Sunshine (2007)

In ancient times, several religions centered around Sun worship. The Sun was crucial to the ancients, its movements delineating harvests, seasons and the passage of time itself. Eventually, the Sun god was replaced by Judeo-Christian/Muslim god as humanity’s primary object of worship. Regardless of religion, however, one thing remains certain: god is an entity both generous and fearsome. On the one hand, god breathes life into human beings and surrounds them with everything they need in order to survive. On the other, god tests humanity and its endurance with disease, poverty, natural catastrophes and rampant injustice. Several religions include the caveat that to look into the face of god is to look at an entity of pure beauty, a beauty that our weak, human senses are incapable of absorbing. Lot’s wife saw the wrath of god and turned into a pillar of salt; Semele looked upon Zeus and was engulfed in flames. Unequipped, imperfect beings that we are, the face of god can blind us, drive us to madness, or kill us.

An atheist can state, half philosophically and half literally, that the source of all life, and our immediate father, is our nearest star, the Sun. Danny Boyle’s new film, Sunshine, attempts to explore our fascination with our celestial power source. Set in a future in which our star is dying, humanity sends a crew of astronauts/scientists aboard the Icarus ship to reignite the Sun by creating a new star within it, via a bomb that will be detonated inside the Sun’s core. Unfortunately, the Icarus ship and its crew disappear, and are never heard from again. Six years later, the Icarus Project mines the last of the Earth’s resources to make one last bomb, and a second (final) mission is launched on the Icarus II, which leaves our planet in the midst of a solar winter. Sunshine follows the story of this second mission, as its crew attempts to avoid the pitfalls that may have stalled the original Icarus.

Of course, the name of the mission is a very deliberate allusion to the son of the Greek inventor Daedalus, who was given artificial wings by his father so that he might escape from prison, only to perish in the sea when his proximity to the sun melted the wax off his feathers. The moral of the tale is explicit: when Man attempts to imitate the power of the gods, he stands to suffer divine retribution. This poses a moral quandary for humanity: do we accept divine providence passively, thereby respecting the gods, or do we use our god-given gifts to save ourselves and to prolong our existence in every way possible? Do the gods really favor “those who help themselves,” or do they punish the audacity of those poor souls who attempt to defy their destiny?

In Sunshine, mankind has sent its best and brightest to save the Earth from a certain death. Clearly, faith in the gods is based on the presupposition that one accepts divine will as absolute. Knowledge is something to be stolen from divinity, and therefore is profane. Prometheus was bound and punished precisely for his decision to share knowledge (the gift of fire) with mortals. The name of the fallen angel, Lucifer, literally means “he who enlightens.” Throughout history, the opposite of religion is knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge in science has been labeled blasphemous.  If our intrepid scientists succeed in their mission to re-ignite the Sun, they will become the givers of life, a prerogative hitherto exercised only by the great deities. The question arises: will the arrogance of their endeavor be punished with failure, like their ship’s namesake, or does the desperation of their circumstances mitigate the offence to the gods?

Of course, there is no divine being in Sunshine. Though Boyle was raised Catholic, his films (with the exception of Millions), exist largely without religion, focusing instead on the humanist perspective. Boyle calls himself an optimistic filmmaker, and claims that he finds positive messages even amidst the darkness that haunts his characters. Sunshine reteams Boyle with Alex Garland, his writer from 28 Days Later, and their latest collaboration echoes over the tension and the despair of that earlier film. The scientists that populate Icarus II have more to fear from human imperfection than from divine retribution. The pressure and isolation of their mission (the round-trip is supposed to last about four years) test the endurance of their psyches. As their mission spirals out of control, tempers flare and group dynamics break down. Can civilization exist millions of miles from Earth? Despite a frenetic, blood-filled climax (one similar to the killing spree at the end of 28 Days Later), Boyle is right to submit his film as an optimistic exploration of human achievement. The hope and the humanity of the film can be found in the fact that, despite all the chaos and fear that grips them, the crew of Icarus II never wavers from its mission.

From a cinematic perspective, the film is exquisite, a visual love letter to the Sun. The cast is solid throughout, and their delivery is pitch-perfect to convey the requisite apprehension without devolving into hysterics. The cinematography also is beautiful, containing blue-tinted images of laboratories and hallways inside Icarus II contrasted beautifully with the brightness of the orange Sun. The characters spend copious amounts of time gazing at their destination, entranced by its beauty and splendor. Of course, like the gods of yore, the Sun is not only a life-giving force; it is also a destructive one, and the danger of the mission increases as the ship approaches the star. The characters are cognizant of this, for even amidst their fascination with the Sun, they suffer nightmares in which they are engulfed by its flames. Once again, the face of the creator is a thing both terrible and sublime. With Sunshine, Boyle achieves what he set out to do; he takes us to “the source of all creation.” Through the darkness, his film is an affirmation of faith, not in an unseen deity, but in the tenacity, ambition and self-sacrifice at the core of the greatest human endeavors.

~ by Artemis on March 30, 2008.