Sunshine: A Review by John David Ebert

The director of this film, Danny Boyle, is no believer in technological progress. Indeed, the film concerns an ever increasing series of technological disasters and systems failures that grow more urgent as the plot unfolds, each disaster giving rise to the next like a series of Russian dolls placed one inside the other. On the ship’s mission to deliver a payload that will reignite a dying sun, anything that can go wrong does go wrong. Boyle does not leave us with any confidence that our technologies will save us, despite the film’s Pyrrhic victory at the end.

Sunshine is, in many ways, one giant visual quotation of the original 1979 movie Alien, sprinkled with liberal references to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it is not as good as either of those films, and that fact itself seems to give a weird weight to Boyle’s general overview of technological decline: things get worse as they go along, Boyle seems to be saying, just as our society is gradually losing control of its cumbersome mechanical - electronic exoskeleton.

Cinema itself, having peaked during the 1970s and 80s, is doing a slow motion spiral into the decay of a fixed stock of conventional forms and stiffened formulae, its boldness of vision and originality becoming more fugitive with each passing year. When the plot of Sunshine is compared, for example, with those of its two progenitors, Alien and 2001, there does seem to be a curious loss of the scope of cinematic audacity. The vision that Sunshine sets out to realize is on nowhere near the scale of those two earlier films, concerned as they were with the destiny of the human race as a whole (2001) and the breakdown of our cultural, psychological and biological immune systems (Alien). Sunshine’s themes are not as grand, for they set out merely to tell us a story about how our civilization is failing to match up to the challenges presented to it by an environment that is becoming, with tsunamis, hurricanes, floods and perfect storms, increasingly difficult to manage. The inevitable water shortages of the Southwest and the future meltdowns of our nuclear reactors will be gigantic events involving the displacement of huge populations of mass refugees fleeing, like the exiles of New Orleans, to nearby cities for shelter.

Indeed, the twentieth century has featured the greatest series of mass disasters in the entire history of humanity, one after the next, from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, through the Great War, the Hindenburg, World War II, Hiroshima, Apollo 13, exploding space shuttles, Chernobyl and 9/11. These disasters were all by-products of the ever gigantifying scale of our technological systems, and they would never have occurred without such a scale. The horrors of the twenty-first century, furthermore, are waiting to unfold before us, and Sunshine provides us with a glimpse of what lies ahead.

Just wait until we attempt those manned missions to Mars that NASA is promising us, in which human beings are expected to remain in claustrophobic environments, cut off from the earth and its natural biorhythms for nearly two years. Experiments conducted on our own planet as attempts to confine people in similar environments for extended periods of time have thus far failed on every single occasion, and there is no reason to expect that they will be any more successful in the extremely dangerous conditions of outer space.

To the technocrats who are guiding our present ship of state toward its rendezvous with disaster, I salute your bravery. These are not debacles that I would want on my  conscience, anymore than William Mulholland wanted the collapse of his St. Francis Dam on his mind in 1928, which killed hundreds of people and which event he took to his grave. Danny Boyle does not share the optimism of these technophiles, either, and a glimpse of his movie Sunshine will tell you why.