Before Their Time: Sunshine
By Daniel MacDonald
July 16, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Set about 50 years in the future, Sunshine follows the crew of the Icarus II, a self-sustaining space shuttle carrying a massive nuclear bomb - the size of a state - with a mandate to re-ignite the sun before the star dies and leaves Earth a cold, barren wasteland. The ship has been traveling several years, subsisting on freshly-grown food and O2 from an impressive oxygen garden, and relations between some members of the crew are beginning to fray as they approach their destination. The stakes couldn't be higher: should the Icarus II fail to properly administer the bomb, having only one chance to get it right, all of humanity will perish in fairly short order, and the crew won't have any reason to return. So, the team's discovery along the way of the Icarus I, an earlier mission with which all communication was lost and whose crew was assumed dead, leads to a heated debate on the best course of action. To meet up with the lost ship would mean changing the Icarus II's trajectory, potentially endangering the entire mission for the sake of a handful of people who in all likelihood are already dead. On the other hand, they could pick up Icarus I's payload, giving humanity's saviors two chances rather than just one to get the job done correctly.
Of course, if they decided to ignore the other vessel, and carried out their mission without a hitch, we would have a pretty short and uninteresting picture on our hands. The decision they make to change course has consequences both dire and unforeseen, giving us a couple of wham-bam adventure sequences, along with other turns of events that challenge both the sanity of the characters and the willingness of audience members to go along for the ride.
What made Sunshine especially tough for audiences to get behind is its apparent dual personalities: the first two-thirds are highly accessible and exciting, after which the picture seemingly takes an abrupt right turn. Likable characters are quickly sketched out, Boyle's dynamic camera work injects tension and drama into action scenes and scientific explanations alike, and the plausibility of the scenario is surprisingly well-established. A sequence of two crew members venturing out to make repairs on their ship's giant shield, with the threat of instant incineration by the sun's rays creeping ever closer, strikes as one of the most original predicaments we've seen in the genre in some time. Boyle and frequent screenwriter Alex Garland (whose star rose significantly with his novel and adaptation, The Beach) took great pains to craft a film based as solidly in science as it is in fiction, and it shows in the end result. Then Icarus II docks with its predecessor, and things get a little wonky.
The key to appreciating Sunshine in its entirety is to pay close attention during early expositional scenes, especially discussions of theoretical physics in relation to what may happen as their craft gets closer to our favorite star. Bearing these exchanges in mind, and treating them as the foreshadowing that they are, it's not that surprising what direction the picture takes. It can be easy to miss the point of Sunshine by dismissing these early conversations and getting caught up in the more-easily digestible action sequences.
While the majority of critics gave Sunshine positive notices (the Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics Tomato Meter sits at 58%), many agreed with the accusations of third-act letdown: Claudia Puig, writing for the venerable USA Today, remarked that, "as the film ultimately deviates from its course, the filmmaking suffers." Richard Roeper called it an "ultimately disappointing futuristic mind game." It's not hard to tell where these notices came from, as I felt a similar disconnect to the last half-hour the first time I watched it: while Sunshine positions itself as hard science fiction early on, a number of extraordinarily entertaining set pieces make it easy to forget all that set up, marveling at the gloriously low-tech space suits, the fiery wrath that the sun can inflict on under-protected parts of the ship, and the intriguing mystery that goes along with the discovery of Icarus II. Then, when the pendulum swings back the other way, the film seems abruptly disconnected from its roots, adrift on a flight of fancy. Subsequent viewings, however, have shown - to me, anyway - Sunshine to be deviously well-plotted and uncompromising in its vision. That very lack of compromise probably led to the movie's less than stellar box office performance: even with its modest-for-an-ambitious-science-fiction-story budget of $50 million US, Sunshine's worldwide gross of about $30 million undoubtedly left disappointed investors in its wake.
That shouldn't long be the case, though, in my estimation. This type of picture - imbued with meaning, requiring multiple viewings to get the full effect - tends to thrive as a cult favorite, driven by positive word-of-mouth from those who get it. Sunshine is challenging, no doubt about it. It's also whip smart, wholeheartedly entertaining and creative. It's The Dark Knight of science fiction (not in terms of box office, of course, but for the shared characteristic of sneaking big, complicated ideas into a relatively crowd-pleasing package). Danny Boyle's gotten a lot of attention for films like Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, but his under-the-radar works like Millions, Shallow Grave, and Sunshine are the ones I expect to have the longest shelf life. He hit it out of the park with this one, we just haven't noticed yet.