Cult-Movie Review: Sunshine (2007)

Way back in 1981, the Sean Connery/"High Noon in Space" sci-fi movie Outland was advertised with the memorable tag-line: "Even in Space, the Ultimate Enemy is Man." A deliberate homage to classic outer space films from Solaris (1972) and Dark Star (1975) to Alien (1979) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007) could have re-purposed the same slogan.

Because if you remove all the technical bells and whistles, the harrowing Sunshine concerns not the final frontier, but the yin-and-yang of the human psyche; the best and worst angels of our nature.

Just how far would you be willing to go to save the human race? To the surface of Sun? 

And where would that journey take you, spiritually-speaking? Would it lead you to an epiphany about yourself, or contrarily,  and like a character in the film named Pinbacker, to the very heart of darkness itself?To put it another way, would you curse the blackness and loneliness of space, or share in the glowing illumination and belonging of a radiant star...even if you knew such belonging was short-lived?

Set in the year 2057, Sunshine is the tale of Icarus 2, a massive spaceship bound for our Sun, and carrying eight fragile human beings aboard her. The international crew has been tasked with dropping a vast stellar bomb into the Sun in hopes of re-igniting the dying star before it fades out and leaves Earth a frozen, destroyed world. The entire human race hangs in the balance.

En route to the sun, however, as the ship enters a communications "dead zone," the crew of Icarus 2 intercepts a mysterious signal. The signal originates near Mercury, from Icarus 1, the first ship that attempted this mission some seven years earlier...but disappeared without a trace. It too carries a massive stellar bomb, and thus offers the crew of Icarus 2 twice the possibility of success on their critical mission. Though some crew members disagree with the decision, the captain of Icarus 2, Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) orders a course adjustment on the recommendation of ship's physicist Capa (Cillian Murphy). Their mission: to secure a second payload.

What follows this fateful decision is a surprising and terrifying glimpse of human psychology, of man both at his remarkable best and at his absolute worst. Catastrophic human errors jeopardize the mission and yet egregious instances of human heroism - and selflessness -- bring the mission back from the precipice over and over. 

In one torturous, edge-of-your seat sequence, three crew members traverse a gap in space (between airlocks) with only one space suit between them. In another tense scene, one committed astronaut, Mace (Chris Evans) dives headlong into freezing liquid to re-start a computer mainframe. When he can't do the job at first, he goes back into the coolant again. And when he still doesn't finish, he goes back in a third time...

On the opposite side of the equation is a man called Pinbacker who believes that if humanity dies, he will be "alone" with God. He believes, I guess, that there will be some sense of intimacy there, in that twisted relationship. That's the mission he's assumed, and it involves murder, sabotage, and chaos. Pinbacker is consumed with self, while the survivors on Icarus 2 are consumed with saving the planet...and the species. These are two diametrically opposed viewpoints, and yet both are human.

The battle between these opposing aspects of the human psyche leads right to the surface of the Sun itself...and beyond, into a beautiful, even transcendent metaphysical climax. And Boyle doesn't spare viewers any comforts on the trip. Characters you grow to love make agonizing sacrifices, face grotesque and gory deaths, and broach a suicide mission with the dignity we all hope we would evidence if, by chance (or bad luck...), we found ourselves in their shoes.

In Sunshine, Danny Boyle has crafted an intimate, haunting, and utterly believable space movie, one that is never cheesy, trite, or less than totally involving (not to mention anxiety-provoking). And while you're watching be certain not to take your eyes off the screen even for a second, especially during one unsettling scene that creepily employs nearly subliminal (and highly-disturbing...) flash cuts.

Boyle revived and re-energized the zombie genre with 28 Days Later (2002), and Sunshine is strong enough that it should have also re-ignited the cerebral outer space film. An aficionado of the genre will recognize and appreciate many of Boyle's tributes to genre greats of yesteryear too. 

The film's villain, Pinbacker, is named after Dark Star's Sgt. Pinback (Dan O'Bannon), and even the Icarus's mission -- deploying a destructive device: a bomb -- reflects that nihilist John Carpenter classic. Boyle's slow, majestic pans across empty and isolating high-tech ship corridors deliberaately evoke memories of the Nostromo and Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). And the talking computer Icarus may be the Nostromo's "Mother" or 2001's HAL.  Even the steadfast focus on human psychology reminds one of Solaris (original or remake, take your choice).

Boyle utilizes these references and homages not as gimmicks or nudges to appreciative fans, but in the very manner Quentin Tarantino might: re-directing them for his own unique story, and making certain that they carry significance for viewers beyond their original context. 

For instance, any time a talking Computer appears in a science fiction film, we expect certain...things to happen. HAL, Proteus (Demon Seed) and Mother all turned out to be treacherous "beings," after all. Boyle plays with that anticipation in a unique way, particularly in a scene that involves the captain of the ship and Capa embarking on a dangerous space walk. As for the Ridley-Scott-esque pans, these carefully-orchestrated shots serve to remind viewers of a few important things. First, of the technological nature of the shelter that houses this group of human beings; and secondly that -- in this case -- the haunted house in space is not one invaded by a nightmarish "outside force," a malevolent extra-terrestrial, but rather a monster direct from the human id; a flawed "man" not a "perfect" alien.

Sunshine is also highly reminiscent of the literary works of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), which are considered, to varying degrees, inspiration for films as diverse as Alien and Apocalypse Now (1979). As is the case in Conrad's works, Sunshine offers a tangible sense of place (the Icarus 2 could be the Nostromo or the Narcissus of Conrad's travels), and characters' fates are played out in a remote location (stellar orbit...) far from the lights of modern civilization. 

Another Conrad-ian theme, the Evil "Outside" creating an Evil "Inside" also finds purposeful life in the Boyle film. Pinbacker goes insane because of the "loneliness" of black space, and also, perhaps, because of his religious upbringing. Those evils "outside" Pinbacker grow an evil seed within him; one that germinates on the long voyage to the Sun.

Long story short: Sunshine is a remarkable outer space movie because is about us, not clones, robots or monsters. When Man finally reaches the stars, he may have to reckon with the clones, the robots and the monsters of space opera too, but one thing is for certain: he will certainly have to reckon with his own psychology first.  

This idea is perhaps my favorite of all "outer space" conceits, and evident in Space:1999 (1975), and Prometheus (2012) to name just two other productions. In exploring this facet of the human experience, Boyle's film is about the darkness and the sunshine to be found there too.

Cult-Movie Review: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

Long ago -- and according to legend -- the great Sigourney Weaver put down the Ripley role because 20^th Century Fox envisioned a new direction for the Alien series.

What was that new direction?

Aliens vs. Predators. 

Perhaps apocryphally, perhaps truthfully, Weaver noted that she believed aliens belonged in the darkest, most isolated corners of deep space, not jumping out from behind haystacks on Earth.

Aliens vs. Predator Requiem (2007) is the movie she had the foresight to imagine.

It’s the aliens-jumping-out-of-haystacks film.

And it is no exaggeration to note that Requiem is godawful. It represents franchise-scuttling at a heretofore unimaginable, apocalyptic level.

To put it another way, this is the worst-shot major film that I’ve reviewed in ten years of blogging, and the most disappointing too. 

Often, I write here that a horror film fails because it lacks suspense or tension.  AVPR can’t even reach the quality threshold where that’s a legitimate issue. The movie is incompetently lit, making important details impossible to determine, and the narrative is incoherent and contradictory.

The film never bothers to build towards anything significant, and scenes start and stop without rhyme or reason.

“You know, when I was your age, I used to have these awful nightmares.”

AVPR is the tale of several aliens and one predator set loose in a small Colorado town in the early twenty-first century.  

Basically, the Pred-Alien that hatched at the end of AVP (2004) causes a ruckus on a predator ship in orbit and it crashes in Colorado. A bunch of face-huggers get loose in the woods, thus spawning more aliens, and the Predators send one of their own (from their home planet...) to clean up the mess.

Caught in the middle of this war are a bunch of horny teenagers, a former juvenile delinquent named Dallas (get it?) and sexy, confident Reiko Aylesworth as a tough-as-nails Iraq War vet. 

They all attempt to escape the sleepy burg of Gunnison, while the U.S. Government puts a fatal strategy into effect, one that will contain the spread of the alien forces.

“This plan is stupid.”

The most trenchant observation I can make regarding AVPR is that it represents the first film in either classic horror franchise that feels it necessary to spotlight teenagers skinny-dipping in a high school pool after hours.

And yep, these horny teens are attacked by swimming aliens there.

Once upon a time, neither franchise required stripping high-schoolers to draw enthusiastic audiences.

Once upon a time, both franchises were intelligent, beautifully-designed meditations on the darker angels of human nature.  But now -- all the sudden -- we’re asked to sympathize with the angst and ennui of a pizza delivery boy who wants to date a girl he’s always liked.

Because that’s the reason I go to see Alien and Predator films.

As I wrote in my post the other day, Alien ³ (1992) was about the fact that survival isn't always a "win." One could also gaze at Aliens (1986) as a metaphor for American arrogance during the Vietnam War. And the original Alien (1979) was about, in some subconscious sense, human sexuality co-opted by a nasty xenomorph.

Even 1997's Alien Resurrection -- for all of its problems -- offered some worthwhile commentary on the morality of human cloning, and the way that man had unwittingly become more like the xenomorphs by corrupting the life-cycle of other beings.

But the best that AVPR can muster is to steal a page from the 1980s slasher film formula: vice (sex) precedes slice-and-dice or in this case, attack by alien.

I find this element of the movie immensely depressing; that the Rolls Royce and Cadillac of horror franchises settle for Friday the 13th-style scenarios that are so hackneyed they were being mocked by Scream nearly twenty years ago.

Now don’t get me wrong, please. I happen to like many of the Friday the 13^th films. The “Dead teenager” formula absolutely has a purpose and a kind of validity to it in appropriate circumstances.  But I hate to see Alien lobotomized into the equivalent of a bad slasher flick.  Especially one that so readily dispenses with series continuity.

On that front, consider the modifications presented by the Pred-Alien. It has developed, genetically-speaking to eschew the egg and face-hugger stages of development. Now it simply kisses its prey and pumps embryos into the throat, leading right to the chest-burster stage.  

I see this unnecessary alteration as emblematic of the film’s lack of patience. AVPR isn’t willing to take its time, make its characters sympathetic, or generate real feelings of terror and unease.  Instead, it just wants to barrel away, skipping the things that would have made the film more than an extended wrestling match.  The Pred-Alien’s evolution is a symbol of this lack of patience.

AVPR never bothers to explain how an infusion of Predator DNA permits this change in the alien’s nature.  Since the answer is never given,  I suspect that the filmmakers decided to do something “cool” rather than something faithful or dramatically motivated.  Here, we get a scene where a few chest-bursters erupt out of a pregnant woman in labor, and that, I suppose, fulfills “the cool factor.”

Another question: why does Predator technology -- and even the spaceship interior – suddenly look completely different than how it looked at the end of Alien vs. Predator?

AVPR also puts the final nail in the long-erosion of the "un-killable alien" meme first realized by Ridley Scott in 1979. In his original film, the alien couldn't be killed, and couldn't even be stopped. You just had to get away from it...to leave it behind floating in space.

Yet here teenagers with hand-guns literally blow aliens away left and right.

Twenty-first century weaponry is more than efficacious blowing up these once unstoppable beasts. The trademark xenomorph -- once a genuine Terror from the Id -- is now just a big "bug" to be swatted with our state-of-the-art hardware. Forget the fact that it took advanced, futuristic hardware like smart guns and pulse rifles in Aliens to do the same job.

Nope, now we can do it with good old-fashioned, conventional shotguns and pistols. 

Among other problems, this fact dishonors Ripley’s four-movie journey. She fought the alien without weapons. She fought the alien with weapons too.  She even laid down her life to prevent the aliens from reaching Earth, and impacting innocent families. 

Why?

The xenomorphs were so dangerous that they could destroy everything, imperil all life.  They were a perfect (and perfectly hostile) life-form, and if they reached our cities…it was game over.

Well, AVPR undercuts Ripley’s meaningful sacrifice by putting aliens on Earth -- and making them containable -- before Ripley was even born.  This “sequel” film fails egregiously because it rewrites the saga in a way that makes Ripley’s choice to die rather than birth a queen seem inconsequential.

If aliens can be put down by shot-guns, what’s the big deal?

Also, I strongly dislike how the aliens move in this film. They are almost universally seen on all-fours, as though they are banana-headed dogs, rather than the upright drones of the earlier films.

The Predator fares slightly better in the film, though he operates by no sense of logic I can discern. This Predator arrives on Earth with the mission to "clean up" the mess. We periodically see him spilling some kind of glowing blue acid stuff on the corpses so as to cover the tracks of both the aliens and his own kind.

It's his mission, we presume -- from this act of destroying the evidence -- to hide the incursion of extra-terrestrials on Earth.

Given this task, the fact that the predator skins a police deputy and hangs his corpse from a tree --- to be found by the sheriff -- doesn't make a lot of sense. Why go out of your way to destroy all evidence of your presence, and then leave behind a bloody, hanging corpse in a tree?

That's just one incredible gap in situational logic, but there are bigger fish to fry here.

Before seeing the movie, for instance, I read a number of reviews from unhappy fans indicating that the film was poorly shot: that it was too dark.

I thought this was just fan griping.

 It isn't. 

I know of no modern-day corollaries for this overt failure in a major, big-budget production. But for some reason, AVPR is terribly, terribly under-lit throughout. Even the daylight scenes are hard to see. You'll spend the entire movie squinting, trying to make-out the crappy action.  This is a movie that actually hurts to watch. 

I mean that it physically hurts your eyes to pay attention.

In scene after scene, dark, indistinguishable figures clash with other dark, indistinguishable figures, all to the sound of squealing, gunfire and grunting. Rain falls, and we get the illumination we desire and need from brief instances of gunpowder flare and lightning strikes. 

But otherwise, we’re in the dark, literally.

Even now, some years later, I remain shocked that there was no quality control on the set in terms of the lighting; no review of dailies that revealed the film was too dark to countenance. Perhaps the film was darkened post-production because the monster suits weren’t up to scrutiny? I don’t know the reason for the problem, but the film is inarguably a visual disaster.

In the final analysis, AVPR isn't merely an insult to the intelligence, it's an insult to the great tradition and lineage of Alien and Predator films.

A requiem, by the way, is a hymn for the dead; a musical composition for the expired.

In this case, the "requiem" sung by AVPR is the death knell of not one, but two classic sci-fi film franchises.