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Sunshine Movie Review

Sunshine is a 2007 science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Cillian Murphy and Chris Evans. It’s a deeply flawed, but still admirable effort.

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“So if you wake up one morning

and it’s a particularly beautiful day,

you’ll know we made it“

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A team of astronauts is assigned the huge responsibility of saving the sun. Things, however, take an ugly turn when an accident occurs and the lives of the crew members are endangered. This movie came out at a time when hard science fiction wasn’t really a thing, which is the main reason why it bombed at the box office. Now however, it is regarded as one of the best SF movies of the 2000s, though its third act remains problematic.

Everything that they did in the first two acts was amazing. Surely the film is lacking in terms of themes, though it does depict Sun in an almost godlike fashion and the science behind most of the plot is sound with the exception of the actual bombing the Sun being very unrealistic. But the attention to detail was incredible with the technical talk being very investing and all of their problems are intensely executed. This is high technology, but cleverly the film showcases how brutal and difficult space travel is, so their numerous hardships were grounded in reality.

The movie homages ‘2001’ in the gorgeous, almost operatic score and amazing effects and cinematography. The feel of the film in the silent sequences is very grandiose and almost spiritual. This is where it excels the most, but coming in at close second is the psychology behind it. This is where the ‘Solaris’ influence comes in. As they explore each and every crew person’s mental and psychological states, we get to see even the moral dilemma of sacrificing a person for the greater good being played out.

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But then we arrive to that ‘Alien’-inspired third act that was very misguided. I do realize that they wanted to include something more exciting to attract bigger audiences, but the film before this inclusion was so believable that introducing this burnt male figure as the core villain was unnecessary. The scenes were well shot with the light tricks making him even scarier, but simply the blood, gore and horror elements were too excessive and uncalled for in this instance.

Sunshine has an enormous cast of many recognizable faces with everybody delivering great work. Cillian Murphy is the best of the bunch with the meatiest role as he gets to emote a lot. He’s excellent. Chris Evans is also very memorable in a standard heroic role for him. Both are very good, but my problem with these two is that the film obviously picked the two favorites to survive the longest and it was overly convenient in that regard. Rose Byrne and Michelle Yeoh were both wonderful as they always are, but both were a bit sidelined unfortunately. Among the rest of the cast, the standouts were the very memorable Cliff Curtis and the dignified captain character. As a team, they worked splendidly.

Sunshine features a beautiful ending that was epic and quite moving. That scene compensated for the messiness of the whole third act, but overall I forgive the film for that mess as the rest of it is so fantastic and ahead of its time that it needs to be respected. Danny Boyle directed it phenomenally while Alex Garland is reliably outstanding in his writing.

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