Danny Boyle and Alex Garland send a crew to relight the sun, and the first two acts are patient, frightening, beautifully built science fiction. The third loses its way, but the journey is worth taking.
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland send a crew into space to reignite a dying sun. Garland does not dress it up. Sunshine is good for its first two acts, before a turn we will not describe makes it a different and lesser film. The journey is still worth the evening.
Alwin H. Küchler makes the sun dominate the images, so the crew’s fascination with it becomes easy to understand. We were frightened by how strongly they were drawn to it. There is something unsettling about watching people approach a star when the pictures make its destructive power feel so immediate. Boyle lets us spend enough time looking to share their curiosity, even as the mission grows more alarming.
Mark Tildesley’s ship is the other thing to look at. Its practical appearance helps us accept a mission that sounds implausible when written down. Even at this scale, the ship seems like somewhere people have to work. That matters: the danger becomes easier to take seriously if the crew look as though they belong in their surroundings.
Chris Gill cuts the early stretches with real patience. He gives the danger time to register before asking us to fear the next thing, and the pace allows the crew’s decisions to carry some weight. John Murphy’s score sustains that tension and keeps the fate of people beyond the spacecraft in mind. It gives the mission an emotional force that Garland’s dialogue does not always manage.
Garland writes the crew as jobs rather than people, and for the most part that is the right call. Cillian Murphy is watchful and slightly absent as Capa. Chris Evans, as Mace, is short-tempered and practical, and the film is better for his impatience. Rose Byrne plays Cassie as the crew’s conscience with few lines. Still, the thin characterisation makes it harder to stay involved when the film begins to lose its way.
Then the turn. Boyle’s control becomes less secure, and there are passages when the action is hard to follow. The picture that had been so patient starts to hurry. The questions it had raised about what a person owes to strangers are set down in favour of more conventional thrills.
Boyle and Garland made a more convincing transition from quiet to violence in 28 Days Later. Here the change seems to belong to another script. For much of its running time Sunshine sits comfortably with the thoughtful space films of the 1970s that it plainly admires. The later reliance on familiar thriller devices feels unnecessary.
It runs 108 minutes and carries a 15. Watch it on the largest screen you have, with the lights off. The sunlight needs the black around it.
