If you enjoyed Project Hail Mary but couldn’t quite stomach its sickly sweet message of intergalactic companionship and the indomitable human spirit, then there’s a movie from 2007 that might be right up your alley: Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which today plays like Project Hail Mary’s older, emo cousin.
The setup of both films is essentially the same: in the near future our sun is dying, threatening all life on Earth and prompting an emergency space voyage by a team of plucky geeks. But while one film came from the folks who made The Lego Movie, the other is by the blokes who made 28 Days Later.
In Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling plays a quippy molecular biologist tasked with studying a distant star system, where he encounters alien life and learns the true meaning of friendship. In Sunshine, the life-or-death mission is even more harebrained and decidedly more metal. A team of eight astronauts must pilot a “stellar bomb” – roughly the mass of Manhattan and containing every last scrap of Earth’s fissile material – directly into the surface of the sun in the hopes of nuking it back to life.
And if naming your spaceship Icarus after the ancient Greek myth that birthed the expression “don’t fly too close to the sun” wasn’t ominous enough, bear in mind this actually is Icarus II.
The first Icarus ship launched seven years earlier but failed to deliver its payload, subsequently going dark somewhere near Mercury’s orbit. It’s now broadcasting an eerie distress signal that the team of Icarus II (none of whom apparently have ever watched a sci-fi movie) feel duty-bound to investigate. Their logic being, even if the old ship’s crew is dead, they can deploy its bomb as a back-up: “Two last hopes are better than one.”
In Boyle’s eclectic filmography, Sunshine comes sandwiched between two heartwarming stories of young boys self-actualising via unexpected wealth: 2004’s Millions and 2008’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. This psychedelic space slasher is more spiritually akin to 2000’s The Beach, Boyle’s first collaboration with writer Alex Garland and a similarly sun-soaked descent into madness.
With production design by Mark Tildesly and costumes by Suttirat Anne Larlarb (those reflective golden spacesuits are a perennial favourite within the sci-fi canon), Sunshine pays just enough homage in style and structure to genre touchstones such as Event Horizon, Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, while still providing Boyle enough room to carve out something unique.
The interiors of the spaceship are shot like a nightclub and as the crew enters the communications dead zone – beyond which Cillian Murphy’s astrophysicist Robert Capa predicts “space and time will become smeared together” – Boyle experiments with blurry double exposures, subliminal flash frames and eerie gravitational architecture (one could imagine a younger Christopher Nolan taking notes, seven years before Interstellar).
The film is scored by John Murphy and electronic dance outfit Underworld, whose euphoric Born Slippy (Nuxx) underpinned Boyle’s breakout film Trainspotting and arguably marked the zenith of 90s British club culture.
Icarus II’s crew, meanwhile, is a who’s-who of brilliant actors frozen in time right before the wider industry figured out what to do with them. There’s not just Cillian Murphy (seemingly our go-to guy for history-altering explosives), but Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong, Hiroyuki Sanada and Captain America himself, Chris Evans – who starts the film with an indie-mod Mighty Boosh-esque hairdo that looks as nefarious in 2057 as it did in 2007.
If Project Hail Mary paints science and kindness as humanity’s greatest interplanetary exports, then Sunshine posits that the further we stray from Earth the less human we become. The film opens with psychologist Dr Searle (Cliff Curtis) spending an unhealthy amount of time in Icarus II’s viewing room, sunglasses on and skin turning crispy, staring obsessively into the ethereal mass of the dying star (and at only 3.1% brightness – imagine what 4% could do). Our parents always told us that staring into the sun was bad for our eyes – Sunshine suggests it might be just as bad for our brains and perhaps even our souls.
Garland’s writing frequently reaches for this sort of inverse Spielberg effect, where secular revelation is inseparable from existential horror. Much like his later works Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), which also combined highbrow philosophy with good old-fashioned schlock, Sunshine plays out as an atheist’s worst nightmare. Imagine: you’ve staked your life on rational science and journeyed into the very gut of the galaxy, only to discover something irrefutably Godlike, terrifying, awe-inspiring and utterly impartial towards your continued existence. Perhaps those sun-deifying ancient civilisations were right all along. The sun giveth and it taketh away, and if it decides our number is up, who are we mere mortals to argue?
Sunshine is available to stream on Stan and Disney+ in Australia and Disney+ in the UK. It’s also available to rent or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV in the US. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here
Jordan Prosser’s new novel Blue Giant is out on 4 August (UQP)
