Sunshine and sacrifice

For some curious reason, within the last few week I've seen "Sunshine," the Danny Boyle movie about a mission to the Sun, and Steven Soderbergh's remake of "Solaris."

Solaris has its moments, and is a great example of the science fiction film as exercise in close-observation psychology. However, it lacks Tarkovsky's crazy inventiveness, and the movie's end is strangely limp and ambiguous, particularly in contrast to the original's wild ending.

Sunshine has gotten some pretty negative reviews, but I thought it was brilliant and haunting: hardly perfect, but admirable for its audacity. Visually it's very striking, great at contrasting the claustrophobic and slightly crazy life within the ship with the terrifying energy outside it, and struck through with all kinds of fascinating visual touches-- virtual reality rooms, holographic displays, things you've seen in lots of science fiction movies before, but done really well. There aren't many movies this bright, where the light is allowed to be so strong and overwhelming. (It's as if the film were made by a people with a hundred different words for sunlight.) At its best, the music is wonderful, as are the sound effects generally. And I don't buy the idea that the ghost ship detour, or the twist in the last half hour, is a bad move: I thought it worked, especially given who the "ghost" turns out to be.

(Spoiler after the jump. Carpe diem.)

Technorati Tags: movies, science_fiction

The other thing about Sunshine that's pretty bold is that it kills off every single person you've come to know: they manage to save the Sun, but only after two hours of relentless self-sacrifice. People die repairing heat shields, getting computers back online, staying controls that have to operated manually so everyone else can get to safety.... I haven't seen so much nobility since Tommy Lee Jones' Volcano, in which anyone who acted altruistically got themselves killed.

It's oddly old-fashioned in its sombre celebration of people's willingness to die for a cause, and in a couple cases, the way characters embrace their fate (though saving Earth is a pretty unambiguously good cause). If many other science fiction movies (like Solaris) show people unravelling in space because of a combination of deadly routine and lack of purpose, Sunshine argues that people need (or can't help but be drawn to) things bigger than themselves; they need to have causes; and they need to be able to sacrifice themselves for those causes. We need such things to give our lives purpose, even if those lives are made much shorter.