The year is 2057 and our distant sister Sun is dying. The small crew of Icarus II are nearing Mercury as they hurdle towards the sun to deliver a nuclear payload which will "re-ignite" the star and thusly save mankind. This second incarnation of the mission was brought about because the first neared the Sun and was then never heard from again. The ship itself is a long needlelike vessel with antennae rotating along its axis and a massive heat shield out front that protects the ship as it approaches the Sun. The shots of Icarus II from outside the ship are truly awe-inspiring; from the short fly-by cutaways to the extended scenes, the Sun looms ominously in the background. Director Danny Boyle and his DP Alwin Küchler took great advantage of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Not only are the exterior shots gorgeously panoramic, but many interior shots place characters (and sometimes just their faces) at the extreme ends of the frame. This is a film not to be missed on the big screen.
Towards the beginning of the film, we witness the crew sharing a meal. There is some light-hearted banter but tension as well with one crewmember taking complaints about the dinner directly to the cook who becomes irritated. They eat at a table whose surface is lit and anyone who has seen Alien will find him- or herself feeling déjà vu. Lighting from below casts the crew's faces in a pallid miasma which mirrors their states of mind. Having been aboard the ship for years with just one another for company and the fate of humanity in their hands, they are drained of any exuberance and are just ready to complete the mission. Their faces stand in stark contrast to the photo of the crew that hangs on one of the walls. Presumably taken shortly after lift-off, it features brilliant colors and a host of smiles.
Hiroyuki Sanada plays Captain Kaneda. With his straight hair and scruffy beard, I again thought of Alien as he looked suspiciously like Tom Skerritt's Dallas. The ship's botanist is Coraxon as played by Michelle Yeoh of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame. She tends to the ship's greenhouse which provides food and oxygen. Cillian Murphy is Capa, a young physicist on whose shoulder the burden of detonating the payload falls. The crew is rounded out by Harvey, Cassie, Mace, Trey, and Searle who is the ship's psychologist and responsible for the crew's mental health. This is the same man who grasps at fleeting moments of transcendence in the observation deck by staring at the Sun through windows tinted just enough to keep him from going instantly blind. ("It's invigorating, like taking a shower in light.")
Icarus II approaches Mercury as the plan is to use the gravity of the planet to slingshot it further on towards its destination. (A trick used in 2010.) As it approaches, a signal is detected which is identified as the distress call from Icarus I. Searle suggests that their course be altered so as to make contact with the stranded vessel to find out if its payload remains intact. The reasoning being that two massive nuclear matches are better than one. This deviation brings out high emotions amongst the crew but the clam, pensive Kenada defers the decision to Capa as he is the physicist. Capa eventually comes to agree with Searle and a rendezvous is plotted.
He and Cassie are having what is perhaps the closest thing to a tender moment when Icarus II violently shudders. Trey had made the modifications for the rendezvous but he had neglected to alter the angle of the heat shield. This prompts an extravehicular walk by Kaneda and Capa to examine the shield. I absolutely adored the spacesuits. They were these huge, bulky things with a welder's mask attached and were a million miles away from anything sleek. As they are out repairing the broken panels of the shield, the ship's computer does a HAL and refuses to let the crew maneuver the ship so that Kaneda and Capa are out of the Sun's fiery gaze. Kaneda sacrifices himself although the physicist survives. As the captain is enveloped by giant furnace before him, Searle asks him to describe what it's like.
This brings me to something that disappointed me about the film. By this time, Searle has spent so much time in the observation room that the skin on his face is peeling off. This certainly makes for a disturbed yet very interesting character. While I greatly appreciated that he didn't lose his mind and collapse into a psycho killer (which is very much against type) but Searle is never developed. The scene with him in the observation room has many close-ups of his eyes behind a pair of sunglasses and, indeed, such close-ups are very prominent throughout the first third or so of the film. I distinctly recall sitting there after 20 minutes thinking that Sunshine used the eye motif the most of any film since Blade Runner. Unfortunately this motif suddenly disappears and is only briefly resurrected towards the end. It felt like every motif and theme got up but never went anywhere. Such thematic dead ends would have been fine if the film had an existentialist bent like Le Samouraï but Sunshine never developed a cohesive stratagem in the department. In addition, the dialogue and plot never much doubt as to the fate of the crew so this stylistic device seemed overkill. Is this a "mistake" by the filmmakers or my expectations having been thwarted?
Icarus II eventually meets the rendezvous point. Trey is so wracked with guilt that he is sedated lest he commit suicide and four of the remaining crew members board Icarus I. As the crew enter via the airlock, quick flashes of Icarus I's crew appear. These are from their own colorful portrait and these brief glimpses are disorientating but not distracting making them quite effective. The interior is covered in a layer of dust but the greenhouse has flourished and is overgrown. A message from the captain of the dead ship, Pinbacker, is found and played. The video is pixilated and distorted and the voice on the message is clearly one of someone who's gone insane. He speaks of talking to God and other such delusions. Eventually the crew are found in the observation deck having been turned to dust by a blast of the sun's rays at full exposure. The core of the ship's computers, which need to be submerged in coolant, are discovered to have raised out of the liquid - they overheated and shut down. As Mace wanders in the lush greenhouse, Icarus I shudders. The connection of the two ships' airlocks has been sabotaged. Searle sacrifices himself by manually operating the airlock door to allow Capa, Mace, and Harvey to get blasted out towards Icarus II. Harvey misses the target and flies off where he freezes to death while Capa and Mace make it back into the airlock.
Aboard Icarus II, it has been calculated that there was enough oxygen to get four of them home and, in an all-too brief scene, it is decided that Trey must be killed. Mace goes to the medical room only to find Trey slouched against the wall in a pool of blood let from his wrists. Meanwhile Capa is checking the payload and making sure it will be ready for detonation. He asks the computer about the crew and discovers that there is a fifth person aboard who is on the observation deck. Capa investigates and finds that it is Captain Pinbacker whose body has been severely burned and he looks like a walking scar. This scene was shot as a near white-out with the figures barely penetrating the glare. When we do see Pinbacker, the image becomes distorted which questions Pinbacker's physical make-up or Capa's sanity.
At this point the film turns into a thriller as a creature ranting and raving about sending humanity to heaven hunts down the crew. I'm ambivalent about it. On one hand, it is just formulaic. But on the other it is symbolic with a war between religion and science, destiny and determinism being played out. While I appreciate the symbolism, it is inserted too late in the game to have much of an impact. As I noted above, thematic material has an incredibly short half-life in this film. If the crew had talked about it and it had been developed from the start, this conflict would have had stronger resonance.
Just as Sunshine hints at other classic sci-fi films such as 2001, Alien, and Solaris, it only dips its toe into the metaphysical pool. The characters are occupied by their concerns over the vagaries of space flight and their technology which means precious little time is given to scenes where Icarus II is humming along smoothly. To make matters worse, most of these scenes merely serve as brief preludes to trouble befalling the ship and crew.
Those who see this film on the small screen are lost but I'm still looking forward to the DVD release as I’m hoping for extended and deleted scenes. Sunshine clocks in at under two hours and, to my mind, it could have benefited from another 30 minutes of running time. I am forced to wonder if more scenes like those of Searle on the observation deck and Kenada in his quarters watching a video message were left on the cutting room floor. And perhaps there are more of the crew interacting in a way that involves socializing and/or moments of reflection instead of troubleshooting. My problems with Sunshine are more about what it's not rather than what it is. I didn't need grand themes popping up all over the place but I kept waiting for the less grandiose thematic devices to point me somewhere instead of just trailing off. While the cul-de-sacs could have been meaningful in and of themselves, I didn’t feel the movie did much to imbue them with importance.
Despite these criticisms, the film did many things right. The best was the all-pervasive mood which I can only describe as giving a sense of stately loneliness. It does this via a combination of great sets, cinematography, and by juxtaposing the interior of Icarus II against what is happening outside it. Inside the ship is a cramped, almost lifeless, world of drab grays that is betrayed only by the occasional glimpse of the verdant greenhouse and Trey's crimson blood. It is a mechanical environment where everything is done with mathematical precision. Meanwhile, outside is an exemplary hierarchy of size with the goliath heat shield which is dwarfed by the enormity of the Sun which, in turn, pales in comparison the vastness of space. The brilliance of the refulgent orb contrasts with the blackness of the great emptiness and exterior scenes are full of bright areas and those black or shaded. Unlike the interior of Icarus II, the Sun is active and appears alive with its tentacles of flame swirling and eddying as they seem to reach out at the ship. The great widescreen cinematography is complemented well by the music which is by the electronic group Underworld. The score is very minimal and highly moody. There were a few scenes where I wished that music was absent but, on the whole, its drones and rumbles served the visuals well.
As I noted earlier, Sunshine is a fantastic widescreen spectacle from the vast stretches of space to the arguments between crew members which pitted the verbal pugilists at opposite ends of the screen. The scene where Capa finds the mutated Pinbacker in the observation room almost made me shield my eyes and there were a couple other instances where the brilliance overwhelms the screen which fades to white. The first act features very shallow depth of field with close-ups of people's faces and extreme close-ups of their eyes. It helped establish the cramped feel inside Icarus II and did a bit to humanize the characters who were trapped in a technological bubble left to single-mindedly carry out a task. Plus it made the exterior shots all the more expansive. When this shooting style returns very late in the film, it helps bring things full circle as we see Cassie shed tears, Corazon's joy at finding that one seedling had survived a fire, and Pinbacker's madness.
Although Sunshine is scattered thematically, it is a bracing film visually and viscerally. It creates a mood and a tension which creeps inside and stays with you. I noticed things around me in the theatre maybe two times – it held my attention that well. If I have seemed overly harsh on the film this is because I enjoyed it tremendously and just wished that there was a little more to get it over the hump so it could take its place with the greats of the genre.
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