Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) is not only his most underrated film in his career, but it’s also one of the most overlooked movies in 2007. Set in the year 2057, the Sun is dying and all life on Earth is in danger. Sunshine stars Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, and Chris Evans, are just a few of the crewmembers on a spacecraft that is sent to re-ignite the sun with a massive nuclear bomb, after another crew disappears in the vastness of space.
What makes this film interesting, and separates itself from other science fiction movies is that gives the viewer that feeling of claustrophobia not only on the spaceship, Icarus II (Boyle’s shout out to Greek mythology), in which the crew resides, but also in space. We get this feeling, especially when Boyle puts the audience inside the suit (see below):
In past science fiction films, they usually have a crew in a ship and that’s it, they don’t really factor in what all would be needed to survive. In Sunshine, each crewmember is assigned a task to keep each other alive. For example: there’s a biologist that’s in charge of taking care of the on-ship garden, which supplies the ship with oxygen; a psychiatrist that keeps the crew members sanity in check during the long trip to the sun. Others include: a communications officer; an engineer; a navigator; the ship’s pilot; the captain; and most importantly, the physicist that knows how to operate the bomb. Once disaster hits, as expected by the audience, each of the crew member must decide who is more important and who is expendable. Even though they're potentially sacrificing their lives to re-ignite the sun (many factors set in: the bomb going off before they reach their destination, running out of oxygen supply, etc), it's a terrifying concept that one would have to be prematurely sacrificed and not even know if the mission is a success of not.
Overall, this is one of my favorite films, and I recommend it any science fiction fan that hasn’t checked it out yet. One last thing that I would like to mention is that Sunshine has one of my favorite sequences ever filmed. If you decide to watch it or already have seen it, let me know what you think in the comments section.
No comments:
Post a Comment