Ray Pride

Scots-born director Danny Boyle’s protean imagination tends to the tactile, the immediate, the blood-rushing, the trippy: think "Trainspotting," "Miracles," "28 Days Later" and its sequel, "28 Weeks Later," which he supervised. His latest, "Sunshine," is no different, tending more toward the mind-expanding drift of "2001: A Space Odyssey" or the "Solaris" of Tarkovsky and of Soderbergh or the claustrophobia of "Das Boot" or "Wages of Fear" than to the pop-pow of "Armageddon."

A crew of astronauts, some fifty years in the future, is headed toward the sun. "Set the controls for the heart of the sun," goes a 1968 Pink Floyd title. "Our sun is dying" are the first words intoned in "Sunshine." A vast bomb is being ferried as the heart of the solar system seems in danger of expiring. But they’re the second crew: Icarus II is following the path of an earlier Icarus, lost, presumed destroyed. Hardly a gram of philosophy is spoken: they’re practical, pragmatic, all in thrall to the nearing fire, fire with the character of viscous fluid, heavy sultry water. Alwin Kuchler, whose marvelous work includes "Ratcatcher" and "Morvern Callar," shot "Sunshine" with innovative combinations of color and light.

Shipboard or in space for almost the entire duration of the film, "Sunshine" puts a physicist (Cillian Murphy) at the center of its story, appropriate for a production that counts a particle physicist among its consultants. A psychological officer is also on board, mediating the battles that grow in intensity as they near their destination: can they not know that there’s little likelihood they’ll return, even if they save mankind?

"The biggest problem of psychology is just surviving long-term space travel. Everything is designed to kill them," the 50-year-old writer-director tells me. "Everything! Like in a battle zone. Everything is waiting to kill them. There’s a wonderful book if you’ve never read it, by a British journalist named Andrew Smith. He had this idea, that I think has been copied in a documentary, of going and talking to the remaining Apollo astronauts. He got to talk to some of them, there are only like twelve left. They were all marked by the distance and especially the dark side of the moon, when they lose radio contact with Earth. Especially the guy who’s left alone when the other two went down to the surface. That guy represents the most alone you can get. It’s only forty-five minutes around the dark side, but… They were also pretty confident they would get them there but it was only fifty-fifty they’d ever get them back. And they knew that, the astronauts. It’s astonishing they got them all back."

One hopes to be as engaging and curious at 50 as Boyle: every zag of conversation holds a gleeful zig in turn. But in the movie, larger metaphors, say of the spaceship as an ark, as civilization, as the human heart, seem to emerge on their own. "If they’re there, you try to heavily disguise them!" A burst of laughter. "The great thing about space movies, you shouldn’t be too prescriptive about it, I think people like to use space as an experiment, who knows what they’ll find?"

Boyle describes one of the unsettling ideas he used to make his actors think in a more tactile fashion about the story: the table, the glass, the chair they sat in, themselves: shattered stardust, re-formed, where we came from, where we’ll all go. It’s a noble and oddly Eastern destination for the narrative. Toward the climax, there’s an extended sequence that in real time would take less than a breath, and Boyle stretches it majestically.

"What is literally happening…" Boyle starts, jumps up, the bright Chicago sky to the west bursting through thirty-fourth-floor windows, "What’s happening is that behind him, when he gets inside the bomb, the bomb is detonating. That’s a billionth of a second, if it’s that. But nobody knows, if you’re pulled into the sun, the gravity of the sun, the speed would be so colossal, no one knows what would happen. Would you flatten? Would you stop?" He laughs. "No one knows what would happen to perception, if there’s any perception left. So you’ve got to try and find a way of, visually, of announcing that all. When he puts his hand up like that, that’s that capsule we sent off into deep space, there’s a woman and a man naked, and his hand is up like that. Somebody’ll notice that!"

The film takes place fifty years from now, but it doesn’t traffic in fanciful futurism. "The problem with futurism is that it becomes the be-all, end-all of the whole fil—then the design, your impression of what things will be like in a hundred years time, becomes more important than the film itself. The designer had this rule, the ‘red bus rule’ to connect with the past. In London fifty years ago, there were red buses. There’re still red buses, they’re a bit different, but they’re basically the same! That’s the way the future comes on you, y’know. You evolve into it."

"Sunshine" beams from Friday.

(2007-07-17)

Also by Ray Pride

Bombs Away
"Nice Bombs" is Chicago filmmaker Usama Alshaibi’s forceful diary-style documentary about the first visit he and his father and his American wife made a journey back to their native Iraq after the American occupation had begun
(2007-07-13)

iPhone Has a Home
Walking down Michigan Avenue, the crowd at Huron is motley, but up close to the Apple store, lines are roped off to east and south, security guards are parsing ten customers at a time: who gets to drop five, six hundred dollars in the pursuit of gadget-lust in the half hour to come?
(2007-07-10)

Tip of the Week
Steeped in many political and economic developments of the decade in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover, a supple parable of the absorption of Hong Kong and Macau into the Chinese dragon, the eyes-wide, visceral, fluent, violent "Triad Election" is one of director Johnny To’s most accomplished
(2007-07-10)

Well Enough in the Margins
In "Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix," which functions as a narrative passageway from the things of youth to the damaging disappointments of adulthood and responsibility for its young charges, there is much motoring of plot for those who have read and find J. K. Rowling’s multi-billion-dollar enterprise worthy of deeper, greater and longer concentration
(2007-07-10)

Bay Watching
(2007-07-02)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-02)

More Moore
(2007-06-26)

Tip of the Week
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The Show Must Go On
(2007-06-26)

Limpid Pools
(2007-06-26)

Enough Stuff
(2007-06-22)

Nothing Else Matters
(2007-06-22)

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