Two hours of beautiful visuals obscured by a director who clearly forgot to steady his camera
Apparently, in the not-too-distant future, the earth is freezing solid because the big light in the sky is running out of juice. The only logical solution the big brains in charge can come up with is to pack a bunch of scientists into a giant metal tube, slap a nuclear bomb the size of Manhattan on the back of it, and shoot them straight into the solar fireplace to give it a good poke.
The story follows the crew of the Icarus II, a spaceship named after that genius kid from the old stories who flew too close to the sun and melted his wings. You would think that name alone would be a red flag for the space agency, but nobody ever accused movie scientists of having common sense. The crew is already sixteen months into their trip and losing their minds from staring at the sun through giant filters when they pick up a radio signal from the Icarus I, the first ship that went missing seven years ago. Instead of sticking to the plan, they decide to take a detour, because what could possibly go wrong on a haunted ghost ship parked next to a giant ball of fire?
Review by Ben Dover
So I am sitting in my favorite recliner, trying to figure out my remote control, and I click on this movie called “Sunshine” from 2007. I figure, hey, maybe it is a nice story about a beach vacation or something cheerful. Nope. It is two hours of depressed astronauts whining in the dark while the earth freezes over. The whole setup is that the sun is dying and mankind faces extinction. They don’t even bother explaining why the sun is quitting on us. Back in my day, if something broke, you fixed it, but you didn’t drive a nuclear bomb into it.
The first half of this thing actually had me paying attention, I hate to admit. They build up some decent tension because everything keeps breaking on the ship. One idiot forgot to adjust the heat shields when they changed direction, which sets off a chain reaction of disasters. Watching these over-educated folks argue about math while their oxygen garden burns up is halfway entertaining. They have a computer on board that talks to them in a creepy, calm lady voice, telling them exactly how much air they have left down to the percentage. It reminded me of my ex-wife tracking the grocery budget. It’s actually a fantastic sci-fi film up to a point.
But then the movie hits the third act and completely loses its marbles. It stops being a smart space movie and turns into a trashy slasher flick. They get to the old ghost ship and find out the captain of the first mission is still kicking around. He looks like a piece of overcooked beef jerky because he has been taking sunbaths without sunscreen for seven years, proving space travel is just an expensive way to get a really bad sunburn. He goes completely bananas, spouting a bunch of religious nonsense, and starts stalking our crew with a scalpel. I have seen better monsters on Scooby-Doo. The director starts shaking the camera around and blurring the image so badly I thought my cataracts were acting up again. I can only surmise that the makeup and prosthetics were so bad that he had no choice.
The ending is just plain ridiculous. This is where the science goes completely off the rails. You have the main kid, Capa, floating around in a giant tinfoil suit, leaping through space onto a bomb while the ship is melting. It is the kind of logic only today’s youth could appreciate, where laws of physics don’t apply as long as you look cool doing it. They manage to drop the bomb and save the world, and we cut to a bunch of kids building snowmen in Australia suddenly getting a sunburn. I guess it is supposed to be inspiring, but it just made me want to go turn up my thermostat.
Star Studded Cast
- Cillian Murphy plays Robert Capa, the head physicist who is the only guy smart enough to arm the bomb. This kid spends the whole movie looking like he just found out his dog died. He has these giant blue eyes that stare into space like he is trying to remember if he left the stove on back on Earth.
- Chris Evans plays Mace, the ship’s engineer. Now, this guy I actually liked. He is a hothead, but at least he wants to get the job done and doesn’t get distracted by looking at pretty lights. He is the only guy with any sense, even if he does get into a sloppy, uncoordinated fistfight in the communications room.
- Rose Byrne plays Cassie, the pilot. She spent most of her time crying and complaining that they were all going to die. Not exactly the kind of nerves of steel you want from the person steering the spaceship.
- Michelle Yeoh plays Corazon, the biologist who takes care of the plants. She treats her vegetables like they are her grandchildren, which made me uncomfortable.
- Mark Strong plays Pinbacker, the crispy captain from the first ship. He is supposedly a deeply religious man who thinks God told him to kill everybody, but he just comes across as a lunatic who needs a giant jar of aloe vera.
Special Effects and Visuals
The special effects are a mixed bag. When they are showing the outside of the ship and the giant gold shield reflecting the sun, it looks pretty sharp. The sun itself looks like a big, angry, breathing monster, which I guess was the point. But the director, Danny Boyle, gets way too fancy for his own good. Every time the monster captain is on screen, the camera starts flickering and melting like an old projector eating film. It is supposed to look artistic, but it just gave me a headache. I don’t need a movie to give me vertigo while I am sitting on my own couch.
Music and Sound Design
The music is done by some group called Underworld and a guy named John Murphy. It is a lot of loud, thumping electronic noise that today’s kids probably call music, but there is one track that plays near the end when everything is blowing up that actually gets your blood pumping. It has a nice, slow build with a piano and strings before it turns into a giant wall of sound. The sound effects on the ship are good too, lots of clanking metal and hissing air that makes you feel claustrophobic. At least they got the volume levels right so I didn’t have to keep adjusting my TV. All in all very good and fitting.
Rating
3 out of 5 Stars – It’s two movies, an excellent sci-fi flick followed by a middling to poor slasher.
Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown
The movie kicks off sixteen months into the voyage of the Icarus II. The sun is sputtering out, and Earth is trapped in a permanent winter. The crew is a bunch of scientists and astronauts who are already sick of looking at each other. Robert Capa explains to us via a voice memo that they are carrying a bomb the size of Manhattan to jumpstart the sun. Everything is going fine until they pass Mercury and pick up a distress signal from the Icarus I, which vanished seven years prior. Capa makes the executive decision to divert their course to check it out, thinking they can double their chances of success by grabbing the first ship’s bomb.
This is where the trouble starts. The navigator, a nervous kid named Trey, changes the ship’s route but forgets to adjust the giant mirror shield that keeps them from getting fried. The edge of the ship gets scorched, and the captain, Kaneda, has to go outside with Capa to fix it. While they are out there playing handyman, the ship’s computer overrides things because a fire breaks out in the oxygen garden. The ship shifts, and Captain Kaneda gets swallowed up by direct sunlight and turned into charcoal. To make matters worse, the fire burns up almost all their plants, meaning they don’t have enough air to finish the trip and make it back home.
Desperate for supplies and oxygen, they dock with the creepy, dark Icarus I. A boarding party goes inside and finds that the ship’s computer has been sabotaged. They walk into the solar viewing room and find the old crew turned into piles of ash on the floor. Suddenly, the airlock connecting the two ships mysteriously explodes, stranding the guys on the ghost ship. Capa has to put on the only spacesuit they have, while the other guys wrap themselves in insulation and try to jump across open space back to their ship. One guy misses and freezes instantly, another stays behind to die, and Capa and Mace make it back.
Back on the Icarus II, they realize they still don’t have enough oxygen for the remaining crew to reach the sun. Mace decides they need to kill Trey to save air, but they find out Trey already saved them the trouble by cutting his own wrists. Just when you think the math adds up, the ship computer announces there is a fifth person on board who is hogging the oxygen. Capa goes looking and finds Captain Pinbacker from the first ship. The guy is completely insane, skin peeling off, and he wants to sabotage this mission too because he thinks it is God’s will for humanity to die.
Pinbacker goes on a rampage. He locks Capa in a freezing airlock, stabs the plant lady to death with a scalpel, and pulls the ship’s computer mainframes out of their cooling liquid, which shuts down the ship’s systems. Mace tries to fix the computers but gets his leg trapped in the freezing coolant fluid and freezes to death. Capa manages to use a blowtorch to break out of the airlock, and he scrambles onto the payload bomb just as it separates from the dying ship. He fights off the crispy captain one last time and triggers the bomb right inside the sun. The movie ends back on Earth, where Capa’s sister sees the sun finally brighten up the sky.
Famous Quotes
- “Our sun is dying. Mankind faces extinction. Sixteen months ago, I, Robert Capa, and a crew of seven left Earth frozen in solar winter.”
- “For seven years I spoke with God. He told me to take us all to Heaven.”
- “At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass. Man will be gone.”
- “We are dust, nothing more. Unto this dust, we return.”
- “Only dream I ever have. Every time I shut my eyes… it’s always the same. The surface of the sun.”
Interesting Facts
- The actors all lived together in a house during pre-production to make them feel like a real crew that was sick of looking at each other’s faces.
- Cillian Murphy spent time with a real physicist named Brian Cox to learn how to act smart, copy his mannerisms, and learn how to look like a guy who understands science.
- The spaceship’s computer is named Icarus, which is terrible luck considering the Greek myth is about a kid who burns to death for being arrogant.
- The director had the actors do scuba diving and flight simulation training so they wouldn’t look completely ridiculous pretending to be in outer space.
- Michelle Yeoh was allowed to choose whichever role she wanted on the ship, and she chose the biologist because she wanted to hang out in the garden.
Photos
Trailer
Notes
Interesting movie ruined by the ending, the real greatness here is in the acting and directing of the first 2/3 of the film, once it goes slasher it never gets that feel back. Early on Chris Evans is set up as Murphy’s foil, using their fight over the last communication to earth, I felt that the whole movie was Murphy slowly coming to terms with the fact that it was a one-way trip, something that Evans understood from the start. Evans did not hesitate for one moment when it came time for sacrifice, something Murphy learned by the end.
Dude would have been crispy instantly, no idea what that touching the sun at the end was, but it was incredibly stupid.
I was enthralled by the visuals and the idea that some people can’t mentally handle seeing the sun in all of its majesty.
Then it just devolved into “bad guy gonna stab ya.”
Could’ve been a perfect sci-fi flick if not for that.
Just let our own crew go insane. Use the tapes from the first mission to tell what’s happening and find a solution, you know standard sci-fi fare.
I don’t see how the mission is survivable even if nothing goes wrong. The ship is protected by the giant sunshade at the front; when the bomb is jettisoned it takes the sunshade along with it. When the bomb actually is separated at the end of the film, the Icarus is destroyed, as you would expect.
The people who made Sunshine didn’t always see eye to eye on its themes and tone. Years later, Garland confessed, “What I can see in Sunshine is I can see unresolved tensions. I can see different movies being made simultaneously. … Sometimes viscerality and reflection were fighting for space on that movie. It was like a balance issue.”
Not that Garland blamed Boyle, later adding, “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.”
The cast showed up in London over a month before we started shooting just to rehearse and this is the way Danny works,” Evans recalled. “It’s unbelievable, it’s so giving for actors; we ran lines every day like it was a play. We moved in together in the dorm rooms to get the sensation of shared space, we did SCUBA diving, we went to lectures, we saw film, we did the British Airways flight simulators.” Indeed, the director was interested in crafting a sci-fi film that was as realistic as possible, doing extensive research into, for instance, what the reality would be for Earth to enter into a new ice age if, like Sunshine proposes, the sun threatens to go out