I’m going to spoiler a lot in this movie, so if you’re interested in seeing a hard sci-fi movie about humanity in the face of the end of the world, and/or a difficult and dangerous space journey ala 2001, watch the movie before you read this (or anyone else’s posts) about it.
This is going to be a long post. I have a lot of thoughts oh why this movie has some of the best writing of any movie I’ve ever seen, and how other movies with nominally similar stakes get it so wrong.
This movie isn’t too highly rated - it’s a 7.3 on IMDB. Not bad, but hardly worthy of anyone’s “best X movie of all time” lists. And what you will generally see is that people like the first two acts but feel that it falls apart completely in the third act. This isn’t wrong, but I think it’s a bit of a narrow and overly critical view of the movie and I think people don’t appreciate it like they should. I will address how it falls apart later in the post.
Now, I’m going to go on a long rant about stakes in writing. It’s necessary to understand why I love this movie so much.
This is a movie that takes its stakes seriously. A lot - a whole lot - of movies ramp up the stakes of their movies by putting the fate of Earth or the fate of all of mankind in the hands of our heroes. But the movie rarely lives up to that premise. Mostly it’s a contrived way to add a feeling of importance to a story. Often times the movie has to give the hero personal stakes, as if saving the world won’t be good enough. Oh, the villain is going to blow up the Earth, and he’s also got your girlfriend and you have to save her. The heroes often don’t act as though saving the world is motivation enough, the writers have to fudge in some more personal plotline for us to relate to. Which means they aren’t really realistically looking at what a competent, heroic, rational would do in the face of the end of humanity, to face the highest possible stakes for the human race.
This isn’t the best example of what I mean, but it’s the one that immediately comes to mind to demonstrate my point. Spoilers for a 60 year old movie. In the movie failsafe (which should actually be called fail deadly), the premise is that a malfunction gives a B52 bomber on nuclear deterrent patrol an order to attack moscow with nuclear weapons, which it does. Russia loses millions of people and their main economic, cultural, and government hub. The rest of the movie is spent trying to rectify this mistake, and everyone involved trying their best not to escalate this to all-out civilization-destroying nuclear war.
The conclusion is that the Russian president can only maintain control over a military coup that demands all-out retaliation if the US is willing to lose something as important as Moscow as to make them even, to maintain parity between the two countries so that neither gains the upper hand in their struggle. The US president decides that his best course to avoid all out nuclear war is to drop a nuclear bomb on New York city, killing millions of Americans.
It’s a complex decision but it makes a lot of sense in the scenario the movie presents. It presents a plausible dilemma and the characters in the movie treat it as an extremely heavy dilemma. The president is making what may be the most weighty decision anyone has ever had to make - to kill ten or twenty million people in order to save hundreds of millions or billions by preventing an all-out nuclear war. The stakes are so much higher for him than any sort of petty concerns that the heroes of most movies would worry about. He has to make one of the hardest sacrifices any human has ever been asked to make, possibly the hardest, and he does it, because he’s acting in the best interest of humanity. This is good writing, this is living up to your stakes.
After it becomes clear that the president is going to order the destruction of New York City, one of the staffers around the president says “but his wife is on a shopping trip to New York City!” and the audience is supposed to be shocked. Another staffer replies with “he knows”, as if THAT acknowledgement is what made the stakes high. I hate this. This is horrible writing. This means that you don’t understand your stakes, or you think your audience cannot comprehend the stakes and needs a character’s personal (but inconsequential) stake to make it real to them.
This made me just want to say “fuck you!” to whoever wrote this. They were so close to living up to their stakes, but blew it. Here’s a man who has the weight of the world on his shoulders, who is making a make or break decision for humanity, and you think you need to personalize his struggle? You think that it’s not hard enough for him to kill 10 or 20 million people to save billions, and the stakes are only real for him if he’s killing his wife too?
The writer has contempt, or extremely low expectations, for the audience when writing that. Either the writer is right, and the audience simply can’t understand that facing a dilemma of weighing the lives of ten million versus billions isn’t enough drama for us to be interested in the president’s dilemma and we need to make it personal - to add his wife as part of the stakes - for the audience to relate to it, in which case the audience is full of incredible small minded people who would completely fail when faced with a decision of this magnitude, or the writer is wrong and he’s patronizing the audience as if they can’t understand that the end of civilization raises the stakes high enough by itself, and doesn’t need an added personal element to the stakes in order to make them real.
Either way, to me, it’s a huge black mark on the writing of that movie. You were so close to taking your own stakes seriously, and then you undermine it by going the easy route of adding a personal connection to the stakes which is supposed to make it feel real to the audience.
Sunshine does live up to its own stakes. This is the only movie I can think of in which the world is built around the stakes that the fate of humanity is in the hands of a few people and actually logically fulfills that purpose.
What we see of Sunshine is a serious attempt to portray what would happen to humanity in the face of an existential crisis. Not just a collapse of civilization, like with nuclear war, or climate catastrophe - but snuffing out the existence of the human race in its entirety, with no survivors. The world comes together to build Icarus 1 and Icarus 2, which are portrayed as extremely expensive, extremely difficult to design and build ships using the best engineering and science that Earth has to offer. Between the two of them, they effectively mined the entirety of the fissile material left on Earth. It’s not shown, but almost certainly as soon as it was clear that Earth were facing an immediate, obvious, existential threat, the world got its shit together, stopped being in conflict with itself, and united for this singular purpose. Most of the productive capacity of Earth for years would’ve been used to complete this grand project. Most people alive would be working towards it in some way, even if it was just making sandwiches for someone who was working on a some small part they were going to use when building the ship.
Now you may say that’s unrealistic - after all, global warming is a threat to human civilization and we are certainly not uniting against it. But let’s be clear - climate change is a threat to civilization in the long term, but likely not to the continued existence of humanity. Our civilization is likely to decline, our population and resource levels will dwindle, but we aren’t talking about “no more human will ever live again in 10 years if we don’t do this” level of existential threat. Additionally, the movie takes place in a few decades. Think about how the current old generation are choosing to put their own convenience over the future of the Earth. That generation will be long dead, and the younger, more empathetic, more Earth-concious generation who are kids now will be older and in power. It’s very likely that the generations that are now young, and the kids they have, will be much more likely to band together in common purpose when needed.
So, Icarus 1 and 2, and the bombs they carry, represent the very best of human unity, ingenuity, effort, and dedication. And the crew, too, are bright, young, experts at their field, heroic, and well trained. There would’ve been a selection process that searched the whole Earth, for the best and brightest, those most willing to put the whole of humanity above themselves, who are competent at what they do and understand the weight of their mission. This is a plausible crew for such an important mission. This is the sort of human greatness you could expect if we ever faced this sort of threat.
Compare this to, say, Prometheus, where the richest man in the world puts together an interstellar mission of supposed experts, on a journey in which he personally has his life at stake, and they are about as competent at executing an interstellar mission as a bunch of day laborers you pick up at home depot. Worse, really - at least the day laborers would give it their best. Just a complete clusterfuck of incompetance.
This movie, better than any I’ve ever seen, shows us that space is dangerous. They’re hanging out at the edge of human capability. They have trained and planned for every eventuality, but the reality is that space is a dangerous place, and they are completely isolated from humanity. There’s no one to ask for help. They can’t even send one-way messages back to Earth. No one even knows what happened to Icarus 1. They’re on their own and at the mercy of an epically dangerous environment. At one point, a mere split-second reflection off a communication tower guts the ship because the sun is so incredibly dangerous.
The Sun is the villain of this movie. But it’s also a source of wonder, and almost religious experience. It represents both an existential threat to the crew of the ship - where even the slightest problem results in catastrophe - but also the driver of all life on Earth. At its core, this is the most epic version of the Man vs Nature story you can imagine.
The dilemmas they face are not contrived, they are not stupid. There’s no obvious solution. None of the characters have to be stupid or incompetent to drive the plot. The choice to alter their course to dock with the Icarus 1 is legitimately a hard decision with no clear answer. Both arguments - that something happened to the Icarus 1, and if they were capable of completing the mission, they would’ve done so, and so it should be ignored as to not risk Icarus 2 by changing the plan so late in the game, or that “two last hopes are better than one” are both plausible.
Trey, the navigator, makes a mistake that does almost fatal damage to the ship, but it’s a plausible mistake. They had to disable the safety/autopilot systems on the Icarus in order to change their flight plan, and so he had to manually juggle all of that. Flight paths, timing, fuels, velocities, orbits - he overlooked one factor, altering the angle of the shield, when under a tremendous mental load. So many movies need a smart character to act stupid to create the adversity in the story, and this isn’t that. The risky (but plausibly justified) decision to dock with the Icarus 1 lead to exactly the sort of problem that the arguments against it suggested they might face if they chose that path.
The weight of that mistake breaks Trey. In general, the psychological weight of having the fate of all of mankind, and all of the future of mankind in your hands would put enough weight on everyone’s shoulders to make them go insane. This would’ve been an important part of the screening process. But they faced pressure greater than anyone in human history has ever faced, and you can’t know if you’re strong enough to withstand it until you’re there. Trey broke. He became catatonic. He realized that he may have botched humanity’s last chance of survival and he simply couldn’t live with that. He shut down.
Mace, played by Chris Evans, thrives under that pressure. He is, to me, the hero of the movie, probably along with Kaneda, who doesn’t get as much of a chance to define himself. He is not a perfect hero. He’s antagonistic towards Cappa, the physicist, well beyond what would be good for the mission. He’s confident he knows what’s at stake and he knows what right and he’s greatly vexed by people who thwart his plans. But he is undoubtedly heroic. He is the voice of reason. He reminds the crew constantly that their lives do not and cannot matter, that they are utterly trivial, infinitesimal, against the stakes of their mission. When the movie calls upon him to sacrifice himself, he does so, without hesitation. He’s the one who has the commitment to kill Trey when life support can no longer provide for him. He’s the one who jumps right into cooling fluid that’s likely several hundred degrees below zero, pulls himself out, and does it again, even as his body is dying of frostbite and shock. He doesn’t stop until he’s dead and he simply cannot help the mission any further. He is quite possibly, while not perfect, the most heroic character I’ve ever seen portrayed in film.
His determination actually leads to what I consider to be the climax of the movie. I know it’s not the real climax, or at least the intended climax, or structured to be the climax. But the scene in which Kaneda and Cappa are out in EVA suits repairing the shield, and they realize that the sun is going to kill them before they get a chance to get back in, Cassie, the pilot, tells Icarus to move the shield to save the crew who are outside the ship.
These people have been training together for years, all day every day. They have conflicts among each other, but they must love each other. They have been bound by their situation, of the mutual respect that comes from knowing you’re a group that’s going to share incredible adversity together, who dedicated their lives to this. It’s the sort of feeling that military men might feel for each other, only so much more intense given the stakes and given how much time they would’ve spent together in training. They have an incredibly deep connection, they would have to. Something stronger than friends or family or comradery. And they were about to lose two of those brothers.
Icarus needed a second human to override the safety protocols for such a dangerous move, so Cassie turns to Mace for backup. Mace hesitates and thinks about it. Cassie then calls on Harvey, communications officer/second in command to back her up. He does. Mace says to wait, then tells Icarus to take control of the ship, preventing the shield rotation and effectively killing at least one of the people still trapped outside. He calls for Kaneda to back him up, which Kaneda immediately does, sealing his own fate. Unhesitatingly sacrificing his life to give the mission a better chance.
This, to me, is the climax of the movie and the core of what it gets so right that other movies never have. This is what heroism is. This is what a heroic, competent person, with the weight of the world on their shoulders does. This is living up to your stakes.
There were further adversities that the crew face, but to me this is the scene that defines the movie. It is a masterpiece of drama and characterization and a realistic take on what the best humanity has to offer would do when faced with the extinction of the human race.
Now, the bad stuff. When people say that this movie has two great acts and then falls apart, they’re talking about Pinbacker becoming the antagonist. I have not read the script, but I think that Pinbacker would work in writing, so the problem becomes translating him to film.
Pinbacker is the commander of Icarus 1. This is significant. The crew of Icarus 1 almost certainly thought that they were humanity’s only hope, that there wouldn’t be time or material left for Icarus 2. Earth civilization would’ve already been in strong decline - we see Australia covered in snow in our brief view of Earth. The movie gives the impression that building Icarus 2 was the last gasp of human effort. As the commander of what he thinks will be the only mission to try to save humanity, a tremendous amount of pressure is on him. The weight of that made him have a religious experience. He wondered if something on so grand a scale happened to humanity, that it must be God’s decision to have done that, and the Icarus mission would be humanity denying the will of God. The isolation from humanity, the weight of the responsibility, and the sort of hypnotic, almost mind-altering realizations about the power of the sun and what it represents to us (that we saw several people transfixed by) made him snap at some point and made him think that he had to prevent the mission. This, to me, is a plausible enough (or at least established enough) motivation for someone to snap like this. The weight of the responsibility on his shoulders would’ve been unreal, would’ve been something that no human has ever experienced before, and he cracked. It changed his worldview and broke his mind.
Now, if this were a book, Pinbacker would work. We’d see his perspective. We’d see him being stealthy, sabotaging the Icarus 2 in ways that wouldn’t have been obvious to the remaining crew. In a way, he’s a force of nature, representing the weight of their situation and the strength needed to keep your sanity. Written and portrayed correctly, this would still be a man vs nature story.
But the way it’s shot, it becomes a man vs man story. It feels like a huge tonal departure from the rest of the movie. Pinbacker is portrayed as a slasher movie villain. He didn’t look threatening enough in the role (a guy barely existing on Icarus 1, sunburnt and weak, wouldn’t be that threatening if you simply filmed it straight up), and so they gave him an almost supernatural presence to make his threat look credible on film. Having not read the script, so I’m not sure, but I would guess this was probably a failure of directing rather than a failure of writing.
Pinbacker should not have been a slasher villain, he should’ve been a silent saboteur, a representation the weight that the crews would’ve had on their shoulder, and the insanity that resulted. The story would still be man vs nature, but with one aspect of that embodied by a man who snapped from the natural forces they were facing. He could’ve done the same things he did in the film, but it should have been presented in a more plausible, less tonally different sort of way.
Still, if you’re forgiving, and if you realize that the character of Pinbacker could make sense, and just sort of forget how he’s portrayed, you can enjoy the film much more. That’s a lot to ask. I’m not saying that the portrayal of Pinbacker wasn’t a failure of filmmaking - it was - I just don’t know that it was a failure of writing.
In my own view, I think of Pinbacker as being the final adversity they face, a physical representation of the incredible pressure put on these people for being responsible for billions of lives and billions more in the future. Of all of humanity and what humanity might become. I do not enjoy watching the parts where he’s actually portrayed on screen, but I think about what he represents and still feel as though this movie is a triumph of writing.
Perhaps another director could’ve done a better job with this. Perhaps this is something that would work well in a novel but not in a movie. It is undoubtedly a big flaw, but one that does not necessarily have to ruin the story.
Other flaws.
I have heard other people make the criticism “you can’t re-ignite the sun! And especially not with anything you could get from Earth. That’s stupid!”
But I think that misses the point. The movie is not about what’s killing the sun. We’re asked to accept that as a premise. It’s never explained to us. Nor are we to understand what the payload of Icarus 1/2 was, other than that it was our best attempt at fixing the problem. It’s not simply a large nuclear bomb. We’re shown the payload chamber being able to generate visible effects of some sort as part of the detonation sequence. Whatever it is, it’s something sci-fi that we don’t fully understand.
The filmmakers actually consulted with Brian Cox, a famous physicist, to devise a scenario in which this is plausible. He came up with an idea IIRC about something like a supersymmetric particle catalyzing the matter in the sun to change in such a way as to inhibit fusion. It relates to a theoretical particle physics idea of a Q-ball, something that could inhibit the normal function of the sun, and whatever the payload is, it’s meant to dislodge or destroy that Q-ball.
I don’t understand the physics. That’s okay. The physics of the sun dying is not the point of the movie, it’s the premise. They don’t feel the need to explain it in the film. The point is the journey.
But “herp derp can’t nuke the sun when it’s dying!” is not a real criticism of the movie. It’s simplistic and unnecessary. We’re not talking about the sun dying because it ran out of helium and hydrogen to fuse 5 billion years from now. We’re talking about it dying in the next few decades because something exotic happened to it.
I thought it was somewhat implausible that the Icarus design would incorporate a return trip. Maybe the ship is so self-sufficient anyway that it doesn’t “cost” that much more to make a return trip. Maybe it’s propelled back in part by light pressure on their heat shield or something, so it doesn’t require that much fuel. But whatever was built for the return flight could be better spent on mission-proofing the ship. It would not be hard at all to find volunteers to go do this mission even with no chance of coming home. As such, anything dedicated to keeping the Icarus arrive after dropping the payload would be irrelevant. Either leave it off the ship, or use that extra mass to store spares and equipment that might be useful in edge cases. Still, I understand why it was written that way. The impact of the continual damage to the ship, and realization that they’d never make it home is a dramatic point for the characters. It makes sense to include it for that reason.
Some people wavered when heroism was required of them. Harvey, the communications officer/acting commander after Kaneda died would be the best example of this. He was simply a coward. He placed his own life - and likely a short one at that - over the best chances of the mission. You could make the argument that people like him would’ve been screened out during the process of selecting the Icarus teams. But I don’t know. Maybe he said all the right things, and understood intellectually that the mission may require self sacrifice, but when the actual moment came to be heroic, he simply didn’t have it in him. He is the anti-Mace. But what happened? Even though he was nominally in charge, no one listened to him. They basically just brushed him off and told him he wasn’t going to get in the suit. Searle stayed behind, sacrificing himself, again without hesitation. They made the best out of situation by trying to save Mace and Harvey, but the crew knew that Cappa had to have the suit. So even as Harvey himself wavered, the crew did the right thing.
And now I realize I made my post way too long for people to read. So if you made it this far, thanks. Alex Garland, the writer, went on to create Ex Machine and Annihilation, two of the best sci-fi movies of the last decade. I still think this is his best script, and one of the best scripts I’ve ever seen adapted. I think the criticisms from people who don’t like it are overly harsh, and I think people don’t appreciate just how amazing the good parts are. To me, it’s the most underrated sci-fi movie of all time even with its flaws.