Now wait a moment, you say. If "Sunshine" is set a mere 50 years in the future, isn't the sun snuffing out a few billion years ahead of schedule? What a silly question. As IMDb.com helpfully explains, the sun "has been 'infected' with a 'Q-ball' -- a supersymmetric nucleus, left over from the Big Bang -- that is disrupting the normal matter."
When I offered this explanation to a physicist friend of mine, he snorted and muttered "Q-balls" under his breath. I'm not sure whether this was meant as an expression of skepticism, but I have a pretty good guess.
I could easily spend the remainder of this review debating the plausibility of Q-balls, but at some point you're probably going to want to know the plot of the movie. Well here it is: The human race, understandably unwilling to part with its sun, has launched a massive bomb into space to reignite the dying star. Attached to the bomb is the spaceship Icarus II, whose eight-person crew has been entrusted with the monumental tasks of guiding the bomb toward the surface of the sun and detonating it, ideally in that order. As its name might suggest, Icarus II is the second mission of its kind -- the first Icarus lost contact with Earth and disappeared without a trace.
Who are these noble crew members, in whose hands the fate of the world rests so precariously? Well, there's the broodingly handsome physicist (Cillian Murphy); the hotheaded engineer (Chris Evans); the resident babe, whose only discernable talent is to stand around looking great (Rose Byrne); the nervous Asian guy (Benedict Wong), and so forth. It's as though the filmmakers kidnapped the stock supporting characters from half a dozen other movies, locked them aboard a spaceship, then decided to throw them into the sun as a sort of collective mercy killing. No wonder all the characters seem so angsty.
Since there's no TV aboard Icarus II, most of the crew members get their entertainment by hanging out on the observation deck and staring reverentially at a highly filtered image of the nearby sun. Occasionally they float around the ship in space suits resembling massive golden candy wrappers with arms, performing minor mechanical maintenance and such. Their serene monotony is broken, however, when the ship intercepts a distress signal from the first Icarus mission somewhere around Mercury. Upon consideration, the crew makes the implausibly stupid decision to divert their course to look for the missing ship, in the hope that they might salvage the second bomb and thus double their chance of success. As the broodingly handsome physicist broodingly puts it, "Two last hopes are better than one."
Needless to say, things go a bit haywire in this ill-conceived rescue mission, and before long the film's characters begin dropping like so many angsty flies. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland seem to derive a mordant pleasure in thinking up new and imaginative ways to kill off each successive astronaut -- characters are frozen, incinerated, frozen then incinerated, and so forth. Between deaths, crew members occasionally pause to blurt out hurried sound bytes on spirituality, the nature of the universe, and whatever else comes to mind in the heat of the moment (no pun intended).
That's really what sinks "Sunshine": It is a film cripplingly caught between its eagerness to thrill and its urgent yearning for philosophical substantiation. These two ambitions are not intrinsically incompatible, as Boyle himself demonstrated in the brilliant and terrifying "28 Days Later." This time around, however, his efforts are sabotaged by a slavish concern for genre convention. Occasionally "Sunshine" seems to be endeavoring to emulate Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- but Boyle lacks Kubrick's visual discipline and narrative patience, and the result comes off less as a homage than a hollow imitation.
Prior to the film's release, Boyle made a point of emphasizing in interviews the extremely tight production budget given to him and producer Andrew Macdonald. I now suspect that the reason for this repeated assertion was that the director had hoped to lower our expectations to the point where we wouldn't notice how crappy the special effects look. I am aware of the cruel economic realities of film production, but couldn't the visual effects department have mustered up a space ship that looks like something other than a shiny metal umbrella hanging from an invisible rope? The images of the sun appear realistic enough, but every time the astronauts went crawling through space in their full-body candy wrappers, I found myself curiously underwhelmed.
The third act of "Sunshine" features a twist that clever viewers will spot a mile away, as it seems blatantly ripped off from Ridley Scott's "Alien." Suffice it to say that the remaining crew members find they are no longer alone aboard the Icarus II, leading to interminable scenes of ambushes in darkened corridors as a mysterious assailant begins to pick them off one by one.
After a certain point the film completely flies off the hinges in a maddeningly incomprehensible hallucinatory sequence, during which Cillian Murphy appears to literally high-five the surface of the sun, his face contorted into a big dopey grin. If there's some sort of symbolism taking place here, it's way too advanced for me.
In a summer dominated by dumb action movies whose sole purpose is to peddle mindless entertainment to the moviegoing public, I am tempted to recommend "Sunshine" wholly on the basis of its laudable intellectual ambition. It is a temptation I can resist.
Bold though it might be, the film fails at almost every conceivable level save one: It is surely the most compelling public service announcement I have ever seen on the hazards of misplaced Q-balls.
