Not to make a theme of bagging on the Weekly but Ella Taylor's review of Sunshine is a fairly good example of how bad the film criticism has become there, in my opinion. She either exaggerates some points for effect -- Cillian Murphy does not spend most of the film peering through one confining contraption or another, he spends about 20 minutes (out of 115) in a space suit; no golden-suited figure is dragged into the gravity of the sun, although one does become incinerated upon becoming exposed to its unadulterated rays -- or simply misunderstood others -- the sun's premature weakening has nothing to do with humans and little about the occasional bursts of violence could be considered sadistic. In short, her review seems rather lazy to me; she appreciated some of its surface but couldn't be bothered to think about its themes.
I would place the film in the company of Children of Men. Both films use apocalyptic events in the near future -- the sudden infertility of humanity; the sudden weakening of the sun's power -- as the springboards for meditations on the role of faith and hope in human existence. The crew of the Icarus II are all well aware that their mission may be pointless and it taxes them, popping up in petty fights. However, at some level they all accept that the potential to do good outweighs the risks or pointlessness; Capa's fractured monologue to his sister and nieces tells them that if they wake up one morning and the day seems even a bit brighter, the mission will have been worth it. This hopefulness also informs the crew's fateful decision to alter their course in an attempt to rendezvous with Icarus I -- Capa, the crew's physicist, reckons that two last chances are better than one, and illustrates his point with a computer model that refuses to calculate the likelihood that their mission will succeed.
The sun itself becomes the symbol of this hope and of an utter lack of hope -- or perhaps a different kind of hope, a fatalistic desire to leave the material world behind. Searle, the Icarus II's psychologist, begins the film by experiencing the sun as directly as he can, giving himself a very bad case of sunburn in the process. His experience is transcendental; he describes it as the sun overtaking one's body and soul. Capa describes what will happen upon the detonation of the Stellar Bomb they hope will jump start the fading sun as a "small Big Bang" -- the creation of a new star within the old one -- and adds that he is not at all frightened about what will happen. On the other hand, the villain of the film has experienced the same transcendental experience as Searle and has come to a different conclusion, one that would doom earth to death. For the villain, the sun doesn't infuse him, it remains outside of him and "speaks" to him as it poisons his body. Unable to embrace the hope that the sun represents, the villain aligns it with "God," an abstraction of life and death -- it becomes a symbol of a symbol, a perversion of its relationship with the humans and planets it nurtures. The showdown inside the Stellar Bomb between Capa, Cassie and the villain is a battle between the complete faith in science to renew the transcendental symbol (Capa), an agnosticism that both fears and believes in the future (Cassie) and a fatalistic religious attitude that assumes that natural disasters are the just deserts for sinful humanity (the villain).
The film's "lead," Robert Capa, shares a name with the famous World War II photographer. The connection might be a bit opaque, but one possible link would be the Capas as witnesses to pivotal battles in human history between more-or-less clearly defined good and evil. Just as the Allies committed what must be considered war crimes during WWII, the crew of the Icarus II sacrifice themselves and others for what is clearly a greater good. In this case, Cillian Murphy's famous blue eyes are the lens through which this epic moral struggle occurs.
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Oh, yes, how film crit falters: they're nephews, not nieces, for starters. For seconders, why does no one else seem to be bothered by the fact that screenwriter Alex Garland goes so far out of his way to make these supposedly intelligent, professional people look like dumb bunglers? That Kaneda essentially is an incompetent leader is just the beginning: the film blunders along from mistakes to bad judgment calls until Garland really kicks the slaughter into high gear by tossing in a psychopath (who, nonetheless, in keeping with the general ineptitude of the other characters, picks a scalpel-- a hopelessly inefficient killing tool-- as his weapon). To make this mess work, we needed an external threat, such as a solar flare or a catastrophic mechanical failure: to ask us to accept this group of professionals acting as unprofessionally as they do is nothing short of insulting. Of course, that's exactly what Garland and Boyle ask us to do, and plenty of people out there seem willing to celebrate the stupidity of Kaneda and Capa et al., and the ridiculous tortures Garland inflicts on them. Blinded by the light? Maybe you are; I'm not. "Sunshine" is a pathetic glorification of human shortcomings; just because Capa enjoys such a "beautiful" demise doesn't make him any less of an idiot: he succeeds in his mission quite by accident. No heroes and nothing to celebrate here.
NOTE: Complete spoilers below!
Anonymous, you're right -- they're nephews, not nieces. I also found the introduction of the villain at the end of the film strained, although in the context of the film's themes, I accept it.
As for the rest of your comments -- I completely disagree. How is Kaneda incompetent? In what ways do you see the other crew members as behaving incompetently -- as opposed to simply making one mistake that sets off a series of dire problems that the crew struggles to deal with? (The one time I remember a crew member behaving like an idiot is when Capa goes to confront the villain alone; but sci fi and horror are rife with people making such silly decisions -- indeed, they are generic conventions.) The villain kills one person with the scalpel -- which is motorized, if I remember correctly, making it a bit more lethal.
Finally, the mission doesn't succeed quite by accident -- Capa and Mace in particular work to keep the mission moving forward; Mace sacrifices himself to repair the villain's damage as best he can, and Capa devises his own plan to get to the Stellar Bomb, he and Cassie fight and escape the villain themselves, Capa manually detonates the bomb. What exactly there is an accident?
I can understand disliking a film because of what would be considered surface problems -- I can't enjoy North by Northwest because of that inane crop duster sequence, or Le jour se leve because I for the life me can't see why Francois would fall so desperately in love with such a dull twit like Francoise. But I also recognize those films have themes that deserve to be examined.
Anonymous, on the other hand, seems to remain on the surface of the film like Ella Taylor, picking nits at what s/he can't accept about the film (which seem to be complaints about the genre itself). Or have I just picked another fight with a Weekly critic?
Vivian Sobbchack's piece on Sunshine in Film Comment isn't available online but it's well worth checking out. Sunshine is not a good film, as it goes, for many of the glaring plot contortions that anon points out above as well as the ultimately banal narrative means of conveying fairly underdeveloped themes. Vivian, then, approaches the film in the only way that one can who still wants to take it seriously and say nice things about it, which at the level of its visual spectacle. I want to say that this is a case in which the film's story line acts as a drag on its visual imagery, which is far more effective at conveying the film's larger concerns than anything the characters might do or say. If Boyle had jettisoned much of his plot in favor of a looser structure i think the film could have been something amazing ...
Paul, I'll look for Vivian's piece. But would someone like to actually identify the plot contortions, rather than simply say they exist? I'd be interested to see what plot contortions the film has that aren't typical to the genre.
I think it's the "typical to the genre" part that's irksome about the film. When Danny Boyle takes on a new genre (here we are back to the auteur again) there's an expectation established that we aren't going to see the plot of Alien rehashed for the 11 billionth time with little else to say about it.
Seriously. The Core explored similar themes as well with largely the same generic plot but because Sunshine's ship is heading in the opposite direction people seem to want to cut it some slack. I give it credit for being visually striking for much of same reasons that Vivian does. She notes by way of Gaston Bachelard, that the encounter with the immense -- here the infinite reaches of space and the vastness of the sun -- is also an encounter with our own insignificance. Which is why the immense is also an intimate encounter: the vast out there striking an inner chord. This can be a humbling experience, or as Vivian says, it can lead to a dangerous inflation of the ego, as the individual conflates the self with the infinite.
I think that's great explanation of why the spectre from Icarus I went batshit but that doesn't necessarily save from banality the formulaic climax that concludes the film.
As a long-time fan of the Science Fiction genre, I was very impressed by Mookie's post. And while I had more problems with the film than did he, I agree with his analysis of the film in general.
While I would have liked the "villian's" character to be explored and/or explained with a little more depth, this did not ruin the film's larger themes.
And I still fail to see anyone detail the "plot contortions" in any meaningful way.
While the plot certainly did contain elements familiar to this genre and others (thrillers, horror, action/adventure) by making the climax a struggle between the villian and the hero, as long as the "villian" and "hero" are explored and represent some larger idea, then it is a perfectly acceptable use of the time honored tradition.
I absolutely agree with Mookie that the final showdown is a symbol of the three variations of faith that Mookie describes so eloquently.
I also disagree with Anonymous that the crew came across as bunglers. I saw no evidence to support this claim. Other than the one actual "human error" mistake made by Trey, the other "errors in judgement" were made by calculating risk and benefit with all the scientific models available to them. That things went wrong only amplifies the theme and makes the outcome all the more spiritual.
Thanks for havin' my back, sweetie!
Paul, we seem to be approaching the film from different perspectives: I accepted it as a genre film and looked at what it had to tell me about faith; you seem to have wanted a different kind of genre film (the Danny Boyle genre) and dislike the film because it did not deliver on your expectations of genre-bending/breaking. And while the film does resemble Alien, I am compelled to point out that Alien's plot was hardly fresh; it's a fairly straight lift from It! The Terror from Beyond Space, and also shows influences from a number of other films. To call Sunshine a rip-off of a film that is itself vulnerable to charges of being a rip-off is a little short-sighted.
I still need to read Vivian's piece but am at this point not sure I agree with the notion that part of the film's themes is man's insignificance in the cosmic scheme. Yes humans are small before the sun but Searle's experience of the sun is transcendental -- the sun envelops him, informs and infuses him; he desperately wants to know Kaneda's final thoughts as he meets his own solar death. The Stellar Bomb actually works -- although the Icarus computer refused to estimate the likelihood of success, as it happens the humans hopes and efforts were spot on: the bomb survives its plunge into the sun, detonates and renews the sun. Furthermore, this new act of creation actually pauses to allow Capa to witness it in its beauty; he flinches, expecting to be immediately incinerated, but instead the new sun approaches him and stops, baring itself and creation to him. The film is about the potential for transcendence, the struggle between hope and oblivion, and this is a beautiful scene of that hope being rewarded.
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