Sunshine (2007)
This is one of the few films that I know that people either love or hate, there is no in-between. I, personally, adore this film, and have ever since I saw the trailer for it on Flicks months before it was due out.
Based in the near future when our Sun is slowly dying, Sunshine is the story of a team of 8 scientists – Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada), Harvey (Troy Garity), Searle (Cliff Curtis), Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), Trey (Benedict Wong), Mace (Chris Evans), Cassie (Rose Byrne) and Capa (Cillian Murphy) – on the Icarus 2, sent to reignite the sun with an atomic bomb attached to their spacecraft. They are the second team sent on the mission, as 7 years previously, Icarus 1 failed to deliver the payload, and the Earth is dying. The mission goes well until they reach Mercury and receive a distress signal coming from the Icarus 1. Deciding that if the ship can send a signal, it must still be able to fly, they detour towards the first ship to get the payload off it and deliver two bombs to the sun for better chance of success. From here, things start to go wrong.
To be honest, the only thing that really annoyed me about this movie was the name of the ship. For those who don’t understand why, then reread your Greek myths. There is a superstition that says that how you name a child/ship/vessel will define how it lives its life. If you name a ship that is flying to the sun Icarus, DO YOU EXPECT IT TO MAKE IT BACK? Keeping in mind that neither the first Icarus mission nor the second were meant as suicide missions, it really annoyed me that they named their ships after someone who flew too close to the sun and fell.
Besides that, I really enjoyed the film. There is always the chance with sci-fi films that everything will be over the top, because the future where space travel is normal is not yet existent, people’s imaginations run wild with how life will be when that happens (cue flying cars and cities on the moon). In Sunshine, things are futuristic but not ridiculous: they have an oxygen garden, their water is recycled, they power the ship with solar power (funny that) and the computer isn’t insanely futuristic but functional. The crew itself is made up of people who have to be there, not people who are just there for the fun of it. There are 8 people, 4 of them are engineers, one is a communication expert, one is a biologist, one is a psychologist and one is the physics expert that built the bomb they’re delivering.
The film could fall under the category of thriller as well as drama and sci-fi, but again, it’s not a horror movie. The scary things that happen could easily happen in space: the oxygen garden burning up, people floating away in space… Of course, there is Pinbacker (Mark Strong)… but I won’t say much about him because I would be accused of spoilers.
The relationships between the characters are also realistic. The mission takes 6 years to get to the sun and a slightly shorter time to get back (due to no longer being burdened with the bomb), so obviously tempers will be strained, and certain people will be friendlier to each other than others. The rivalry is there, and there are attractions, but there is no ridiculous tragic love story, which made me incredibly happy. The style of the film, also, is worth a mention. I’m quite a fan of science fiction literature more than films (I really dislike Star Wars and steer clear of Star Trek even though I have watched both) and this film was made very much in the style of Stanislav Lem (and later on, Andrei Tarkovky)’s Solaris. No, not the one with George Clooney, if you don’t know the difference between Tarkovsky and Soderbergh then shame on you.
I would recommend this film to people who are fans of the genre. People who aren’t are welcome to watch it as well, but a lot of it revolves around the idea of reigniting the sun and things that can go wrong in space, so if you’re not a sci-fi nerd it may bore you in some parts. The acting is excellent, so if you’re a fan of Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne and Chris Evans (they are the three main characters) then watch it for them, you won’t be disappointed. The film has violence in it, and aspects of horror (as I said, I mention Pinbacker but say nothing more about him) but most of it is to do with the human condition and the realistic effects space can have on a human being. All up I give this a 7.5/10 and watch it semi-regularly. I would be really interested to get the opinions of someone who hates this film, though, just to see what they say.
