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| Friday, March 7, 2008 09:51 PM |
| (Last updated on Friday, March 7, 2008 10:29 PM) | | On the Viewer - Sunshine |
 by Fëanor |
[UPDATED. I remembered another issue I had with the movie, and added it below. Doesn't change my overall opinion, though.]
Whenever I watch a movie on my iPod now, I always think of David Lynch and feel ashamed. His comments seemed particularly appropriate while I was watching Sunshine, because the film is so clearly a visual spectacle that was meant to be enjoyed on a movie screen and not on a screen that's smaller than a deck of cards. Still, I saw enough to know that it's quite an excellent film.
I'd been meaning to see Sunshine since it came out, but didn't get around to renting it and ripping it until a few months ago, and then forgot I had it lying around until a few weeks ago, at which point I finally put it on my iPod. I started watching it a few days ago and it wasn't long after that that I'd watched the whole thing, because once I'd started, it was hard to stop.
Sunshine is the latest film from Danny Boyle, who's a pretty uneven director. Trainspotting is fantastic, of course, but A Life Less Ordinary is very odd, The Beach is dreadful, and 28 Days Later is just okay. So I wasn't sure what to expect from a sci-fi film from Boyle about a small group of people on a quest to save the Earth and all of humanity by flying out in a spaceship (with the rather poorly chosen name of Icarus - did they want to fail, or what?) to the dying sun and delivering a bomb that they hope will reignite it.
The plot reminded me rather distressingly of The Core, but thankfully it's nothing like that film. Boyle wisely avoids any attempts to explain the science or technology, forcing us to take his premise for granted, and drops us into the action in medias res, with the crew already well on the way to their goal. We get to know them a little - their quirks, their dreams, the tensions that are already developing between them. Then they pick up the distress beacon from the first, failed mission. Their decision to change their course to examine the ship - not to attempt any rescue, but simply to salvage what they can from the wreck - is a fateful one, and sets off a chain of increasingly deadly and terrible events that threaten not only their lives, but also the lives of everyone on Earth.
The film opens with the crew having a joking conversation at dinner on the spaceship, which inescapably calls to mind the Alien movies, movies which the characters in Sunshine practically reference by name later on, when they board the other ship. And indeed it quickly becomes clear that Sunshine is a truly frightening horror/thriller that owes a lot to films like Alien. In the latter section it even becomes something of a slasher flick. But throughout it is also a deeply thoughtful, moving, and meaningful film full of excellent acting and complex character portraits, whose real purpose is to examine humanity - who we are, how we act in the face of death, and what we are capable of doing for our own survival and for the survival of those we love.
There is one thing about the ending of the film, however, that I found slightly puzzling.
[spoilers]In a particularly disturbing and horrifying sequence, our hero, Capa, who is under the impression there are only four crew members left, discovers from talking to the computer that there's a mysterious fifth person on board the ship. The stowaway turns out to be Pinbacker, the insane captain of the first, failed mission, who, it must be assumed, slipped on board the new ship while his ship was being examined. He spends the rest of the film doing everything in his power to sabotage the mission, and kill everyone on board.
All of which I would be willing to take at face value, except for the fact that every time the camera points at Pinbacker, his face is blurred or doubled in a very strange way. My natural response to this was to assume the character was meant to be a hallucination of some sort, which would certainly be understandable given the circumstances. It does, after all, seem unlikely that Pinbacker could have survived all that time (especially in the condition he appears to be in), and then somehow gotten on board the ship without anyone noticing. Also, at this point the crew is all experiencing high stress and oxygen deprivation - fertile conditions for hallucinations. Furthermore, I've even read of real cases in which small groups of people in high stress situations will imagine that there is a mysterious extra member to their party.
But if Pinbacker is meant to be a hallucination, he must be a mass hallucination, because multiple crew members see and interact with him. Maybe we're meant to be left unsure as to whether Pinbacker is for real or not. Or maybe the blurriness and his zombie-like condition is meant to suggest, not that he's a hallucination, but that he's something more than human - a mystical force, or a ghost. In fact, when Pinbacker first appears and wonders aloud whether he will be the final man who will be there at the end of everything, I couldn't help but think of the legend of the Wandering Jew.
Of course, it could also be that the make-up on Pinbacker didn't turn out so well, so they decided to blur him to hide it.[/spoilers]
Regardless, that odd little visual touch left me slightly puzzled. [UPDATE] But happily it's one of the only parts of the film that didn't quite work for me. The other part is when it comes up that Capa is the only one with the knowledge and training necessary to actually launch the bomb and complete the mission. I understand why this needs to be true for the plot to work, but it doesn't really make sense. This is a mission whose success or failure will mean life or death for all of humanity. Therefore, it seems to me any and every person on the ship should have the knowledge and training to be able to deliver the payload and complete the mission, just in case. Either that or launching the bomb should be so easy that it requires no training - like, you just have to push a great big red button. Still, I suppose that would have come with its own risks - like, what if somebody does it early by mistake?
But those are just a few small issues in an otherwise overwhelmingly impressive piece of work.[/UPDATE] Sunshine is a suspense film, a disaster movie, a slasher flick, and a philosophical science fiction film all at the same time, and it works as a strong entry in each of those genres, with the ultimate conclusion of the film bringing everything together in a truly powerful and moving moment.
In other words, Boyle has managed to create another masterpiece after all. Well done, sir! |
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