Sunshine - A Review of Sorts

It's normally my custom to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey over Christmas and New Year, just because I generally watch it every couple of months anyway and it seems extra special with the holidays and everything.

This year I gave it a break - I think I'm subconsciously waiting for the new disc with the commentary to be released in Region 2 before I watch it again.

As a substitute, I couldn't decide if I wanted to watch Silent Running, or Alien or Dark Star or Solaris or one of that small cadre of science fiction films that are nicely produced, and have some element of scriptwriting, story and effects craft to them. Yes, even Dark Star is well crafted. You know they type of film -- you've seen it a thousand times, usually late at night and by the time it finally comes to an end, you've seen some really quite nice model building roll quietly past the screen and heard dialogue that an actual writer came up with.

In the end, I decided to forgo all of the classics and watch that curious mash-up of all the films I have mentioned above: Sunshine.

I'd avoided Sunshine in the cinema because I'd had my fears confirmed that it was shallow and derivative, but I was rather shocked to learn just how diaphanously shallow and blushingly derivative it was. Although people have drawn comparisons with 2001 and Alien I would say that Sunshine's closest relative is the execrable Event Horizon.

I went to see Event Horizon in the cinema. I took two friends with me and I suspect the fact that I am no longer in contact with these two friends is in no small part connected with Paul W. S. Anderson's film, which could only be described as a piece of hate mail to the art of the moving picture. Event Horizon was the first film for me that really made me think about the gap in the craft between the production of the sets and the effort that went into writing the story, the plotting and the script. "How could they put that much craft into building an airlock but subsequently forget to read the script out loud to see if it sounded something other than rubbish?" I thought to myself, "did all the other people working on the film not feel really let down when they saw what all their hard work was used for in the end?"

And so on to Sunshine. More time and effort was expended on designing the handles on the doors on the airlock in this film than actually went into developing the story. I can prove it too - through my sources, I have managed to get my hands on the entire transcript of the story development focus session between Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, showing how much care they lavished on the plot whilst people sat in design agencies all over London coming up with new stencils to denote zero gravity areas.

Somewhere in Hoxton:

Alex Garland: "Right -- these scientific types have to go to the sun and restart it."

Danny Boyle: "Great idea. Like The Core?"

AG: "But in space, remember. It's all about claustrophobia."

DB: "Good so far. What's the ship called?"

AG: "Icarus II"

DB: "Same as the guy who flew to close to the sun and died?"

AG: "It's fatalism."

DB: "Why Icarus II?"

AG: "First one failed."

DB: "And they were allowed to call the second one Icarus again?"

AG: "The project managers were a bunch of lazy miserablists. I hear it happens."

DB: "How do we make the audience care about the mission if the movie is thematically detached from the fate of the Earth? I mean, who cares about scientist-types?"

AG: "They'll be pretty."

DB: "This is Big Brother in space, isn't it? But the evictions are better? We should add a diary room."

AG: "Already done. They will all look different in a differently pretty way each, and we will use their names all the time - people mistake that for character development. Plus, one of them will have a name that's almost identical to someone in Dark Star. It won't break the plausibility at all and the geek demographic will love it. Homage if you will."

DB: "How are they going to restart the sun?"

AG: "With a really, really big bomb."

DB: "Is that good for restarting suns?"

AG: "I don't care."

DB: "Do they have to talk the bomb into exploding?"

AG: "I think that's been done - but one of them can ride it down to the detonation point. That's clever."

DB: "OK - but how do we add tension other than the obvious 'will they manage to do it and save the Earth (which we haven't seen)' thing?"

AG: "I know - they'll have problems along the way ... and there will be too much pressure to succeed, so it will make them a bit bonkers."

DB: "And then?"

AG: "Ummmm -- everything will be dangerous, you know with the heat from the sun and everything. And the vacuum."

DB: "We need them to run out of oxygen at some point, because this is basically a submarine film."

AG: "I spoke to some scientific types, the non-pretty ones - they said you'd need to grow plants to have oxygen on a long journey, so we could destroy that. It can catch fire and they'll have to use the oxygen to put the fire out."

DB: "I still cry in Silent Running when Louie... Hey, why not just let some vacuum in to put the fire out, or recirculate the CO2? Plus that would allow the plants to survive."

AG: "Shhh. Don't mention that - whose side are you on? I have to get this plot nailed down now because I need ten minutes this afternoon to write the Indiana Jones 4 story. Otherwise it's going to be an old guy and a kid in a mine. We're burning the damn plants, OK? Besides, it looks better - I shouldn't have to tell you that."

DB: "We need some good old fashioned Greek irony, like I learned in drama school."

AG: "Oh yeah, I heard about that."

DB: "I know - they're at risk from the sun, but the cold will be dangerous too. Everything will be too hot or too cold. Or wet."

AG: "Oh, like drowning in the desert? Or dying of thirst at sea?"

DB: "Yeah. Let's have some of that."

AG: "So, they go from one problem to the next -- but we need something for the last act. You know -- different. To send it in a new direction."

DB: "Like Fight Club?"

AG: "Not that different. I know - there's someone else on board."

DB: "A stowaway! Awesome - there hasn't been a good stowaway movie in at least three months."

AG: "Not a stowaway - he gets on board from the other ship, which they find abandoned. Like in Event Horizon."

DB: "Because even though their mission is really critical they still stop at the other ship to find out what happened and get new plants and stuff."

AG: "Yeah. I know the audience will spend the rest of the film asking why the hell they did that, but we can just have the scientist types argue it out with a bit of exposition, and by the time they get to the conclusion that two bombs are better than one the audience will be saying 'Just go to the other ship and get on with the dying etc.'"

DB: "So this guy somehow survived from the other ship and somehow got on the Icarus through the vacuum and heat and everything, but we can get round that by not bothering to explain. Won't the computer, HAL or whatever, tell them there's someone on board?"

AG: "Not if they don't ask it!"

DB: "Genius. And what is the guy doing?"

AG: "Well, he's killing them off one by one but the audience won't object because we've already made a joky reference to Alien in the second act."

DB: "What's his motivation?"

AG: "He doesn't want the sun restarted."

DB: "Why not?"

AG: "We'll just say 'god' or something. It'll be really close to the end at this point so we don't have to explain anything from now on. It's cosmic."

DB: "I still feel we need to make him a bit different somehow. How about blurry; has blurry been done?"

AG: "Why is he blurry?"

DB: "To add a small bit of mystery to this mysteryless film. You know, get them thinking there's something more to it than someone trying to stop someone else doing something difficult in a confined space."

AG: "Like he's not really there? Perhaps he's really only in their..."

DB: "You said don't mention Fight Club. What do we do for an ending?"

AG: "Bomb goes off. Sun restarts. Mankind gets back to killing the Earth and each other. I'm bored now - we've spent enough time on this. How long has that been?"

DB: "About as long as it takes one of the designers to open the ship model in 3ds Max."

AG: "Yeah, that's about right. Next film - oh yeah, Indy 4. Now, there's this old archaeologist. Since the median age of the people going to see this film is 14, we need a kid as the true central character so that they will emphasise with him and eat popcorn."

DB: "Why send people along with the bomb anyway? Don't we send robots into space all the time? And why was the sun going out?"

AG: "Shut up. So, the old guy and the kid are in a mine. And they're wearing hats."

So, my advice to designers, set builders and all other crafts people working on films is this: whenever you've just spent three weeks redesigning a chair twelve times for a film, remember to stop the director once in a while look him in the eye and say "You've remembered to write a story for this, haven't you? It's not just all me doing the work here?"