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iView Author:
SAAD NAWAB
(Vadodara, India)

EMAIL:
saadnawab [at] gmail.com

Sunshine in more ways than one delves into the realm where sanity and reality draw a blur.

The film marks as one that was seen as an experiment in psyche and claustrophobia through the eyes of its director. And the cast has volunteered for this experiment road trip to the sun.

Sci-fi writer Alex Garland in his third writing collaboration with Danny Boyle delves deeply into human animosity and shows the consequences of educated men needing barbarism in a closed environment. Sunshine takes place in the space vessel ‘Icarus II’ where eight astronauts are travelling to the sun with a Q-bomb that has to be blasted on the surface of the sun to keep the earth from freezing of a solar winter. All that is protecting the astronauts from being incinerated by the suns radiation is a solar reflective shield covering the bomb and them.

Freakin awesome, I’d say. A nice concept that can be believable if it is scientifically accurate (I read that it definitely is, well most of it).

What makes Sunshine a gut-wrenching thriller are the characters whom you fear for, well most of them. Imagine what it would be like millions of light years away in the farthest reaches of space heading towards a star with a bomb knowing that you have no chance of coming back. The cherry on top is that the first space vessel ‘Icarus I’ failed in its attempt and this is humanity’s last hope. Would you complete your mission and die for a great cause or is wrong for lesser beings to meddle in the affairs of God? The last question would be rhetorical because then God would not have made us that intelligent. Things go from bad to worse when the crew responds to a distress call from ‘Icarus I’. Thus the catalyst is added and there we have a plot forwarder.

This is not your average sci-fi thriller where the action and special effects are the focus and the characters second hand. I only had minor issues but all those can be overlooked other than the twist in the third act where the whole movie is shoved into crazy drive. The deaths and scares never seem forced upon and the fate of the characters is accepted. While there are issues pertaining to the handling the characters space fully, that trick is very hard to master in cinema.

The characters feel like professional astronauts and scientists rather than being actors shouting mumbo-jumbo. The interaction between them may be lacking, though not with all of them. Some scenes really do stand out like one of the astronauts staring at the sun, being infatuated with it. It seems as if the sun is drawing them towards abomination as the movie takes its course. Kind of ironic here (read: darkness in light). The actors (Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Tony Garity, Rose Byrne, Benedict Wong and Hiroyuki Sanada) prove their mettle handling their jobs well enough. Camerawork is solid and so is the feel of the space vessel. Technology is grounded in reality. There are no complicated switches or warp drives. It feels like a real experience. Special effects are mesmerizing but all that brightness can be a bit of a strain, but still damn good considering the budget of Danny Boyle films.

After seeing this film, I definitely believe Alex Garland to be the right choice to bring that amazing video game Halo to the big-screen. As for Boyle, well we’ll welcome him open arms when he comes to India to shoot his ‘Slum Dog Millionaire’, a story about a slum kid who won the top prize in Kaun Banega Crorepati?