Sunshine Supermen
April 22, 2007 | 12:00am
It’s nice to see much of the planet suddenly concerned about the environment, thanks in great part to an alarm-raising documentary by Al Gore called An Inconvenient Truth. Now that most of the world’s scientists have concurred with Gore’s collected findings  with even polar bears facing extinction due to polar ice melting  expect a vast outpouring of "green" messages from corporations that will rival the emissions of Ford, GM and Chrysler for pure gas content. An Inconvenient Truth (see it while it’s playing in Manila, if you haven’t already) has had two or three other by-products since winning an Oscar: it’s made former US vice president Gore look like Nostradamus, and his election rival, George W. Bush, look like Nostra-dumbass for invading a country with no known connection to 9/11 or Al Qaeda.
The third by-product is to spark a bunch of movies about our poor, imperiled planet. We’ve had our share in the past  everything from Armageddon to The Day Before Tomorrow. Expect more, as we collectively nurture a moment of self-awareness and think about cutting back on light bulbs and plastic bags.
Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle, has us contemplate planet Earth without a functioning sun, which would make everything down here, like, really dark. And cold. Certainly, scientists have predicted the eventual extinction of our sun in something like 4.5 billion years. But Boyle’s science fiction outing places the switch-off date somewhere in the near future, as the eight-member crew of the Icarus I hurtles toward the Big Furnace to deliver a payload: a large nuclear weapon that will hopefully jump-start the sun by sparking a "new star" inside the old one. How dangerous is this mission? Let’s just say they do not expect to return for their ticker-tape parade anytime soon.
The crew consists of scientists (including Michelle Yeoh, Cillian Murphy and Rose Byrne) and more hard-hat types (Chris Evans). There’s even a ship psychiatrist (Cliff Curtis) onboard who enjoys staring at the sun too much.
As Icarus II approaches Mercury, it picks up a distress signal from… Icarus I, the earlier mission that failed to deliver its nuclear payload. A big debate ensues over whether to sidetrack their mission in order to check out Icarus I, and pick up its payload (on the "two nukes is better than one to restart the sun" principle, though I’m not too sure about the physics there).
As in all space movies, this turns out to be a Big Mistake. Things quickly begin to go kerflooey as the crew realizes they no longer have enough oxygen to complete their mission… unless they sacrifice a few crewmembers.
This is a fine setup for what turns out to be a great-looking thriller, scripted by onetime Manila resident Alex Garland (he "researched" his novel The Tesseract here, and later wrote the zombie flick 28 Days Later). Garland has an eye for comic book pungency: the scenes and dialogue have a crisp, pulpy quality to them. And he likes his action: the discovery of "problems" onboard the Icarus II naturally leads to a nonstop roller coaster of cliff-hanger solutions.
But you begin to wonder just how dumb these scientists/astronauts (supposedly the "last, best hope for mankind") are. First of all, there’s the ship’s name: Icarus. As we know from Greek myth, Icarus was the son of Daedalus who flew too close to the sun with wax wings; bad idea, dude. So, too, the christening of this vessel.
We get a whiff of out-of-control testosterone as Murphy and Evans get into the obligatory dust-up early in the movie, to set the tone of "they’ve been on this ship too long and are starting to crack up."
And while heading to the abandoned vessel to retrieve its nuclear payload, one crewmember forgets to reset some thingamajig and, before you know it, the ship is short on oxygen. D-Oh!
What it all amounts to is a mission that seems doomed from the start. Yet Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) is very good at keeping the adrenaline pumping; you don’t get too many chances to stop and think about the logical lapses here and there. He also shoots some beautiful sequences, reportedly on a smallish budget (this is a UK production, after all). The only problem is that they too often evoke his "holy trinity" of sci-fi films: Alien, Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Did I say "evoke"? Sometimes they borrow, lift wholly and replicate shot for shot. The whole "mood" of the opening third of the movie is "borrowed" from Ridley Scott’s Alien, from the workaday chowdown scene with the crew, to the beautiful shafts of light illuminating the gloomy corridors as Icarus II approaches the sun. The hunt-the-crew dynamic also comes from Alien, while the eerie sense that space can somehow change and warp us comes from Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
As for Kubrick’s 2001, it’s there in the "ship repair" scene, with astronauts floating off to oblivion outside the ship; the emergency hatchdoor launching to reenter Icarus also "borrows" heavily from Dave’s tussle with HAL in 2001. And when Murphy dons a spacesuit to track down the "extreme element" onboard, his look of bug-eyed, quivering terror is a duplicate of Dave Bowman’s trippy approach to Jupiter in the same film.
Boyle admitted as much in an Uncut interview ("Everywhere you turn, those three films are there. Every decision you make that you think, ‘That’s interesting,’ you realize it’s already been done"), but I can’t hold that against him. He had some good templates for Sunshine, and some good teachers. And to his credit, the film looks new and fresh.
The environmental message in Sunshine is soft-pedaled, perhaps because too much tree-hugging would stand in the way of the hurtling plot. But Yeoh does have one twig-hugging scene, as the ship’s scientist who goes all Greenpeace when she discovers a single plant sprouting amid a burned-out oxygen garden.
Murphy ends up leading the mission (no big spoiler there, I hope), and he’s good with that bug-eyed, creepy intensity that made him stand out in Red Eye and Batman Begins. He is odd-looking, though. Not as odd-looking an environmental savior as Al Gore, perhaps. But odd-looking nonetheless.
The third by-product is to spark a bunch of movies about our poor, imperiled planet. We’ve had our share in the past  everything from Armageddon to The Day Before Tomorrow. Expect more, as we collectively nurture a moment of self-awareness and think about cutting back on light bulbs and plastic bags.
Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle, has us contemplate planet Earth without a functioning sun, which would make everything down here, like, really dark. And cold. Certainly, scientists have predicted the eventual extinction of our sun in something like 4.5 billion years. But Boyle’s science fiction outing places the switch-off date somewhere in the near future, as the eight-member crew of the Icarus I hurtles toward the Big Furnace to deliver a payload: a large nuclear weapon that will hopefully jump-start the sun by sparking a "new star" inside the old one. How dangerous is this mission? Let’s just say they do not expect to return for their ticker-tape parade anytime soon.
The crew consists of scientists (including Michelle Yeoh, Cillian Murphy and Rose Byrne) and more hard-hat types (Chris Evans). There’s even a ship psychiatrist (Cliff Curtis) onboard who enjoys staring at the sun too much.
As Icarus II approaches Mercury, it picks up a distress signal from… Icarus I, the earlier mission that failed to deliver its nuclear payload. A big debate ensues over whether to sidetrack their mission in order to check out Icarus I, and pick up its payload (on the "two nukes is better than one to restart the sun" principle, though I’m not too sure about the physics there).
As in all space movies, this turns out to be a Big Mistake. Things quickly begin to go kerflooey as the crew realizes they no longer have enough oxygen to complete their mission… unless they sacrifice a few crewmembers.
This is a fine setup for what turns out to be a great-looking thriller, scripted by onetime Manila resident Alex Garland (he "researched" his novel The Tesseract here, and later wrote the zombie flick 28 Days Later). Garland has an eye for comic book pungency: the scenes and dialogue have a crisp, pulpy quality to them. And he likes his action: the discovery of "problems" onboard the Icarus II naturally leads to a nonstop roller coaster of cliff-hanger solutions.
But you begin to wonder just how dumb these scientists/astronauts (supposedly the "last, best hope for mankind") are. First of all, there’s the ship’s name: Icarus. As we know from Greek myth, Icarus was the son of Daedalus who flew too close to the sun with wax wings; bad idea, dude. So, too, the christening of this vessel.
We get a whiff of out-of-control testosterone as Murphy and Evans get into the obligatory dust-up early in the movie, to set the tone of "they’ve been on this ship too long and are starting to crack up."
And while heading to the abandoned vessel to retrieve its nuclear payload, one crewmember forgets to reset some thingamajig and, before you know it, the ship is short on oxygen. D-Oh!
What it all amounts to is a mission that seems doomed from the start. Yet Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) is very good at keeping the adrenaline pumping; you don’t get too many chances to stop and think about the logical lapses here and there. He also shoots some beautiful sequences, reportedly on a smallish budget (this is a UK production, after all). The only problem is that they too often evoke his "holy trinity" of sci-fi films: Alien, Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Did I say "evoke"? Sometimes they borrow, lift wholly and replicate shot for shot. The whole "mood" of the opening third of the movie is "borrowed" from Ridley Scott’s Alien, from the workaday chowdown scene with the crew, to the beautiful shafts of light illuminating the gloomy corridors as Icarus II approaches the sun. The hunt-the-crew dynamic also comes from Alien, while the eerie sense that space can somehow change and warp us comes from Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
As for Kubrick’s 2001, it’s there in the "ship repair" scene, with astronauts floating off to oblivion outside the ship; the emergency hatchdoor launching to reenter Icarus also "borrows" heavily from Dave’s tussle with HAL in 2001. And when Murphy dons a spacesuit to track down the "extreme element" onboard, his look of bug-eyed, quivering terror is a duplicate of Dave Bowman’s trippy approach to Jupiter in the same film.
Boyle admitted as much in an Uncut interview ("Everywhere you turn, those three films are there. Every decision you make that you think, ‘That’s interesting,’ you realize it’s already been done"), but I can’t hold that against him. He had some good templates for Sunshine, and some good teachers. And to his credit, the film looks new and fresh.
The environmental message in Sunshine is soft-pedaled, perhaps because too much tree-hugging would stand in the way of the hurtling plot. But Yeoh does have one twig-hugging scene, as the ship’s scientist who goes all Greenpeace when she discovers a single plant sprouting amid a burned-out oxygen garden.
Murphy ends up leading the mission (no big spoiler there, I hope), and he’s good with that bug-eyed, creepy intensity that made him stand out in Red Eye and Batman Begins. He is odd-looking, though. Not as odd-looking an environmental savior as Al Gore, perhaps. But odd-looking nonetheless.
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