Oughts from the Aughts: Sunshine (2007)
My favorite underrated movies from the 2000s, explained in under 2010 words
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
-Carl Sagan
“There is no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have. And some of these feelings are so special, so deep, they can’t even be described in words.”
-Leonard Bernstein
The universe is bound together by matter and anti-matter, positive and negative charges, dazzling stars and profound, enveloping darkness. So too is this blog defined by contradictions and opposites: structure and tangents, satire and seriousness, examples and counterexamples. So when I went on a rant no one asked for about hating Rudy despite loving its iconic soundtrack, I already knew with the gravitas of Neil Degrasse Tyson there was another film that proved the exact opposite conclusion. Just as Rudy demonstrates that a film can have a great score and lasting legacy while being worse than people remember it as, Danny Boyle’s 2007 forgotten sci-fi flick Sunshine proves that a movie with an iconic score with a longer half-life than the film it’s from can still be an incredible film worth re-visiting.
Like Rudy, I’d heard the score from Sushine dozens of times before I finally decided to watch it. So let’s start there. I dare you to listen to "Adagio in D Minor," John Murphy's masterpiece from Sunshine, and not feel something.
For me, it’s profoundly sad and hauntingly beautiful all at once. It floods me with longing and forbids me from looking away, like the waning seconds of a colorful sunset. I am left pondering the fleeting, beautiful, fragile smallness of human existence in the face of a cold, uncaring universe. This song is so evocative that it's taken on a life of its own that’s lasted longer than the film it was written for. This happens to movie music sometimes.
The churning string sections of “Requiem for a Tower” transcended The Two Towers trailer it was written for and Requiem For a Dream, which it was inspired by, sublimating into a pop cultural shorthand for all epic movie music. So too have the tragic piano chords of “Adagio in D Minor” become the go-to soundtrack for melodramatic moments in trailers, film and television. This track has been featured in trailers for X-Men Days of Future Past, Gravity, Ready Player One, and NBC’s coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics, and used directly in Kickass and The Walking Dead. Epic film score guy Hans Zimmer even included it in the Wonder Woman 1984 soundtrack, perhaps recognizing that even he couldn’t pen anything more moving for the scene in question.
I re-encountered the emotive power of “Adagio in D Minor” in episode 9 of the basketball documentary The Last Dance during COVID. Those echoey piano chords started to fade in when Michael Jordan drew the double team against the Utah Jazz in game 6 of the playoffs. In gorgeous slow-mo, Jordan calmly passed to a wide open Steve Kerr who proceeded to pull up for a jumper with ice cold confidence, sinking his iconic game-winning shot. Murphy’s score helped me experience this moment of NBA history in glorious new levels of drama. Precious few movie songs enjoy this much time in the sun, so what caused the score of Sunshine to eclipse Sunshine itself?
The elevator pitch of Sunshine is that our sun is dying and our planet’s survival depends on an international team aboard a spaceship called the Icarus II detonating a nuclear payload to restart it. Yes, the Icarus II is the third most ominous vessel name imaginable, just behind Titanic II and Hindenburg 2: 2 Hydrogen 2 Flammable. And yes, this is a movie premise that’s incredibly bleak and slightly straining the bounds of credulity for a sci fi film. Nuking the sun would likely be just as futile (and fatal) as nuking a hurricane, so let’s not pull a Trump and get too hung up on the details of how this would work, exactly. What happened to the Icarus I, you ask? This ends up being a key plot point and a source of much of the film’s drama.
The cast of this movie is an incredible constellation of stars before they got big, featuring Cillian Murphy pre-Peeky Blinders, Michelle Yeoh pre-Everything Everywhere All At Once, Rose Byrne pre Bridesmaids, and Chris Evans pre-Captain America. Each of them has a different skillset and personality that are as integral to the plot as the layout of the ship and heat of the sun. Michelle Yeoh’s Corazon is a grounded botanist seeing to the ships delightfully conceived “oxygen garden,” while Chris Evans’s Mace is the ships logical yet volatile mechanic. Rose Byrne plays Cassie, the ships pilot and moral center. Cassie’s compassion is a glaring contrast to temperamental communications officer Harvey, played by Troy Garity, whose temper and cowardice were apparently based on Harvey Weinstein. Hiroyuki Sanada, always a joy to watch for me, anchors the crew as the stoic captain Kaneda while charismatic Cillian Murphy plays the ships physicist Capa as a shy intellectual struggling with the magnitude of the moment. Kiwi actor Cliff Curtis plays the ships psychological officer, Searle. Not only does this film wisely recognize that a voyage like this would need a psychological officer onboard, it shows him developing a pathological, bordering on religious obsession with looking at the sun.
This fascination with the creative and destructive power innate to the sun is a through line of the film. While the setting is a spaceship in the not so distant future of 2057, we’re reminded of how, long before we had spaceships, many society’s religions revolved around sun deities. No matter how advanced we’ve gotten, we still depend on the sun to keep us warm, grow our crops, and provide our energy in one way or another.
Two things about the premise work well for me. One is the scope of their mission. Since it’s as difficult to achieve as it is important to get right, the stakes feel mythically high. The second is how it’s human actions that propel the plot forward, not contrived sci-fi mumbo jumbo. It’s the crew’s discussions, decisions, mistakes, and miscalculations that cause the main conflicts as well as resolve them. Some of the best moments of drama for me are the believable and tense conversations about what to do to achieve their objective despite mounting obstacles in the indifferent entropy of deep space.
Boyle makes a compelling case that what we have to fear most is not the coldness of the universe, but the fear and frailty of our fellow human beings. No matter where we adventure as a species, we bring the baggage of being human with us. We can’t escape our fallibility just as we can’t escape our capacity for empathy. In this way, the humanity of the cast, magnified by the heartbreakingly immense scope of the mission powers the film onwards to its tense conclusion.
Today, Sunshine is a largely forgotten piece of Danny Boyle's ouvre, crowded out by the beloved early work like Trainspotting, fan-favorites like 28 Days Later, and Oscar darlings like Slumdog Millionaire. It was a box office bomb, only hauling in 32 million against a budget of 40 million. Critical reviews were mixed when it debuted, some comparing it to 2001: A Space Odyssey and the SF Chronicle saying it “Starts bad and gets worse.” After completing it, Boyle stated that he’d never make a sci-fi movie again since this one was “spiritually exhausting.” Today, it holds a lukewarm 76% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The reasons this film fizzled upon release boil down to the third act, it being mis-marketed by Fox, and (I suspect) misunderstood by 2007 movie theater audiences. Without spoiling it too much, the third act takes an unexpected, violent turn. While some felt this turned a cerebral sci-fi thriller into a slasher film for the final half hour, I think this somewhat misses the point of the plot development in question. Without delving into detail, the third act for me felt like a grimly fitting conclusion that addressed the themes of fundamentalism and fatalism in an appropriately dark way: how can you attempt a mission like this without letting the emptiness of space consume your soul?
The film was marketed as 2003’s The Core, but in space, which played up the action adventure of the mission at the expense of the thematic nucleus of the story. I suspect some audiences went into this expecting a sci-fi space adventure and were baffled by how much of it involved discussions of morality. Sunshine is a hard-to-characterize film that doesn’t fit easily into the genre it presents as. It’s neither the cerebral, organ-powered space romp of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar nor the grounded “word problem brought to life for 144 minutes” that was Ridley Scott’s The Martian. So I don’t hold it against anyone for not enjoying it. I also don’t assume that this movie is for everyone.
Sunshine stuck with me long after I heard the sound of the Icarus I’s distress beacon ominously echoing in the background of the end credits. The cast adds a lot of interesting interpersonal and psychological texture to what would otherwise be a bleak and unbelievable premise, turning an impossible space mission into a tense survival thriller. The way cinematographer Alwin Küchler uses lighting not only makes for shots so gorgeous you’ll want to pause the film and drink them in; it basically turns the sun itself into a main character. And yes, it has a spectacular score. Yet, as the unapologetic liberal arts nerd that I am, the most lasting qualities of Sunshine for me were the philosophical themes.
In his excellent video essay about Sunshine, Like Stories of Old articulates how:
“What I find most interesting about Sunshine is how it not only presents the variety of attitudes towards our inescapable fate, but it also explores the interplay between them; explores how different outlooks can lead to the same virtues and vices, to courage as well as cowardice, to both hope and despair. We see how a spiritual attitude can lead to a religious fanaticism where the destructive force of the sun becomes a pathway to heaven. We see how the fear of a nonbeliever can lead to a sense of self-centered entitlement that overpowers the voice of reason. We see how both spirituality and atheism can lead to humility and inspire selfless acts of incredible bravery. We see how, despite the universe’s constant attempts to prove our insignificance, we can still appreciate the sanctity of life. We can still be caring and merciful towards each other.”
This movie shines not as pure sci-fi but as a moral parable about the human condition. It’s basically a Greek myth set in the future. The core question is not actually the technical one of how the characters plan to use physics to reset the sun, but rather the metaphysical one of how they plan to spend the remaining days of their finite existence. To get a bit meta and heavy, this is the big question we’re all facing constantly, including you right now reading these words.
Like the Icarus II, we are all hurtling towards certain death at this very moment. In light of this, the most relevant philosophical question about being alive becomes Gandalf’s eternal inquiry: what to do with the time that is given to us. Will we fill it with ego and fear like Harvey? Will we embrace selfless sacrifice like Kaneda, Capa, and Mace? Sunshine dares to stare directly into this fiery abyss of a question and have faith that we’ll be able to pick out the answer for ourselves.