Sunshine - The Poetry of Disintegration

Sunshine is a sci-fi film, but an esoteric one in the vein of the great thinking man's sci-fi pictures like 2001 and Alien, and the hard science of its premise is almost beside the point and is brusquely dispatched with in a short prelude: it's 50 years in the future, our star is failing and the earth is freezing to death. In a desperate effort to save humanity, the Chinese and American governments sent a ship called Icarus to fly a bomb straight into the sun and jump-start it. But Icarus failed for unknown reasons, and Sunshine picks up halfway through the journey of its follow-up mission, Icarus II. On it, eight astronauts are taking a second stab at a miracle, this time pushing a thermonuclear payload the size of Manhattan Island under a bronze shield large enough to belong to the mythological god of the ship's namesake. The payload itself is a black, blocky thing; an homage to 2001's monolith. It also contains the last of the earth's fissile materials, making Icarus II humanity's final, best hope.

When the story begins, Searle, the mission's psych-ops specialist and the person charged with maintaining the crew's mental fitness, is having a private moment of obsession on the flight deck. He's watching the sun through a large window in a kind of junkie's reverie and asks the ship's computer to take down the filters enough so he can experience the sun's rays at more dangerous, immediate levels. He's forming an addiction to its consuming power. It's both a beautiful and unsettling moment and a harbinger of fucked-up things to come. As we watch Searle's burned skin get subtly darker in ensuing scenes, mirroring the unravelling of the Icarus's already precarious mission, until he finally starts peeling the dead flesh from his face wholesale, we know things are only going to get worse.

In subatomic physics, there is a point where rationality breaks down; where the closer you look at life, the less it makes sense - particles appearing in different places at the same time and whatnot. Sunshine follows a similar trajectory and the closer its story gets to the center of our solar system and the phenomenal density of its star, reason boils away to reveal a vicious entropy at the heart of man as linear plot gives way to apeshit metaphysics. The sun, which is both cruelly devouring and warmly nurturing depending on the circumstances and, above all, completely indifferent to human struggle, comes to embody a morality vacuum. Assuming its amoral perspective, Sunshine takes spiritual themes of absolute unity and the ultimate dissolution of the human person to their logical conclusion and asks, is there any good reason that the human race must go on?

Boyle's films Trainspotting and The Beach had a wary humanism that showed modern man as socially diseased and examined addiction and selfishness as symptoms of that larger sickness. With the neo-zombie 28 Days Later, he added rage to that list and framed it in a new, low-res poetry of violence. Sunshine has all of 28 Days Later's visceral shock but comes in gorgeous high definition with the resolution cranked up. From Cillian Murphy's day-glo blue eyes to the panoramic vistas of its smoldring celestial bodies, it's a complete celebration of color and a much-needed update to the grimy and by-now-cliche space noir vocabulary abused by Ridley Scott's imitators. Boyle is even adding to the lexicon here with moves that will be soon imitated themselves, like the blurry freeze-frame shot he uses to express relativistic physics at the film's climax. And what a climax it is. The visual equivalent of Squarepusher being at the mixing controls, it's all rapid-fire cacophony and high-tech phantasmagoria.

Sunshine is a film in disintegration, a story about the human race dissolving into the magma of its own dying state and best-laid plans failing in lockstep with the primal grasp at eternal life. As Murphy succinctly and accurately puts it in the promotional material, it is the first compelling science fiction movie in two decades.