SunshineReview by Steven D. Greydanus |
posted 7/20/2007
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In an average apocalyptic science fiction movie, the end of the world figures merely as a potential catastrophe to be averted, galvanizing intrepid heroes to rise to the challenge, facing nearly impossible odds, and ultimately saving the day just in the nick of time.
Danny Boyle's Sunshine—following last year's Children of Men, a similarly downbeat, stylish, middlebrow sci-fi film from a non-Hollywood director—is haunted by the shadow of the mortality not of each human being but of mankind as a whole. Here, the extinction of man looms not so much as a threat to be averted as an inevitable reality, possibly to be resisted, but ultimately to be accepted and lived with.
It may or may not happen tomorrow: An inexplicably barren world could at last produce a miracle child, and a desperate mission to jump-start a dying sun may or may not be successful. Yet an existential bleakness leaps beyond these vagaries to the final inevitability. In the end, the sun is as mortal as our race and our world. In that sense, there is no ultimate final "saving" of humanity, any more than a doctor or fireman decisively "saves" the life of one who will inexorably someday be a corpse. The sun will die, our world will die, our race will die, and everything that matters so intensely to us now will in a sense come to naught.
Chris Evans as Mace, Cillian Murphy as Capa
"At the end of time," a character muses in a critical scene, "a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass … the man will be gone. There will be nothing to show that we were ever here, but stardust … Last man alone with God. Am I that man?"
Writer Alex Garland, who wrote Sunshine both as a screenplay and a forthcoming novel (and who collaborated with Boyle on his last apocalyptic genre film, zombie horror flick 28 Days Later), has said that the film's premise was inspired by what he called "an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based, atheist perspective." (Ironically, the idea of the heat death of the universe has long been regarded by Christian apologetics as a potential indication of the existence of a Creator. If the universe is perpetually degrading toward a final state of maximum entropy, such a one-way, finite process must have a beginning as well as an end, which seems to suggest that the universe has not always existed.)
Capa begins to see the light
Director Boyle has described Garland as "quite an aggressive atheist" (and actor Cillian Murphy, who plays the lead, has similarly said that he transitioned from agnostic to atheist while researching the role with scientists who "confirmed what I'd always suspected").
Yet Boyle, an agnostic, also acknowledged a tendency, rooted in his religious upbringing, to reach for religious and even "broadly creationist" imagery in approaching matters of ultimate import. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sunshine in several respects overtly recalls 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which agnostic director Stanley Kubrick's openness to cosmic mystery may have at least partly subverted the atheistic and anti-religious worldview of writer Arthur C. Clarke (who also wrote that story both as a screenplay and a novel).
Where 2001 was concerned with mankind's origins and ascent, Sunshine looks to mankind's ultimate fate. Kubrick's film ascribed the human race's cognitive and creative development to an outside force, the monolith-building aliens (a conceit that naturally pushes back the question of outside help to the aliens' own development). Sunshine contemplates the sun, that constant heavenly presence on which all earthly life depends, and the cosmological face of divinity in so many myths and cultures.
Cassie (Rose Byrne) feels the heat
The year is 2057. The sun is dying. Earth is succumbing to eternal winter. Mankind's only hope is to mount a manned mission to the sun to deliver a payload the size of Manhattan and detonate it, theoretically reviving our nearest star. (Manchester physicist Dr. Brian Cox [not to be confused with the actor], who worked as scientific adviser on the film, has proposed a scientific rationale for all this involving a construct of theoretical physics called a "Q-ball," an exotic form of matter that could hypothetically become trapped in a star and eat away at it like a cancer. To restart the sun, a "solar bomb" utilizing dark matter and uranium could destroy the Q-ball. None of this, though, is explained in the film.)
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