Sunshine

The premise sounds intimidating. Our sun is dying, and so is life as we know it. A group of astronauts is sent to change that. They carry a precious payload 8212; almost all of earth8217;s atomic energies put together to create a stellar bomb which will be projected into the sun. It will create, to put it simply, a star within a star, and restore the sun to its original brightness and strength.

But that8217;s just the science part of it, and Sunshine is far from being just another action flick couched in technical terms to win over the sceptics. It may be about saving humanity but, at the end of the day, it8217;s also about being human.

The cast itself is a credit to Boyle, who has previously directed the much-talked-about The Beach the same writer-director team as Sunshine and Trainspotting, as well as A Life Less Ordinary. None of the actors is very well known, except Yeoh, and none of them is extraordinary in any way. Unkempt and casual, they are eight different people, experts in own fields, who have been brought together by the mission and who have now spent 16 tense months in close proximity. Not an ideal situation by any standards.

Then it8217;s the setting. Sun, by any scientific estimation, would start to die out naturally only after a couple of billion years. In this film, it has been infected by something called a Q-ball. It isn8217;t very satisfactorily explained in Sunshine, but it doesn8217;t matter, except for the fact that it allows the filmmakers to advance the calamity of a dying sun forward by a couple of billion years to our near future: approximately 50 years from now.

So the eight scientists aren8217;t flying to where no man has gone before with some mindboggingly new technology. Aware of their vulnerability 8212; even their ship is called Icarus II, the Ist having been lost without a trace 8212; you are able to sympathise with them more. Icarus of course is the mythical Greek hero who flew too close to the sun on wings joined by wax and paid a price for it.

Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland don8217;t let the film drown in mumbo-jumbo. Whenever it threatens to, they introduce an element of suspense, underlining the man8217;s insignificance in the larger scheme of things. Be it the crew8217;s discovery that Icarus I and its members may still be somewhere out there, suddenly changing everything they set out to do, or how the silliest of mistakes can prove drastically fatal.

It also brings up the larger question of God8217;s will, whether a man should or could play God, and where to draw the line. Some of the best scenes in the film involve the cast having to take those decisions.

Towards the end, there is a villain. While that threatens to ruin a till-now superbly plausible film, in an interesting decision, he is never clearly shown. He emerges from blinding light, is seemingly impermeable to death and he is clearly angry at those trying to fiddle with nature. In a space with endless possibilities, who is he?

Think about it. Meanwhile, enjoy the sun. It8217;s the real star no pun intended of Sunshine. Amazing, beautiful, a life force and 8212; as we tend to forget sometimes 8212; merciless.