Directrospective: SUNSHINE (2007)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
The spaceship Icarus II docks with the unresponsive Icarus I en route to jump-start the dying Sun with nukes.
Alex Garland, the novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-filmmaker whose career in pictures somehow took off despite Boyle’s adaptation of THE BEACH, has in the last half-decade established himself as a reliable churner-outer of big question science fiction. With his directorial debut EX MACHINA is a single-location thriller that asks what rights we owe artificial intelligences; his STALKER sheboot with machine guns, ANNIHILATION, is about how we know we’re really ourselves and not someone else; his latest work, the television miniseries DEVS, is a Silicon Valley murder mystery that becomes about the ramifications of a computer that can simulate the entire materially deterministic universe.
The first Boyle film in which Garland had an active hand, 28 DAYS LATER, isn’t as directly concerned with a single question posed by the imminent future, but its tightly focused screenplay is a very large part of what makes it one of Boyle’s best. That film had helped to mint an unusual movie star in pretty/spooky/pretty spooky Irishman Cillian Murphy, who had gone on to villainous turns in BATMAN BEGINS and RED EYE and starred in Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY. Boyle’s second teaming with Garland and Murphy is of a piece with Garland’s later work as a writer-director, wrapping an ALIEN-style confined spaceship thriller around an astronomically high-stakes version of the trolley problem.
It’s a perfect avenue for Boyle’s favorite theme of self-interest, this time blown out to proportions so hugely unbalanced that it somehow becomes harder for the characters to know what to do. SUNSHINE takes place in 2057, with the Sun dying and all life on Earth threatened by rapidly dropping temperatures (must be nice). A first attempt to explosively restart the sun, via the spaceship Icarus I, was lost mid-flight. The crew of the Icarus II inhabit the handle part of an umbrella-shaped spaceship, headed solar shield-first for the Sun with a payload of all of Earth’s remaining fissive material. This is very literally humanity’s last hope.
The pressure is getting to some of them more than others - even-tempered biologist Corazon (Michelle Yeoh), prickly engineer Mace (a post-FANTASTIC FOUR, pre-CAPTAIN AMERICA Chris Evans) and very daddy Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) are handling it pretty well; distant and clinical ship doctor Searle (Cliff Curtis) and taciturn physicist Capa (Murphy) are a little weird but holding it together; shaken pilot Cassie (baby-faced Rose Byrne), nervy navigator Trey (Benedict Wong), and fragile communications officer Harvey (Troy Garity) are all about to go to pieces. Their mission is straightforward enough, though - fly to the sun, do whatever it takes to drop the bomb into it, die if you have to, come home if you don’t.
The design of the ship is functional, visually inventive while dorky enough to feel realistic. Recurrent use of golds and reds help distinguish the look of the movie from the whites and silvers and blues of most space films. This time Boyle is working with German cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, who had photographed Scotland for two of the more significant non-Boyle films of the era to do so, Lynne Ramsay’s RATCATCHER and MORVERN CALLAR. Less bombastic and more reserved than the Anthony Dod Mantle style, at least until the end, Küchler makes liberal use of lens flares and other tricks of light, being so close to the Sun and all. Mantle would remain Boyle’s go-to, but Küchler would come back to shoot to similarly subdued STEVE JOBS.
Then they pick up the distress signal from the long-lost Icarus I. The notion of any obligation toward its helpless crew is quickly dismissed - it’s the entire species on the line versus the rescue of a handful of people who are probably dead. But Capa wants to pick up their explosive payload and increase the mission’s odds of success. Mace thinks it’s far too risky to deviate from the plan. Kaneda rules in Capa’s favor, but Trey forgets to make a particular calculation on the way and the shield is damaged, along with the communications tower and much of the oxygen system. Kaneda and Capa spacewalk to fix the shield before everyone burns to a crisp and Kaneda sacrifices himself to finish the job and save Capa, who’s the only crew member who can properly detonate the payload (poor mission planning, should just be a big red button). Now indecisive crybaby Harvey is in charge and Trey has become suicidal and needs sedation.
Harvey, Mace, Capa, and Searle search the Icarus I and learn that its captain, Pinbacker (Mark Strong), went nuts, immolated the crew, and disabled the payload. All that effort and Kaneda dead, and for nothing. Plus now a mysterious accident means one of them will have to stay behind in order for the others to get back onto the Icarus II. Mace and Capa both have mission-critical jobs. Harvey insists that since he’s the captain now, he’s critical, too, even though he sucks at it and the communications tower doesn’t exist anymore. Someone might still need doctoring, but Harvey’s need to feel important and his desire to live, even if they’re all probably about to die anyway, mean that Searle takes one for the team and stays behind on Icarus I to die. Harvey dies on the way back to the ship, the putz.
A compromised oxygen system means the ship doesn’t have enough oxygen left to keep the whole crew alive long enough to deliver the payload, but it would if there were one fewer set of lungs onboard. Trolley switch comin’ up fast! This is the film’s most significant moment, in my eyes, although I think Boyle and Garland pull their punch a bit. Everyone agrees that Trey, zonked out of his mind, isn’t contributing anything to the mission anymore, but Cassie can’t bring herself to endorse his murder. Mace has already volunteered to do the deed and Cassie won’t stop him, but he wants a unanimous decision and she refuses to give him her vote.
The interconnections of our world are so vast and dense and our parts in it so tiny that to my mind it’s impossible to argue anyone has to be killed to save everyone else. But SUNSHINE is science fiction, and this is as slam-dunk justified as a homicide can get. The ship needs to make it to the Sun with Capa alive to detonate the device. If they all stay alive, they’ll die before they can complete the mission. Everyone on board will, regardless of the mission’s success, die very soon. But if one of them dies a little early, there’s a chance that the imminent end of all life on Earth could be prevented. Trey fucked up so bad that someone died fixing his mistake, and he’s been incapacitated with drugs to stop him from killing his own damn self. Comfortable on my couch with no ultimate responsibility for what happens to this pretend man, it’s pretty easy to say Cassie is out of line. The numbers against keeping Trey alive are staggering. It’s what he wants, anyway.
But that’s the thing. The numbers are too high. Logically, there’s no question that it’s the right thing to do, but murder is murder. Unless you have certain kinds of mental illness or you’ve been significantly traumatized or trained for military or police work (see above), murdering another person in cold blood is something we’re very resistant to. Dying before they finish the job is tantamount to the murder of billions, but our brains can’t really feel something like that. I would argue that this is because it is so rarely, if ever, true that any one of us is solely and categorically responsible for the life or death of even one hundred people, let alone a thousand or a million or a billion. We can’t grasp the enormity of it. It’s an abstract concept, and somehow easier to handle. We couldn’t possibility have such significance. But whether or not we end one person’s life, or five, maybe a dozen, is a situation we can imagine and grapple with. Putting aside for a minute the energy industry disinformation machine, I think this is part of why it’s so hard to get people really fired up about doing something to abate climate change. Sure, there will be a billion climate refugees by 2050 or whatever, but if we shut down the coal plants a few thousand people will have to find new jobs! Sure the entire planet will run out of food to eat by the end of the century, but public transportation isn’t as convenient!
The conundrum Boyle and Garland put before their characters is one that none of us is really equipped for. Mace’s willingness to do what must be done is more indicative of an unhealthy level of compartmentalization and emotional repression than any galaxy brain wisdom or Dr. Manhattan super-perspective. They pull their punch a bit with the reveal that Trey appears to have already killed himself, but just out of guilt in the usual narcissistic way. He didn’t even know he was helping. But Mace had already made the decision and was on his way with space-knife in hand. Why he’d pick that over an overdose of the sedatives, I’m not sure. Maybe it would be slow and he’d keep using up oxygen for longer, maybe it’s less cinematic.
The film’s final act, which changes the tone somewhat abruptly in a way that some viewers find to the film’s detriment, furthers this point. It turns out that Captain Pinbacker is miraculously still alive and on the Icarus II, though homicidally insane and monstrously burnt by the Sun. He’s now running around the ship, ostensibly nude (although Boyle chickens out of giving us a look at his melty prosthetic dong) and trying to kill everyone. Prolonged exposure to the sheer scale of the Sun has broken him. The radiation, too, probably, but mostly he says things about power and God in between slasher movie kills. He saw humanity’s insignificance compared to just one star in the cosmos and he determined that we should all accept our fate, with his assistance. He wants to take the switch off the track entirely.
The film is to be admired for resisting any cheap deus ex machina twists to save our crew. Corazon is killed by Pinbacker, and Trey may have been as well, but certainly not to extend the rest of the crew’s survival. Pinbacker has also removed the ship’s mainframe from its coolant goo, which threatens to make it impossible for the device to detonate. Again, I’m a little unclear as to how a massive nuclear device simply getting consumed by the Sun is different from its intentional detonation, but I’m not a Sun scientist. Mace wastes no time in jumping into the coolant goo to resolve the problem. He’ll freeze to death, without question, but he might be able to fix the problem first. It’s a particularly noble third-act sacrifice, the type of thing which in other films often involves someone leaping or dropping to their fairly rapid death. Hypothermia is slower and seems awful, especially when you’re trying to get some work done at the same time. But he does what has to be done. In a way, it’s easier to pull the switch when you’re the one the trolley will hit, even if you have to prepare yourself to be hit by a trolley.
Capa, wounded but alive, ends up inside the big weird device, which looks sort of like an endless airplane hanger. They’re going to have to detonate it manually, or something. Whatever, they have to blow themselves up or else they can’t reheat the Sun. Pinbacker’s in there too, and trying to stop them. Gravity gets really wonky - here Küchler goes all out stretching and blurring and overexposing the image, and it becomes clear what a Boyle can bring to a spaceship movie - but Pinbacker fails to kill them before Capa can do whatever it is that only he knows how to do. There’s a surreal moment when he’s facing a huge, unmoving wall of Sun fire, much like what Pinbacker must have used to justify his rampage, but the physicist is struck only with awe. Maybe some peace, too. Then he’s engulfed in flame.
Back on Earth, we see the sun burn a little brighter in the eyes of Capa’s sister (played by Garland’s now wife, Paloma Baeza). Here Boyle and Garland are especially smart, I think, to show something like a solution to Cassie’s problem with killing Trey. We can’t wrap our heads around the responsibility for the fate of the entire planet, or the entire species, but when it’s down to sparing a mother of two or the suicidal guy who only has hours anyway, maybe the decision is a little easier.