Sunshine

Wanna surreal experience? Catch an afternoon showing of the new movie Sunshine. That way, when you leave the theater and go out into the daylight, it just takes the whole experience home for you.

Sunshine is immediately in my top five for sci-fi. It embodies all of the best qualities I look for in a great science fiction film, in that you start with a very basic scientific principle/theory and build a very human drama around it and have it speak volumes about the human condition. It's a hard trick to pull off, and I haven't found a flick that has pulled it off as well as Sunshine.

Here's the setup: Years from now, our sun is dying. A daring space mission to deliver a massive bomb to reignite the sun has failed, and our story begins with the second and final attempt to save our sun and, in turn, our planet. Why our sun is dying is not explained. The back stories of the characters are not explained. The audience comes in halfway through the second mission, when two-way communication with Earth has cut off and one-way communication to Earth is about to be lost.

So, we're immediately at the point when interpersonal conflict starts taking its toll on the characters. They are increasingly aware of the risk involved in their mission and the fact that what they are trying to achieve is not certain. The results they're hoping for is merely a theory. To that end, they are constantly running diagnostics and simulations to calculate every move they make, knowing full well the chances of being really, really wrong.

Then, things start to go a little haywire. Human errors lead to mechanical errors and vice versa. A distress signal is picked up from the first mission, long since considered lost. Every possible solution to each problem leads to decisions that are based on ever-decreasing probability of success.

As life support systems start to fail, the only undercurrent in every character's motivation, their only common ground, is that if they fail, it's not just the people on the ship that are utterly fucked. There is no possibility of rescue, and no backup mission. The last of Earth's resources for such a mission are on their ship. And, as life support systems start to fail, theres no pussy-footing around about the idea that some crew members might have to waive their share of the oxygen.

This is a Danny Boyle film, so I knew one thing from his previous films to watch out for in Sunshine. There's a point in every one of his movies where everything gets turned on its ear. Unlike M. Night Shyamalan, the big twist isn't a head-scratching or eye-rolling gimmick. Boyle is able to make it all feel completely natural and he's able to do it for the right reason: to crank the tension up to eleven. If you watch Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later or Sunshine, you'll know that Danny Boyle is a master of this art.

Likewise, Boyle is great at taking a genre and...I hesitate to say reinvent or rejuvenate...but make it his own. In the hands of any other director, Sunshine would've been just another disaster movie. Shallow Grave was more Hitchcock than Hitchcock. 28 Days Later was such a good zombie picture that people don't even want to use the word zombie to describe it. Trainspotting was in such a class all by itself that I dare anyone to find another movie to include with it as a double feature.

The best part about Sunshine? Lack of mainstream appeal. It's the kind of movie that makes you proud to have seen and appreciated. The kind of movie that gives you a warm feeling knowing there won't be a Happy Meal toy or a shirt at Hot Topic that ties in with it. The kind of movie that makes you look down your noses at the people that didn't get it. The kind of movie that you'll have in your DVD collection and will immediately make someone watch when they tell you they hadn't seen it.