Nov 24, 2008
Sunshine
You always want a movie like Sunshine to be really, really good. Even in this golden ComicCon age, when even Oscar approves of SF/Fantasy, when half the new shows on network television are about time travel, it’s still a rare that Hollywood tends to tread into the strange territory of Realistic Space Travel. You know, the sub-genre (anti-genre, even), epitomized by 2001, in which traveling through space is just as strange, transcendent, and boring as it is in real life. It’s space travel without all the flashy Star Wars stuff—no space battles, no lasers, no technology more ridiculous than artificial gravity. You know, none of the fun stuff.
Perhaps that’s overstating a bit. But the people who make these movies always seem to self-consciously set themselves against the Star Wars model: We are realistic, and thus, we must be serious, dour, existential. These movies are constructed with such wonderful good intentions, with no thought of ever making money—too artsy for the geek demo, too geeky for the art house. A movie like Soderbergh’s Solaris wears its Big Ideas on its sleeve, but always gets lost in the morass of screensaver perfect space imagery. Mission to Mars was even worse.
Sunshine makes a decent go of it for awhile. A multiracial crew of astronauts gets sent to reignite the sun—a fun twist, since most science fiction is about moving further out into the final frontier. There’s a nice lowkey chemistry onboard—the actors are playing professionals on a suicide mission, so there’s a minimum of interpersonal drama. Nothing you wouldn’t find in an office or The Office. The everpresent sun lurks in the distance, behind darkened solar panels—they’re so close, the onboard computer informs us, that even showing four percent of its actual light capacity would be blinding.
The first half of Sunshine plays like a better version of Solaris. Unfortunately, the second half, after the astronauts track down the first ship sent to the sun that was mysteriously lost, reveals that the filmmakers were actually going for Event Horizon, that little-known late-90s gem that reimagined the river of blood from The Shining in zero gravity and granted humankind the immortal sight of niceguy Sam Neill clawing his own eyes out. Bizarrely, for a film that begin in stoned awe of space travel, Sunshine turns into a slasher film.