won’t survive the trip home, the way she reacts to it just came off to me as a bit too Poison Ivy at her most cartoonish and ridiculous. Is it just me?
I love love love that movie. Sunshine and Duncan Jones’ Moon made for a great double bill back in 09
I was thinking that this film tracked so close to Event Horizon in a few places that it had to be an accident because if anyone had noticed, I can’t help but feel that they would have changed it.“Seven years ago, a ship disappeared and then a broadcast is received away from/I mean towards the sun. The crew go across because their ship is damaged and find a horrible fate befalled the original crew. A horribly scarred crew member tries to drag them to hell … I mean to heaven and it all ends in a big explosion.”I also found it was really tempting fate calling the ship not only the Icarus but the Icarus I of all things. The Icarus II as the follow up ship was really pushing it.Daedalus was not only the one who invented the wings, he used them properly and got to his destination while Icarus played the fool, contributed nothing and then died because his incompetence and yet he’s the one who everyone’s heard of and Daedalus isn’t? Hardly seems fair now is it?
Could be so nice. But facepalm at the beginning (throw a bomb at the sun to light it up) and facepalm at the end (of course, a sunburn so close would turn you into freddy krueger). Why why why didn’t it just… just… dunno, do interstellar without the love dimension black hole or… what’s with these space movies…??
While only theoretical (combined with being a bit of a stretch), the bomb part was approved by Brian Cox – CERN physicist, not the actor. As for Freddy Krueger… I got nothing.https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a1946/4219685/
Obligatory Alternate Picks For This Week’s Theme Post: Guardians Of The Galaxy 1 & 2—Obvious picks, but these movies put the “Universe” in “Marvel Cinematic Universe.” Moon—The movie that show just how tedious and lonely space can be.Event Horizon—One of the most fucked up mainstream movies I’ve ever seen. Flash Gordon—After Star Wars became a huge hit, Dino De Laurentiis was finally able to make a Flash Gordon movie; which was ironic because George Lucas made Star Wars because he couldn’t buy the Flash Gordon rights from De Laurentiis.
Finally, FINALLY, someone has recommended watching a Marvel movie.
This is one of the few movies I would argue demands a theatrical experience. Good lord, just one of the greatest casts of the early 2000’s.
I’m still annoyed by the promise of a hard-science fiction movie, that then uses oxygen to put out a fire in a spaceship.
I’ve always thought they borrowed the EVA suits from Supernova.
The entire movie is just a long tribute to Dan O’Bannon- first part is Dark Star, last act is Alien.
Reading these comments, I am sooo glad I passed on this flick. Anything even remotely inspired by “Event Horizon” what a STUPID fucking excuse for a movie, even by nineties standards) is D.O.A.
Sunshine is phenomenal and nothing like Event Horizon at all.Also, celebrating your own ignorance is just sad.
I am sooo glad I don’t decide what movies to watch based on AV Club comments from strangers.
I watched it again tonight because of this review. I saw it a couple of times and always liked it until it turned into a monster movie, but I finally figured out what bothers me.It isn’t the villain or the fact it changes tone so quickly, those kind of even make sense given the madness of the enterprise. It is the direction of those chase scenes, which throws away the magnificent space shots that make the movie so much worth rewatching, and it replaces it with stuff that is confused, indistinct, and overly stylized.
One of my favourite science-fiction films. Purely for the fact that the bad guys are human, the visuals are amazing (seriously, Danny Boyle should do more science fiction) and the soundtrack? Orgasmic.And then there’s this little sequence, which is probably my favourite bit in the entire film…
I still can’t decide which movie has my least favorite genre shift: this one or 10 Cloverfield Lane. At least that movie’s abrupt and ludicrous shift to action is only a few minutes while Sunshine’s abrupt and ludicrous shift to horror is like a full third of the movie.
I liked this movie but it did not need the shift to generic action / horror at the end. It’s the same issue Interstellar had IMO. Both movies were fantastic just based on the concept of humans trying to find a way to save their race alone, they didn’t need human antagonists at all.
I saw this in theaters when it came out… no expectations. It was great. Sure the ending gets a bit goofy, but this wasn’t a movie with a plot in 3 acts with a strong thread from start to finish, it was more of a journey. The lack of focus on any one major thing helps it more than hurts it. People get lost in outer space… or find themselves… and you saw it one by one.. I loved it.
I got to see a free preview screening of this movie in 06 with my buddy, before the special effects were finished and it had a name. I felt the lame slasher third act ruined it and there wasn’t much of a spectacle without the effects so I had no real interest in seeing it for real. Maybe I should check it out cause it sounds like the effects are part of the enjoyment.
I literally know of no one who likes the ending. I was so invested in the story right up to the point it became a made for cable slasher movie. It was working beautifully to that point so the sudden thematic and tonal shift made zero sense, and as a result I’ve never had the urge to rewatch it. Such a bummer.
I remember being very disappointed by this movie (although it was better than Soderbergh’s “Solaris” which was also written up here recently). Maybe my expectations were too high. Then again, Ex Machina only ever reaches a fun pop-psych level either…these guys Soderbergh and Boyle are not Tarkovskys. Plus even in good spaceship sci-fi horror it’s rarely good all the way through, “Event Horizon” is a fucking bop for the first reel, if I watch it again I’ll probably just take what I can get.This series should look at that James Spader/Angela Bassett “Supernova” one, and not just because of naked Robin Tunney
Pretty sure I own this film on DVD. I really liked it, but never got around to a second viewing.