Danny Boyle has had the most sporadic career when it comes to his style of filmmaking. With other directors, you can usually see a thematic throughline that ebbs through most of their films, whether it be the visual aesthetic, story trend, or character archetype they constantly return to.
Some directors’ names even become expressions to describe other movies that attempt to emulate their style. If you hear someone describing a film using words like Spielbergian, Nolanize, or Tarantinoing, you immediately know what they’re talking about and can trace it back to who and why. However, when it comes to Boyle, his movies are so varied and distinct that it’s hard to pigeonhole him into a single category. Yeah, he made 28 Days Later, which reinvented the zombie subgenre of horror, but he also made Yesterday, which is like…a cute rom-com. If you put those two posters side-by-side, would you ever assume the same director made them? Sure, they both technically feature someone walking across a street, but that’s circumstantial evidence, at best.
A semi-frequent collaborator of his—in that there’s a near-twenty-year gap between collaborations—is screenwriter Alex Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later, The Beach (the novel, not the screenplay), and most recently, 28 Years Later. Before he received critical acclaim for his directorial efforts, 28 Days Later is the film that was most associated with his name—Ex Machina even used that fact as part of its marketing campaign—but the film that gets overlooked the most in his and Danny Boyle’s collective filmographies is the underseen sci-fi cult classic, Sunshine. Not to be confused with the 1927 silent film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. You wouldn’t think that distinction would have to be made, but you’d be surprised.
Overlooked by many, but beloved by everyone lucky enough to have seen it, Sunshine is a 2007 sci-fi thriller that follows a small crew aboard Icarus II as they carry a payload of nuclear warheads, the mass of Manhattan Island, to reignite our dying sun. Along the way, they have to face the harshness of space travel and the frailties of human nature.
One of the things that always gets brought up when talking about Sunshine is the cast. People always like to comment about the MCU/DC crossover with how Cillian Murphy and Chris Evans both star in the film, but what’s more interesting is how this was at the point when they were both known actors, but weren’t household names yet. The rest of the cast is filled out almost entirely of now-respected performers and name actors like Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Mark Strong, and Hiroyuki Sanada. The last one on the list you may recognize as the guy who makes any movie better just by being in it. If the name still doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the one who beats up Tom Cruise with a stick in The Last Samurai. Everyone on the same page now? Good.
What makes Sunshine great upon rewatch is that it’s like a pastiche of other classic sci-fi films, but still has its own unique identity. The film it gets compared to the most is Alien, based on the horror element of the third act—we’ll get to that—and the visual aesthetic of Icarus II looking similar to the Nostromo—funny enough, Ridley Scott would later pull an Uno reverse card with the aesthetic of the colony ship in Alien: Covenant. The film has a few other nods like the early crew meal scene to establish the relatability of the characters before things get bad, and also the crew talking to the ship’s AI for updates, like the crew on the Nostromo did with MU/TH/UR (pronounced, ‘mother’) in Alien. There’s even a distress beacon that kicks everything off. There are a few callbacks to 2001: A Space Odyssey as well, with the characters exiting the stark white airlock into the eerie blackness of space, and a brief moment where the ship’s AI overrides the crew’s instructions due to the mission taking priority over the life of the crew. That being said, Icarus is far more humane than HAL-9000.
Even though it’s often compared to Alien, it feels more like a dark episode of Star Trek or even Prometheus (down to the fact that Benedict Wong is in both), bringing up ethical questions and human failings in a life-or-death situation, without romanticizing anything. On multiple occasions, the crew is faced with a global stakes version of the Trolley Problem, and the movie isn’t afraid to make them look cold-blooded for their decisions. It’s like the filmmakers watched The Wrath of Khan, heard Spock’s sentiment about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, and begged the question of what if you’re in ‘The Many’ category and have to force the hand of ‘The Few’. Things aren’t so peachy when you don’t have a Jerry Goldsmith score to soften the mood (John Murphy and Underworld’s score is appropriately epic, though). It’s also more relatable and human because the first form of conflict that sets everything in motion is when one of the crew members makes a mistake and forgets to do something. He does the equivalent of forgetting to leave the space stove on, and in doing so, he almost burns down the space house.
It's hard to talk about the movie without mentioning the third act, which is probably the most talked-about aspect of the film and why it appears on so many Top 10 lists. We’ll try to sidestep spoilers, but the majority of the film is a solid sci-fi film with thriller elements, until the last chunk, which turns into almost a straight-up slasher film. It may be the movie’s weakest aspect because the story is so tight up until that point that it didn’t need an overarching villain, especially since he’s still not technically the main threat. The mission is the priority; he’s just an added hurdle for the crew to overcome to complete the mission. The villain is still appropriately scary, going mostly unseen, and subverts the usual monster trope of being shrouded in darkness by instead being blindingly engulfed in sunlight. For some people, his inclusion is enough to ruin the movie, but personally, it’s never been an issue. When you get to the film’s finale, it still wraps up beautifully.
Sunshine is simultaneously one of Danny Boyle’s best films and one of Alex Garland’s best screenplays…that being said, it’s still overshadowed by both Steve Jobs and Dredd. That’s a hot take, but we’re standing by it. The film is a tense thriller that shows off that space is very much how Dr. McCoy described it, “Disease and danger, wrapped in darkness and silence,” but it’s also visually gorgeous and amplified by its soundtrack that ranges from being meditative to bombastic. If you’re a fan of either filmmaker…you’ve probably already seen it multiple times, but to everyone else, especially sci-fi fans, it’s definitely worth checking out.