# Sunshine (2007)



## Nesacat (Jan 22, 2007)

A spaceship with a crew of eight carry a device which will breathe new life into our dying sun. But deep into their mission, a distress beacon from a spaceship that vanished years earlier starts the crew on the fight for their sanity.

It looks pretty interesting thus far and here's the link to the trailer, which really does look good.

Sunshine


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## Culhwch (Jan 22, 2007)

This is the Danny Boyle flick? With Cillian Murphy? I'm sure I have heard it called by a different title, but I may be imagining things. It does look very intriguing, I must say...


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## Foxbat (Jan 22, 2007)

The scenario of a spaceship returning from the past and the crew fighting for their sanity sounds a wee bit like Event Horizon but....hey...if it's got spaceships in it I'll give it a watch


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## Steffi (Jan 22, 2007)

This sounds interesting..


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## Pyan (Jan 22, 2007)

Interesting trailer - great ship!


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## BookStop (Jan 23, 2007)

The fact that it's a Danny Boyle film makes it interesting - I'm still not 100% what all it's about, but the trailer looks good too.


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## Nesacat (Jan 24, 2007)

The ship does look quite interesting. Very Gothic and 'old school'. I quite like that.


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## TheDeeMan (Jan 27, 2007)

Personally I'm looking forward to Boyle's "28 days later" sequel "28 weeks later" that's coming out soon.

Dee


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## SpaceShip (Jan 27, 2007)

Spaceships!  Hmm!  Trailer looked very good.


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## why me why now (Feb 26, 2007)

i saw a press screening of this....

all i can say is HEAVY


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## Culhwch (Feb 26, 2007)

TheDeeMan said:


> Personally I'm looking forward to Boyle's "28 days later" sequel "28 weeks later" that's coming out soon.
> 
> Dee


 
Actually it doesn't appear that Boyle is involved with _28 Weeks Later_ in any significant way...


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## why me why now (Feb 26, 2007)

Culhwch said:


> Actually it doesn't appear that Boyle is involved with _28 Weeks Later_ in any significant way...




oh lordy..please don't let them **** it up


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## why me why now (Feb 27, 2007)

someone on imdb just put up the new trailer....
one of the best sequences from the film i thought

Sunshine - U.K. - Videos


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## why me why now (Feb 28, 2007)

anyone else sen this yet?

some seriously thought provoking stuff


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## why me why now (Mar 14, 2007)

pyanfaruk said:


> Interesting trailer - great ship!



oh mate - you have to see the ship shots to believe it....one of the most realistic 'ships in space' performances i've ever seen


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## why me why now (Mar 14, 2007)

hre's a review i put up on my student forum:

" i blagged a press screening of this last week, and i can tell you it's damn amazing. 

 without a doubt... DO NOT see this on some crappy small screen...You need the scale of it. The production values are something else...But it's not some 'empty' blockbuster like half the crap out there.. 
 It's definitely not another disaster movie..Much more in line with Alien etc...Classy as hell. Some seriously thought provoking stuff, not so much the science (although that is interesting), but more the human interaction stuff. 

 I am a big danny boyle supporter, although i wasn't a massive fan of the ending of 28DL..i still rate it highly as a film...Some of the set pieces (particularly the intro sequence in London and the tower block chase) were incredible... 

 As with sunshine, the thought-provoking stuff was actually quite early on. A lot of the same themes of claustrophobia and harsh-moral-decision-for-the-greater-good are present in both sunshine & 28DL 

 I mean ask yourself...Could you kill a loved one to save the rest of mankind? (that's the sort of thing the crew in sunshine face) 

 It's a simple, but genuinely intriguing moral dilemma...and the film's full of them  

 trust me - you have to see this one"


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## Dave (Mar 14, 2007)

Thanks for the links. It's actually the first I've heard of it. According to IMdB Danny Boyle is an "executive producer" on '28 Weeks Later' however if he is involved "in any significant way" I couldn't say. He also was responsible for 'Shallow Grave' and a fair about of UK TV drama in the 1990's.


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## why me why now (Mar 14, 2007)

no worries dave...

Actually there's loads of clips at Sunshine , but i found alot on youtube too if you can be bothered to search...

I'm in 2 minds about 28WL....i really don;t want a repeat performance of the blair witch sequel..


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## why me why now (Mar 16, 2007)

Dave said:


> Thanks for the links. It's actually the first I've heard of it. According to IMdB Danny Boyle is an "executive producer" on '28 Weeks Later' however if he is involved "in any significant way" I couldn't say. He also was responsible for 'Shallow Grave' and a fair about of UK TV drama in the 1990's.



trainspotting ftw


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## why me why now (Mar 21, 2007)

[FONT=arial, helvetica, sans-serif]just seen a review on aintitcool from a screening a couple of days ago:

"Having had the pleasure to catch a screening of Danny Boyle’s new film Sunshine, followed by a Q&A with the man himself and star of the film Cillian Murphy, I thought I’d share my 2 cents worth with you.

Essentially the plot is that the sun is slowly dying and a group of scientists are on a mission to reverse this by ‘kick starting’ the sun. The film knowingly references many sci-fi films from the serious and reflective, 2001 and Aliens, to the more popcorn, Event Horizon. To give you an early idea of how much I enjoyed it I’d place it much closer to the first two films mentioned than the latter. In fact some of the scenes almost feel like updated versions of Kubrick’s film (watch out for the monoliths at the end!) As their ship (the Icarus II) gets closer to the sun they encounter Icarus I, from an earlier, failed attempt. As soon as they decide to change course and investigate things start to go wrong.

Some of the most wonderful thing about the film are the visuals and sound design, this film is a treat for the senses. The CGI work is exemplary and goes a long way to establishing the sun as a character in its own right. The sound design suits the grand scale of the picture perfectly, we’re talking Oscar quality here, and Danny Boyle’s directing is at times mesmerising. The choices he makes behind the camera are inspired. He manages to infuse the screen with beauty, from the serene depictions of the ship at the beginning of the film to the extreme, jumpy, staccato, blurry and physically jarring work that comes later. It is all note perfect.

The acting unfortunately is not quite so stellar. It’s not to say that there are not some fine performances but they are all overshadowed by the truly excellent visuals. Whilst Boyle does his best to balance everything out there is no denying that the visuals, don’t necessarily overpower, but are of a much higher standard that some of the acting on display. Cillian Murphy puts in a strong performance and is able to convey the internal struggle of the character very well. Both Michelle Yeoh and Hiroyuki Sanda are very good and Rose Byrne equips herself well in a part that is far too small. The other performances range from average to poor, the main problem being that the supporting actors are unable to fully portray the intellectual gravitas that such people in their position and their characters would inevitably have and that ultimately weakens the impact of the film. That’s not to say its all their own fault as the characters on the periphery are very one sided and stereotypical not leaving the cast a great deal to work with. Though it is not long before in true sci-fi style they meet untimely demises.

The closer the crew travel to the sun the more their obsession with its power takes control to the point where it takes on almost mythical proportions and the film poses some metaphysical questions.

A hugely enjoyable if not totally original film Sunshine would not exist if it were not for those that have gone before it. Boyle has borrowed from the best sci-fi of the last 40 years and brought it bang up to date. I personally can’t wait to watch it again!"[/FONT]


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## why me why now (Mar 27, 2007)

oh nice...Just saw this: Sunshine Moments Competition

 Some lovely pix in there....

Also, interview with boyle in the guardian;

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview...040180,00.html


 interesting to read this:


"We had this argument in the bar last night. He said it's absolutely critical we use nuclear power and Cillian said, 'What about the Irish sea? It's so polluted and there's all these leukaemia clusters.' And Cox went, 'If we use nuclear power we can give light and food to a million people in Africa and you're worried about a few hundred people in Ireland?'"

 I'm more and more convinced that Boyle's principle interests lie in these human dilemmas, and his films are just different backdrops to explore what is basically the same idea each time


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## why me why now (Apr 2, 2007)

just found this > www.myspace.com/sunshinemovie 

More clips etc....interesting choice of top friends  ;0)


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## Talysia (Apr 2, 2007)

This definitely looks like a film for me.  Looking forward to seeing it.


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## why me why now (Apr 2, 2007)

Talysia said:


> This definitely looks like a film for me.  Looking forward to seeing it.





review from a few days ago:
2007: a scorching new space odyssey | Review | The Observer


*2007: a scorching new space odyssey*



                   [FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]One of the most exciting British movies this year is Danny Boyle's sci-fi epic, Sunshine, which puts the divine back into a genre that had lost its way. To film-makers, it seems, the infinite has a spiritual attraction[/FONT]           

       [FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif] *Mark Kermode
Sunday    March     25, 2007
The Observer* 

[/FONT]          At a key moment in Danny Boyle's radiant new sci-fi film Sunshine, a character is asked, 'Are you an angel?' With its retina-scorching visuals, which blaze from the screen into the dark abyss of the cinema auditorium, this extraordinary epic certainly seems to burn as brightly as a host of fiery angels. Set in 2057, Sunshine follows the crew of the spaceship Icarus II as they attempt to deliver a thermonuclear payload into the heart of the sun, lending new light to our galaxy's inexorably darkening star. En route, they pick up a distress signal from their lost predecessor, Icarus I, which disappeared into the void seven years earlier. Like an interstellar Marie Celeste, the first Icarus now hangs in space like a ghost ship, seemingly without a soul in sight. But as the reason for its mission failure is gradually revealed (more psychological than scientific), the crew of Icarus II fall prey to the eternal inner demons which haunt those who fly too close to the sun. 		 			
 Shot not in Hollywood but in the 3 Mills studios in London's East End, Sunshine boasts extraordinary computer graphic imagery so luminescent you feel you could get sunburn just watching the film. As a sensory experience, it's overwhelming. But perhaps more importantly, Sunshine also harks back to a time when sci-fi turned its attention not toward the hallowed teen market but toward the heavens. Although screenwriter Alex Garland has said the inspiration for the film came from 'an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based, atheist perspective', this ambitious British fantasy increasingly blurs the boundaries between science and religion. In this respect, it falls within a grand tradition of adult-orientated science-fiction which is haunted by the question of divinity, whether as a presence or an absence.These ideas are familiar to director Danny Boyle, who had a traditional religious upbringing, and planned to join a seminary at the age of 14. 'I was at school in Bolton,' he remembers, 'and all set to transfer to this seminary near Wigan. Then one of the priests told me that maybe I should wait, maybe I should stay and finish my school education. Quite soon after that, I saw A Clockwork Orange, which was the first film I went to see by myself. And it just changed everything. I know it all sounds too neat, but that's what happened.'
Boyle went on to make Trainspotting, which has been dubbed 'the Clockwork Orange of the Nineties' - a viscerally hip portrait of anarchic youth culture which became both a controversial modern film classic and a defining pop icon. Yet despite his current free-form agnosticism, Boyle's films have continued to be haunted by the detritus of his religious background, from the worldly angels of the romantic fantasy A Life Less Ordinary (which owes a debt to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven) to the solidly earthy apparitions of saints who appear to the young hero of the underrated Millions. Other Boyle hits include 28 Days Later, a Garland-scripted zombie shocker set in a terrifying post-apocalyptic Britain. Now, with Sunshine, Boyle has set his sights higher than ever before, making a film which addresses 'what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe'.
Sci-fi fans will see a range of familiar texts echoed in the broadstrokes outline of Sunshine, most notably Paul WS Anderson's Event Horizon, a flawed but fascinating Nineties Brit-pic in which a lost spaceship re-emerges from a black hole having been to hell and back - literally. There are also nods to John Carpenter's Seventies cult classic Dark Star, in which co-creator Dan O'Bannon plays Sgt Pinback, whose oddball moniker inspired Sunshine's most mysterious character, Pinbacker. O'Bannon went on to co-write Alien, Ridley Scott's deep space shocker to which so much modern sci-fi owes a debt, and with which Sunshine shares its use of the time-honoured 'intercepted distress signal' motif. And then of course there's my own personal favourite, the underrated sci-fi masterpiece Silent Running - Doug Trumbull's eco-warning dystopian fantasy in which the last of Earth's forests are consigned to giant geodesic domes in space, an idea that appears to have blossomed into the 'oxygen gardens' aboard the Icarus spaceship in Boyle's 21st-century adventure.
Yet the primary heavenly body around which Sunshine charts its orbit is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a weighty and portentous work which opens with 'The Dawn of Man' and climaxes with the birth of a Star Child in what appears to be an extraterrestrial rewriting of the creationist myth. Just as God creates Adam in his own image in Genesis, so the 'aliens' of 2001 transform a dying astronaut into a perfectly formed space baby, the first of a new species which will return to earth (presumably) to herald the next age in man's cosmic evolution.
This conclusion may be obliquely expressed (I remember thinking 'what was all that about?' and having to read the novel to find out) but the mesmerising symphony of sound and vision which constitutes the film's final act clearly suggest a metaphysical encounter way beyond the realms of rational explanation. Dubbed 'the ultimate trip', Kubrick's psychedelic movie used music by the avant garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti, which Underworld's Karl Hyde admits profoundly influenced his own work on the music for Boyle's new film. 'I'd never heard anything like it,' says Hyde of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, which sounds for all the world like choirs of alien angels ringing throughout the heavens, investing 2001's baffling denouement with undeniable overtones of religious ecstasy and unearthly transcendence.
There's a strikingly similar blend of science and theology in Sunshine, in which whizz-kid physicist Capa (played by the ethereally blue-eyed Cillian Murphy) comes face to face with his maker in the shape of a dying sun. Just as the enigmatic monoliths from 2001 act as creative gods to the earthlings, so the sun serves as both the giver of life and the source of all knowledge in Boyle's soul-searching movie.
'I tried to keep it visual,' says Boyle, 'because some of the ideas in the film are very hard to talk about. But when we were making Sunshine, which involved a lot of post-production special effects, my responsibility to the actors was to describe to them what they would be seeing. I was brought up in a religious environment, and so my natural tendency was to lapse into descriptions which were broadly creationist. I'd be saying things like: "Kneel before the source of all creation, bow down before the source of all life!" And even Alex [Garland], who is quite an aggressive atheist, has that same cultural instinct in the language that he uses.'
So too, it appears, does Sunshine's scientific consultant Dr Brian Cox, who works at Cern (the Centre for European Nuclear Research), the world's largest particle-physics laboratory. According to Boyle, Cox's work includes the pursuit of the 'Higgs boson', the missing piece in the current theory of the fundamental nature of matter which is affectionately known amongst scientists as the 'God particle'. 'Brian Cox admits that you can't really speak about these things without allowing for what some people would call a "spiritual dimension",' says Boyle. 'The question is, of course, whether that spiritual dimension is just a constraint of the language - the fact that we simply have no other vocabulary to describe such things. I think that's what Alex believes. But for me, what Capa sees at the end of the movie is definitely something beyond the rational.'
The other significant star in Sunshine's cinematic galaxy is Tarkovsky's Solaris, a sombre Russian classic which, like 2001, uses a journey into deep space to dramatise a symbolic voyage into the very soul of man. Tarkovsky and Kubrick were aware of each other's work, and their joint efforts represent the twin peaks of a neo-spiritualist brand of science-fiction cinema which reached its apotheosis in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Other contemporaneous works (which flourished in the period before Star Wars turned sci-fi into an amusement park ride) include John Boorman's bonkers Zardoz, a self-important romp with philosophical pretensions. Here, Sean Connery (in leather straps, boots, and fetching posing pouch) can be found climbing inside the mouth of the flying deity Zardoz which rules the wastelands of the earth in a godforsaken near-future. Zardoz is meant to be a marauding, all-powerful divinity but, as Connery's Zed discovers, he is nothing more than a false idol - a smoke-and-mirrors illusion like the Wizard of Oz ('Zard-Oz', geddit?). The movie was pretentious, boring, and very, very silly. But its adults-only X-rating and esoteric script spoke volumes about the grown-up aura that sci-fi had attained in the wake of 2001 and Solaris
Nor were the theosophical tendencies of the genre utterly quelled by the kidtastic assault of George Lucas and his clones. Although Star Wars and its spin-off sequels and prequels played primarily to a congregation of children and arrested adolescents, the endless ooga-booga about 'The Force' and 'The Dark Side' have since flourished into something resembling a modern religion which commands an army of merchandise-hungry disciples. I can't stand the Star Wars movies, which always seemed to me to represent a gross infantalisation of the dark hearted 'serious' sci-fi (Quatermass and the Pit, Silent Running, Soylent Green) on which I was raised. But I've heard pulpit preachers quote Yoda in their attempts to engage young people with religion, the battle between Good and Evil having been played out in the popular imagination as a war between Sith Lords and Jedi Knights.
Even Captain Kirk has dabbled in the search for God, most egregiously in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in which the Enterprise boldly goes 'through the barrier' between this world and the next. One sub-2001 light show later, and Kirk is splitting infinitives in heaven. Of course, it all turns out to be a Zardoz-style con, but not before everyone has had a chance to pontificate at great length about the meaning of paradise and the nature of the divine being. (The film was directed by William Shatner himself, which perhaps explains why God turns out to be no match for Captain Kirk.)
Danny Boyle sensibly prefers Robert Zemeckis's 1997 film Contact, large swathes of which involve heated debate about whether a priest, a psychoanalyst or a particle physicist would be best placed to represent mankind in our first meeting with extraterrestrial life-forms. 'I was there on opening night,' says Boyle, a devoted sci-fi fan with an enthusiasm for the genre in all its forms. He was even slated to direct the third Alien sequel but backed out due to anxieties about the level of special effects and the studio's evident desire for a nuts-and-bolts, action-orientated romp.
Having completed Sunshine, however, this endlessly energetic filmmaker has no plans to revisit sci-fi, which has a habit of producing creative burn-out. 'There's a reason why many directors only make one science-fiction film,' he says.
'It's because you exhaust yourself... spiritually. I do think that I've become more spiritual working on this - you have to be open-minded. The interesting thing is that the more commercial sci-fi films, like Event Horizon or Alien, tend to go for Hell in space. But maybe its more ambitious to aim for Heaven...'


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## The_Warrior (Apr 2, 2007)

To me, it has an indie look to it.


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## why me why now (Apr 3, 2007)

The_Warrior said:


> To me, it has an indie look to it.




in what sense?


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## why me why now (Apr 5, 2007)

UK release this weekend! BOH!


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## The_Warrior (Apr 7, 2007)

why me why now said:


> in what sense?


 

To me anyways. I don't now for sure. It still looks good.


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## Lucien21 (Apr 7, 2007)

The film is certainly visually stunning.

It loses it's way in the last 20 mins by changing the tone and tension of the film which, for me, ruined the movie.


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## PTeppic (Apr 7, 2007)

I'd agree with Lucien. It's gorgeous in many ways. Some reasonable space-transit stuff for the first half, though one or two niggles for me I'll not bother you with (well, okay - ease of changing course, velocities etc., effects of leaving a vehicle traveling at 4000+mph). Good consideration of expendables, solar shielding, psychology of the trip, etc. As you say, it starts as kind of Armageddon / Deep Impact (but with style and depth - very much Silent Running) for the first half, but just goes all Event Horizon / Saturn 5 for the second half.
Or perhaps


Spoiler



I know what massacre you did last Friday 13th in a hostel with a  chain-saw



And I'm going to have to comment on the slip-frame stuff in the weapons bay in the last five minutes - I'm sure it's very clever and arty but I just kept thinking I was watching a DVD and it was skipping. It was almost bad enough to induce motion sickness!


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## The_Warrior (Apr 9, 2007)

*What is with that  white writing????*


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## PTeppic (Apr 10, 2007)

At this end its put in with "spoiler" tags... [ spoiler ] text here [/ spoiler ]
Is that not how it's done?


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## why me why now (Apr 10, 2007)

any more reviews?


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## williamjm (Apr 10, 2007)

I did think it was a good movie, although not perfect. It was certainly visually spectacular, there were some real "sense-of-wonder" moments in it at times. The tone was a bit uneven, but I didn't think the action scenes towards the end did too much harm to the seriousness of the rest of the film. The ending did at least make a certain amount of sense, although it was a bit implausible at times and I think there were some (minor) plot holes. The interactions between the crew of the Icarus II seemed plausible and intelligently written. The acting and directing were generally good, although the direction did get a bit incoherent towards the end.


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## why me why now (Apr 11, 2007)

williamjm said:


> I did think it was a good movie, although not perfect. It was certainly visually spectacular, there were some real "sense-of-wonder" moments in it at times.



which bits did you like? Personally i loved the mercury / sun shot. Truly lovely moment


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## why me why now (Apr 11, 2007)

hearing a lot of different reviews of this - seems to be polarising people something chronic. two reviews from papers here - seems to sum it up fairly well..







2007: a scorching new space odyssey | Review | The Observer

"2007: a scorching new space odyssey


One of the most exciting British movies this year is Danny Boyle's sci-fi epic, Sunshine, which puts the divine back into a genre that had lost its way. To film-makers, it seems, the infinite has a spiritual attraction

Mark Kermode
Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer

At a key moment in Danny Boyle's radiant new sci-fi film Sunshine, a character is asked, 'Are you an angel?' With its retina-scorching visuals, which blaze from the screen into the dark abyss of the cinema auditorium, this extraordinary epic certainly seems to burn as brightly as a host of fiery angels. Set in 2057, Sunshine follows the crew of the spaceship Icarus II as they attempt to deliver a thermonuclear payload into the heart of the sun, lending new light to our galaxy's inexorably darkening star. En route, they pick up a distress signal from their lost predecessor, Icarus I, which disappeared into the void seven years earlier. Like an interstellar Marie Celeste, the first Icarus now hangs in space like a ghost ship, seemingly without a soul in sight. But as the reason for its mission failure is gradually revealed (more psychological than scientific), the crew of Icarus II fall prey to the eternal inner demons which haunt those who fly too close to the sun.

Article continues
Shot not in Hollywood but in the 3 Mills studios in London's East End, Sunshine boasts extraordinary computer graphic imagery so luminescent you feel you could get sunburn just watching the film. As a sensory experience, it's overwhelming. But perhaps more importantly, Sunshine also harks back to a time when sci-fi turned its attention not toward the hallowed teen market but toward the heavens. Although screenwriter Alex Garland has said the inspiration for the film came from 'an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based, atheist perspective', this ambitious British fantasy increasingly blurs the boundaries between science and religion. In this respect, it falls within a grand tradition of adult-orientated science-fiction which is haunted by the question of divinity, whether as a presence or an absence.

These ideas are familiar to director Danny Boyle, who had a traditional religious upbringing, and planned to join a seminary at the age of 14. 'I was at school in Bolton,' he remembers, 'and all set to transfer to this seminary near Wigan. Then one of the priests told me that maybe I should wait, maybe I should stay and finish my school education. Quite soon after that, I saw A Clockwork Orange, which was the first film I went to see by myself. And it just changed everything. I know it all sounds too neat, but that's what happened.'

Boyle went on to make Trainspotting, which has been dubbed 'the Clockwork Orange of the Nineties' - a viscerally hip portrait of anarchic youth culture which became both a controversial modern film classic and a defining pop icon. Yet despite his current free-form agnosticism, Boyle's films have continued to be haunted by the detritus of his religious background, from the worldly angels of the romantic fantasy A Life Less Ordinary (which owes a debt to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death aka Stairway to Heaven) to the solidly earthy apparitions of saints who appear to the young hero of the underrated Millions. Other Boyle hits include 28 Days Later, a Garland-scripted zombie shocker set in a terrifying post-apocalyptic Britain. Now, with Sunshine, Boyle has set his sights higher than ever before, making a film which addresses 'what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe'.

Sci-fi fans will see a range of familiar texts echoed in the broadstrokes outline of Sunshine, most notably Paul WS Anderson's Event Horizon, a flawed but fascinating Nineties Brit-pic in which a lost spaceship re-emerges from a black hole having been to hell and back - literally. There are also nods to John Carpenter's Seventies cult classic Dark Star, in which co-creator Dan O'Bannon plays Sgt Pinback, whose oddball moniker inspired Sunshine's most mysterious character, Pinbacker. O'Bannon went on to co-write Alien, Ridley Scott's deep space shocker to which so much modern sci-fi owes a debt, and with which Sunshine shares its use of the time-honoured 'intercepted distress signal' motif. And then of course there's my own personal favourite, the underrated sci-fi masterpiece Silent Running - Doug Trumbull's eco-warning dystopian fantasy in which the last of Earth's forests are consigned to giant geodesic domes in space, an idea that appears to have blossomed into the 'oxygen gardens' aboard the Icarus spaceship in Boyle's 21st-century adventure.

Yet the primary heavenly body around which Sunshine charts its orbit is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a weighty and portentous work which opens with 'The Dawn of Man' and climaxes with the birth of a Star Child in what appears to be an extraterrestrial rewriting of the creationist myth. Just as God creates Adam in his own image in Genesis, so the 'aliens' of 2001 transform a dying astronaut into a perfectly formed space baby, the first of a new species which will return to earth (presumably) to herald the next age in man's cosmic evolution.

This conclusion may be obliquely expressed (I remember thinking 'what was all that about?' and having to read the novel to find out) but the mesmerising symphony of sound and vision which constitutes the film's final act clearly suggest a metaphysical encounter way beyond the realms of rational explanation. Dubbed 'the ultimate trip', Kubrick's psychedelic movie used music by the avant garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti, which Underworld's Karl Hyde admits profoundly influenced his own work on the music for Boyle's new film. 'I'd never heard anything like it,' says Hyde of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, which sounds for all the world like choirs of alien angels ringing throughout the heavens, investing 2001's baffling denouement with undeniable overtones of religious ecstasy and unearthly transcendence.

There's a strikingly similar blend of science and theology in Sunshine, in which whizz-kid physicist Capa (played by the ethereally blue-eyed Cillian Murphy) comes face to face with his maker in the shape of a dying sun. Just as the enigmatic monoliths from 2001 act as creative gods to the earthlings, so the sun serves as both the giver of life and the source of all knowledge in Boyle's soul-searching movie.

'I tried to keep it visual,' says Boyle, 'because some of the ideas in the film are very hard to talk about. But when we were making Sunshine, which involved a lot of post-production special effects, my responsibility to the actors was to describe to them what they would be seeing. I was brought up in a religious environment, and so my natural tendency was to lapse into descriptions which were broadly creationist. I'd be saying things like: "Kneel before the source of all creation, bow down before the source of all life!" And even Alex [Garland], who is quite an aggressive atheist, has that same cultural instinct in the language that he uses.'

So too, it appears, does Sunshine's scientific consultant Dr Brian Cox, who works at Cern (the Centre for European Nuclear Research), the world's largest particle-physics laboratory. According to Boyle, Cox's work includes the pursuit of the 'Higgs boson', the missing piece in the current theory of the fundamental nature of matter which is affectionately known amongst scientists as the 'God particle'. 'Brian Cox admits that you can't really speak about these things without allowing for what some people would call a "spiritual dimension",' says Boyle. 'The question is, of course, whether that spiritual dimension is just a constraint of the language - the fact that we simply have no other vocabulary to describe such things. I think that's what Alex believes. But for me, what Capa sees at the end of the movie is definitely something beyond the rational.'

The other significant star in Sunshine's cinematic galaxy is Tarkovsky's Solaris, a sombre Russian classic which, like 2001, uses a journey into deep space to dramatise a symbolic voyage into the very soul of man. Tarkovsky and Kubrick were aware of each other's work, and their joint efforts represent the twin peaks of a neo-spiritualist brand of science-fiction cinema which reached its apotheosis in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Other contemporaneous works (which flourished in the period before Star Wars turned sci-fi into an amusement park ride) include John Boorman's bonkers Zardoz, a self-important romp with philosophical pretensions. Here, Sean Connery (in leather straps, boots, and fetching posing pouch) can be found climbing inside the mouth of the flying deity Zardoz which rules the wastelands of the earth in a godforsaken near-future. Zardoz is meant to be a marauding, all-powerful divinity but, as Connery's Zed discovers, he is nothing more than a false idol - a smoke-and-mirrors illusion like the Wizard of Oz ('Zard-Oz', geddit?). The movie was pretentious, boring, and very, very silly. But its adults-only X-rating and esoteric script spoke volumes about the grown-up aura that sci-fi had attained in the wake of 2001 and Solaris

Nor were the theosophical tendencies of the genre utterly quelled by the kidtastic assault of George Lucas and his clones. Although Star Wars and its spin-off sequels and prequels played primarily to a congregation of children and arrested adolescents, the endless ooga-booga about 'The Force' and 'The Dark Side' have since flourished into something resembling a modern religion which commands an army of merchandise-hungry disciples. I can't stand the Star Wars movies, which always seemed to me to represent a gross infantalisation of the dark hearted 'serious' sci-fi (Quatermass and the Pit, Silent Running, Soylent Green) on which I was raised. But I've heard pulpit preachers quote Yoda in their attempts to engage young people with religion, the battle between Good and Evil having been played out in the popular imagination as a war between Sith Lords and Jedi Knights.

Even Captain Kirk has dabbled in the search for God, most egregiously in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in which the Enterprise boldly goes 'through the barrier' between this world and the next. One sub-2001 light show later, and Kirk is splitting infinitives in heaven. Of course, it all turns out to be a Zardoz-style con, but not before everyone has had a chance to pontificate at great length about the meaning of paradise and the nature of the divine being. (The film was directed by William Shatner himself, which perhaps explains why God turns out to be no match for Captain Kirk.)

Danny Boyle sensibly prefers Robert Zemeckis's 1997 film Contact, large swathes of which involve heated debate about whether a priest, a psychoanalyst or a particle physicist would be best placed to represent mankind in our first meeting with extraterrestrial life-forms. 'I was there on opening night,' says Boyle, a devoted sci-fi fan with an enthusiasm for the genre in all its forms. He was even slated to direct the third Alien sequel but backed out due to anxieties about the level of special effects and the studio's evident desire for a nuts-and-bolts, action-orientated romp.

Having completed Sunshine, however, this endlessly energetic filmmaker has no plans to revisit sci-fi, which has a habit of producing creative burn-out. 'There's a reason why many directors only make one science-fiction film,' he says.

'It's because you exhaust yourself... spiritually. I do think that I've become more spiritual working on this - you have to be open-minded. The interesting thing is that the more commercial sci-fi films, like Event Horizon or Alien, tend to go for Hell in space. But maybe its more ambitious to aim for Heaven...'"


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## Pyan (Apr 11, 2007)

Just seen it - absolutely blown away.
The only thing I can say at the moment, is that you must see it now, while it's at the cinema - no matter how large your TV set, it just won't be the same.
Blown away.


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## williamjm (Apr 12, 2007)

why me why now said:


> which bits did you like? Personally i loved the mercury / sun shot. Truly lovely moment



Yes, the Mercury scene was good. The various shots of the outside of the Icarus 2 and its shield  were also very good - the scenes where they're repairing the panels do give a good impression of the scale of the Icarus and the sheer power of the Sun at that distance.


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## why me why now (Apr 12, 2007)

williamjm said:


> Yes, the Mercury scene was good. The various shots of the outside of the Icarus 2 and its shield  were also very good - the scenes where they're repairing the panels do give a good impression of the scale of the Icarus and the sheer power of the Sun at that distance.



oh yeh - very true. forgot about those shots..

i remember watching them and wondering if you get vertigo in space


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## why me why now (Apr 12, 2007)

Sunshine Sunspots Competition

cute idea...and lol @ the first entry > YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.


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## Mighty mouse (Apr 12, 2007)

I saw this last night and was surprised how interesting I found it. I am not a fan of near future SF but you get the sense of an engineer's take on the tech and the scale of the undertaking. Not to mention a few breathtaking sequences of the 'reality' of the thing we are orbiting. Refreshing.

My few gripes are you do see elements of other SF films in there (the downbeat, 'Alien' type group, the 2001 computer), the end 20 minutes have no clarity and last and most annoying, it is probably the loudest film I have seen. I hear auditoria are getting louder but this was bordering on the painful (perhaps it is just this multiplex).

My companion (she is an art house aficionardo) hated it, 'Typical mainstream, emotionally sterile , short attention span, cliche ridden ...".


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## Pyan (Apr 12, 2007)

Mighty mouse said:


> , 'Typical mainstream, emotionally sterile , short attention span, cliche ridden ...".


All that I look for in a movie!


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## PTeppic (Apr 13, 2007)

Yup - I go purely for escapist entertainment. If I wanted realism I'd read the paper...


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## why me why now (Apr 13, 2007)

pyan said:


> All that I look for in a movie!



i did a little lol


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## why me why now (Apr 18, 2007)

anyone else seen this? any reviews?


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## digs (Apr 24, 2007)

I will see anything with Rose Byrne in it. Twice.


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## Anthony G Williams (Apr 26, 2007)

I saw it last night.

The science of the basic plot has been comprehensively rubbished by astrophysicists, so you will need to park your logical critical faculties and regard it as a spectacle. In that, it succeeds quite well. The CGI is good, the close-up views of the sun spectacular. It is very much an atmospheric mood piece, with a significant element of horror towards the end (which surprised me - I hadn't read any mention of this in reviews, but then I haven't watched horror films for many decades, so maybe I'm just not inured to such things  ). Definitely not family viewing, anyway, and not recommended for those of a nervous or squeamish disposition.

Worth watching? Just about, for the sheer spectacle, although I'd only give it three out of five.


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## Connavar (Apr 26, 2007)

Me i watch all SF movies no matter how bad.


I even saw Doom


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## why me why now (Apr 27, 2007)

Anthony G Williams said:


> I saw it last night.
> 
> The science of the basic plot has been comprehensively rubbished by astrophysicists, so you will need to park your logical critical faculties and regard it as a spectacle. In that, it succeeds quite well. The CGI is good, the close-up views of the sun spectacular. It is very much an atmospheric mood piece, with a significant element of horror towards the end (which surprised me - I hadn't read any mention of this in reviews, but then I haven't watched horror films for many decades, so maybe I'm just not inured to such things  ). Definitely not family viewing, anyway, and not recommended for those of a nervous or squeamish disposition.
> 
> Worth watching? Just about, for the sheer spectacle, although I'd only give it three out of five.



that's pretty fair comment tbh


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## Firefly (May 11, 2007)

I enjoyed it, though I found the ending to be a little weak.


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## ray gower (Oct 2, 2007)

Pretty pictures, little story, no imagination.

Problem with spaceships is that they are tremendously dull and with a slow story to tell, rather than tell it well and make me believe in it, the producers fell back on the great god effects- So we get long and often pointless shots of stickle brick and mecano space ships hanging portentiously in space. Worse Sunshine falls into arty camera mode with lots of blurring and freeze frame.

I admit, the CGI is great, but I don't watch a film for the effects (it is noticeable pretty well all the positive statements are for the effects). I go so for two hours I can believe in something different and Starshine doesn't do that.
It's not the worst of its kind, but it is dreadfully derivative


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## unclejack (Oct 31, 2007)

*Sunshine*

I can't believe it, there's actually a movie comin out that I actually do wanna see. I recently watched the trailer for sunshine, a movie about a crew of astronauts on a mission to reignite the sun because it is dying out fifty years in the future. The teaser doesn't show how believeable of a premise it will be but it does look pretty awesome. It definately can't be as bad as the core.


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## Nesacat (Oct 31, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

It's been out for some time now. I believe the DVD is out as well. I know I saw it many months ago. It's pretty decent. At least for me the first half was. The second half was like a train wreck. I think there are thread here discussing this movie.


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## StewHotston (Oct 31, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

apart from a certain skinless wonder the film was excellent, the desire to have some human element to the terror was a sad failure of imagination. At least IMHO.


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## unclejack (Oct 31, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

its not out on video but it did come out in theaters already. I guess ill watch it myself and draw my own conclusions.


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## Jarshen (Oct 31, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

Have to agree, great first half and then went into horror failure, and it did not need to. Funny had the same feeling for 28 Days, like two films and he did not have the conviction to run with the first more interesting premise only. But check it out, great on the big screen.


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## GOLLUM (Oct 31, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

It's been out on DVD for a while here, must check it out....


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## unclejack (Nov 1, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

Ive been told on another forum that the trailer is misleading and makes the movie look better than it is. I hope that isnt the case, i was kinda impressed when I saw the trailer and was hopin there would finally be another good science fiction movie comin out that I would like. I guess I'll find out eventually. Thanks for the info though.


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## Omphalos (Nov 1, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

It has not come to netflix yet.  Ive had it in my queue for over a year now.  After 28 Days Later, Id give anything by Danny Boyle a shot.


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## Talysia (Nov 1, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*



GOLLUM said:


> It's been out on DVD for a while here, must check it out....


 

Same here.


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## unclejack (Nov 1, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

Yeah, I agree. I'm not a horror fan at all and zombie movies aren't really my thing but I have to admit that I did like 28 days. I think it's a cut above most of the zombie movies I've seen which for the most part are pretty depressing.


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## ravenus (Nov 2, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

So depressing zombie movies are a cut below? I don't know, *Dawn* and *Day of the Dead* were amongst the best zombie films I've seen and they were depressing alright.

If you like happy or at least cheerfully manic zombie movies, try *Return of The Living Dead*


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## unclejack (Nov 2, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

lol, well most zombie movies revolve around the premise that one day everything is fine and the next you wake up and you're in the ninth circle of hell and there isn't much you can do about it. Plus there's a good chance all the main characters will die at the end. 28 days later was a little more hopeful than most that ive seen.


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## Omphalos (Nov 2, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

I love apocalypse stories, and zombie plagues really do that sub-genre justice, I think.  Actually the next 10 or so movies on my netflix queue are all nuclear war stories.  I just watched Testament a few days ago, then Fail Safe (a really excellent remake that was done by Clooney and broadcast live on CBS in the States.  I highly recommend it, and you can get it on netflix).  My wife wont watch them with me, but I love those stories.  The Day After is next, IIRC.  I wish Netflix had Threads.  I watched that on PBS when I was a kid and LOVED it.  Maybe that;'s not the right word, but I am do get totally engrossed by end-of-the-world stories, no matter what the genre.  World War Z, The Stand and The Purple Cloud, for example.  Anything, really, as long as its not hackwork.


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## unclejack (Dec 10, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

Okay I finally watched sunshine online last night and I loved it. I really don't know what the people who told me they were dissapointed with it were talkin about, I thougt it was great. It was a very dark movie but as far as sci fi goes it was fantastic. Alot of surprises and alot of suspense and well worth watchin.


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## KateWalker (Dec 17, 2007)

*Re: Sunshine*

I loved this movie. It's probably one of my favorite "space" themed movies in ages. The story is simple, but I enjoyed it and the scenes of space and the sun, just breathtaking.


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