Starring Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, and Cillian Murphy before they were famous, Sunshine brings the cosmos down to Earth — in the same ways an eclipse can.
It’s the noble job of science educators to bring the distant cosmos down to Earth, where it can ignite human fascination in more than an abstract way. But the total solar eclipse that will cast its shadow across thousands of miles of North America this Monday doesn’t need any help. Along the path of totality temperatures will drop, wildlife could become confused, and it may get dark enough to see other planets, in a kind of 360-degree sunset.
Which is why there’s no better time to watch Sunshine, the cerebral sci-fi thriller written by Alex Garland (Ex Machina) and directed by Danny Boyle (28 Days Later). Whether you’re in the path of totality or not, you can bring the expansive awe and crushing terror of the cosmos into your living room with a film that discards the factual reality of space exploration in order to get the visceral reality just right.
Plot-wise, Sunshine can be described variously as if it were a dumb action movie (the sun is dying, and a team of experts must save the world by driving a nuclear bomb into it), a psychological art film (long-haul astronauts are slowly driven to various degrees of madness by the sheer enormity of the idea of approaching the sun), and a white-knuckled horror flick (there’s one more person on this spaceship than there’s supposed to be), all with relative accuracy.
Cast-wise, Sunshine functions as a very specific snapshot of Hollywood in 2007, before a shocking number of its actors — Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, and Benedict Wong — had become blockbuster names.
