150 Word Review: ‘Sunshine’ (2007)
Don’t stare at the sun
One of my favorite movie subgenres is what I call “Space Madness,” which includes everything from 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey about a spaceship’s insane A.I. to 1997’s Event Horizon, in which a team of astronauts on a deep-space rescue mission lose their minds and souls. I’ll add director Danny Boyle’s overlooked 2007 sci-fi thriller Sunshine. The movie is both beautiful and depressing. It’s bonkers, too.
In Sunshine, a crew from Earth is sent on a desperate mission to jump-start the heart of our solar system’s slowly fading sun with a custom-made nuclear device. Their ship resembles a giant horizontal umbrella sailing headfirst into brutal sunlight, the canopy tiled in special heat-absorbing gold scales. Beyond this protective dome, everything incinerates.
The cast is a collection of “oh wow” actors, including Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, and Captain America. Here’s a hot tip: never answer a distress call from a dead spacecraft.
Agreed this one is a corker. It is one of those too little known gems of SF; another is Moon. It feels in this movie as if they are being stalked by the sun, whose presence becomes more ominous as the ship gets closer. They spend the entire movie moving towards the horror, not away from it, and e watch their sanity disintegrates in the process. I should rewatch it.
There's an interesting SF novel: The Flight of the Aphrodite, with the same trajectory and dynamics, only with Jupiter and its off-the-charts, deadly magnetic field playing the role of the Sun.