What Sunshine Got Wrong And So So Right . . . Or, Why I Like Boring Sci-Fi

I like boring sci-fi.  I like the science fiction where not a lot happens.  I like exploring derelict space ships, the limits of human understanding, and the void between our aspirations and our accomplishments.  In short, I'm okay if a gun never goes off, nothing ever blows up, and no one dies in my science fiction. 

That means that I really enjoy movies like 2001 and 2010 (although there is violence of a kind, it definitely drives the plot), Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Contact, Moon, and Sunshine.  The highlight, of course, is Contact, Robert Zemeckis's adaptation of Carl Sagan's book of the same name.  It's a beautiful soliloquy on faith, belief, and love.  It also doesn't have a lot of action.  Sure, the first time/space machine gets blown up by fundamentalists, but even that was understated and served to advance the plot.

Sunshine, Danny Boyle's film about humanity imperiled by a dying sun, is predicated on an explosion.  When I think about it, I tend to group it with other 'splosion-will-save-us-all movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact and The Core.  Ostensibly, they're all sort of science fiction.  At least, if you took the science-y bits out, it wouldn't work.  Two of them have space ships; the world is imperiled in all of them; and some sort of techno-babble is needed to save the world (which at this point is about all we can expect from our science fiction--woe to our science illiterate public).  In the end though, the world is saved when the asteroid is exploded, or when a series of nukes are able to restart the spin of the Earth's core, jumpstarting its stalled magnetic field.

I have a feeling these were all funded in part by nuclear apologists, or written by people who saw nuclear weapons as more than just humanity-killers.  These movies, in my mind, all have the subtitle: "Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

In that respect, Sunshine isn't much different.  In the movie, the sun is dying.  We're not really told why, but if you listen to the director's commentary, you get a really nifty, scientific explanation.  Basically, a chunk of dark matter fell in and disrupted nuclear fusion.  The only way to save the sun is to dislodge that chunk so fusion can resume.  Here's where the Bomb comes in.

In order to save themselves, humanity mined half of all the fissile material on the planet, shoved it on a ship and shot it into the sun, and planned to detonate it to knock that chunk of sun-killer back into interstellar space.

Of course it failed.

Fortunately, humanity had just enough fissile material left over for one more go.  And this is where our story picks up.  The Icarus II (you know, because no one reads anything other than Greek mythology) is heading to the sun to deliver its cargo when it picks up the distress signal from the Icarus I.  They have a choice: stay on mission, or divert to see what happened, and maybe salvage the boom-juice from the first mission in case their's isn't enough.

In this movie, either option would have satisfied me.  Watching the ship recede behind them, listening to the distress signal, wondering, letting their curiosity drive them mad, would have made for an intriguing movie.  Perhaps they would have received some sort of indication that someone was still alive on the ship; oh, the complications that would have inspired. 

Instead, the decision is made to go ahead and see what happened and as you can imagine, things go badly.  Some miscalculated by a fraction of a percent, but this close to the sun, that means a lot.  And people die.  And the ship is nearly debilitated.  And they don't find out what happened on the Icarus I.  That miscalculation--that decision--not only meant they nearly lost their lives, but also imperiled the continued existence of humanity.  Heady stuff.

And the movie at this point could have continued to make deep insights, tell compelling story, and build on the stresses of fallible human beings engaged in a last ditched effort to save everything.  Instead, (and trying to keep it pretty spoiler-free) someone starts killing people.  The crew has to hunt down the bad guy (whoever he might be) and continue the mission, which suddenly seems all the more imperiled.  

The movie is visually beautiful, the sound work is stunning, and the acting understated and believable.  So it's a tragedy that it had to take such a sudden and dramatic turn in the second act.  What began as good science fiction devolved rather quickly into pure action for no reason than that it would probably sell tickets. 

The premise is great; the science is great; the decisions are real and believable and delightful.  So while the movie isn't perfect, it still ranks in my top 10 favorite science fiction movies.  Give it a shot.