Sometime today, NASA's Messenger spacecraft, which left the Earth over two years ago, shot right past Mercury to give us a glimpse of the innermost planet for the first time in 30 years. This is only part of Messenger's journey, as it has to make a few more swings around the universe to slow down enough to be able to park itself into orbit around Mercury in 2011. Imagine the planning it must take to figure out how to accurately position a satellite that won't get to it's destination for another six years from when it initially lifted off. Get just the most minute angle wrong, and instead of a great opportunity for scientific discovery, you've got space junk. It's a formidable task to put the shear immensity of our solar system into a scale we can comprehend. Sunshine, a film directed by Danny Boyle that's out on DVD now, takes advantage of this as it's focal plot point.
Wander posted a trailer for this film back in the summer, but I never got the chance to see it in the theaters. To refresh your memories about the basic premise, fifty years in the future, the human race discovers that the Sun is literally burning out, and has sent a last ditch effort in the form of Icarus II and it's crew to our life-giving star in hopes of delivering a fissile payload "the size of the island of Manhattan" to reignite it. Of course, the Sun is a long way from home, and the crew doesn't have the luxury of calling home for directions when problems arise along the way. A distress beacon from Icarus I, the original mission to the Sun that was presumed to have failed, creates a fork in the road that can lead to a better chance for success or a recipe for disaster.
I find that there are two types of science fiction. The first is the preposterous movies that defy any logic or sense of the laws of physics to present an over-the-top action flick. These popcorn flicks are all well and good, but I tend to enjoy the second kind of sci-fi movie instead--the "what if?" scenarios grounded in actual science that create a backdrop for explorations of the deeper issues of the human condition. Sunshine falls into this second category. What do you do when the survival of humanity is literally on the line? How will you react when you have no hope of returning home? If God's creation is literally flaming out, is it truly the place for mere mortals to interfere? These are some of the questions posed in the film that I think Danny Boyle does a good job of presenting in the form of conflicts between the crew of Icarus II.
The cast does a pretty good job of creating a realistic environment of a crew out on their own with no one to depend on but each other, but perhaps the greatest quality of this movie is the utilization of the Sun as a vehicle for tension and action. Sitting out in the Arizona desert seems like a dip in the cold plunge in comparison to getting stuck out in space fully exposed to the Sun's rays in the proximity the Icarus II must get to in the film.
All in all, Sunshine is an excellent movie that's worth a viewing in the comfort of your own home.
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