Memories of SUNSHINE (2007)
In praise of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's eternally underrated sci-fi masterpiece.
“Only dream I ever have. Is it the surface of the sun? Every time I shut my eyes, it's always the same.”
It may have been a commercial flop when it came out, and it may go under-appreciated even to this day, but I want the record to show that I've been banging the drum for Danny Boyle's Sunshine ever since it came out in 2007, when I was 14.
Having already been a Danny Boyle stan for a while before then - thanks to Trainspotting and 28 Days Later - I kept abreast of the film through coverage of its production in Empire and Total Film, before both magazines went on to give Sunshine pretty glowing reviews (pun unintended), and so setting my expectations high into the stratosphere (pun now intended). Of course, with me being just a year shy of the film's 15 rating from the BBFC, I couldn't go see it in cinemas, and so had to wait for the DVD. Not that my contribution would have done much to bump up the underwhelming box office it was unjustly saddled with, thanks to audiences not turning up in enough numbers to have the film even recoup its $40 million budget, let alone turn a profit.
When I finally got my hands on the DVD, and watched Sunshine for myself, I practically had stars in my eyes. How could a movie with these astonishing visuals, these thought-provoking ideas, these thrillingly intense set pieces, this cast, this director, and this overwhelmingly epic (dare I say transcendent) soundtrack... how could so few others see the light?
So I spread the gospel.
How?
Well, during what must've been my last year of secondary school (between September 2008, and May 2009), one of the obligatory GCSE classes we all had to take - alongside Biology, Maths, English, Welsh, etc - was Physics. To my surprise, I grew to kind of like the subject, finding that it held my interest, explaining certain mechanics of the body and workings of the universe in ways I could grasp, and become fascinated by.
At one particular juncture of our Physics studies, we were being taught about something to do with light and heat. Exothermic reactions really stuck with me, because I learned about how the body regulates temperature through that process, and the example we learned to illustrate this is that when you drink a hot beverage, capillaries beneath the surface of your skin dilate to release heat from the body, and conversely, when you drink a cold beverage, the capillaries constrict to seal heat into the body. (Coincidentally, at around the same time I learned this at school, it just so happened to be confirmed within the pages of Max Brooks' World War Z, which I was reading at the time. In one memorable portion of the book, a fateful zombie-related tragedy in a deathly-cold setting involves a group of survivors making the mistake of drinking hot drinks in subzero temperatures, making them lose precious body heat, leading to their deaths.)
We were also taught about the various means of deflecting, or absorbing, light and heat. White clothing bounces light off it itself, and so doesn't absorb anywhere near as much heat as black clothing, which voraciously consumes light and heat. Shiny, reflective surfaces - like foil, or steel (assuming my memory's right) - deflect light and heat significantly, making them invaluable for any ships or machines that are sent out into space, and interact with... the sun.
Cue the cartoon lightbulb above my head.
Seeing the conjunction between our current curriculum's exploration of these aspects of physics, and their relation to the film's plot involving a ship with a giant reflective metal dome protecting the passengers from the sun's gargantuan light and heat, I used this as justification when I decided to ask our Physics teacher if he'd allow us to watch Sunshine in class. It would be entertaining, and educational! All we'd need to do is wheel in the TV with the DVD player, and I'll provide my copy of the film! What do you say, sir?
He said yes.
JACKPOT!
(Incidentally, this isn’t the only tale of me persuading one of my teachers to allow me and my classmates to watch one of my DVDs during lesson time, via some tenuous thematic connection to our studies. It happened likewise when I got The Number 23 shown during Maths, or when I got United 93 shown during Ethics & Philosophy. But those are stories for another time.)
And with that, cut to one of our two-hour blocks for Physics class - the perfect amount of time to watch the whole film in one sitting, rather than split up across two different days.
The square TV was wheeled out. The blinds on the windows were lowered. The lights were turned off. And for those next 107 minutes, we all sat before the TV's glow, enraptured by the film for its whole duration.
I can't rightfully say whether or not everyone in class liked Sunshine beyond its service of killing a couple of hours doing something less tedious than studying. After all, we were collectively a bunch of 15-to-16 year olds, and there's a good chance not everyone was quite as into the science fiction and philosophical aspects of the movie as I was. But I think everyone enjoyed it to some degree or another. There was even a little bit of discussion about the third act and the ending - both notorious for being divisive among viewers, since many argue it's the weakest part of the movie (though I disagree) - and when one girl asked me about it, I offered my interpretation of how, what, and why the ending happens the way it does.
The class ended. We packed up our stuff. I retrieved my DVD. And I walked out of the room to my next lesson (or to lunchtime, I forget exactly) with a feeling of accomplishment, while John Murphy's 'Adagio in D Minor' played triumphantly in my head.
Speaking of which:
Perhaps the most prevailing legacy of Sunshine, in the 18 years and counting since its release, has been the cultural longevity of Murphy's 'Adagio in D Minor' theme. The film itself may not have immediately struck a nerve for people, but that piece of music was so emotionally evocative and breathtakingly beautiful, it couldn't help but begin to cement itself as a new modern classic of film composition.
For those who kept track of such things in the years after Sunshine, you started hearing 'Adagio in D Minor' almost literally everywhere.
It was in countless movie trailers, and TV spots. It turned up in one of the last episodes of The Walking Dead's first season. Wonder Woman 1984 used the track to lend one of its sequences an emotional weight it hadn't earned for itself. And in Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, a composer supergroup was built to team up Murphy with Henry Jackman, Marius De Vries, Ilan Eshkeri, and a one-track cameo from Danny Elfman, to produce a score whose entire basis was built on repurposing Murphy's themes from Sunshine ('Adagio in D Minor'), and 28 Days Later ('In The House - In A Heartbeat').
And when 'Adagio' wasn't being directly licensed for use in other projects, it would sometimes get flat out plagiarised, but in that way where the composition is juuuuust different enough to not be exactly the same in the eyes of the law. Maybe this was because 'Adagio' got used as temp music during editing, and the composers were given the unenviable task of replicating its spirit and structure, but without copying it note for note. Whatever the case may be, you had such examples as the season one finale of the 2009 reboot of V ending on a climactic piece of music from Marco Beltrami that was blatantly copying 'Adagio in D Minor'... or the Australian film, These Final Hours, having a climactic montage set to a piece from Cornel Wilczek's score that also definitely cribbed from 'Adagio in D Minor'.
All this to say that back when I saw Sunshine for the first time, I became obsessed with Murphy's score. He'd already won me over with his work in 28 Days Later, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but in 2007, his work on both 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine made me a ride-or-die fan forever onwards.
But for over a year after the film's release, the soundtrack didn't exist yet.
It's ancient history now that the official soundtrack album's release was delayed for so long because of some unspecified legal kerfuffles going on behind the scenes, but at the time, the indefinite wait was agonising. I can't tell you how many times over how many days I spent searching iTunes to see if the album was out yet. The best anyone could do was listen to unofficial rips of the score on YouTube, where the bitrate and sound quality was garbage, the sound effects were still mixed in with the music, and because 'Adagio' didn't have a canon title for the track yet, it became colloquially referred to as 'The Surface of the Sun'.
When the score finally did come out near the very end of 2008, I remember I practically begged my mother to buy the album on iTunes (and it had to be the whole album, because the iTunes Store didn't allow the one track everyone wanted, 'Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)', to be bought individually). I plead my case by trying to articulate how awesomely powerful I found the music to be. As I only had a 15 year-old's vocabulary at my disposal, and I couldn't yet describe the frisson experience the music still gives me even now, the only words I could think of to sum it up to her was: “It's just... perfect.”
And you know what? Same goes for Sunshine, too.
I loved this movie then, I love this movie now, and nearly two decades later, it has only gotten better with time.
I’m a big fan of this movie. It does become more of a thriller in the 2nd half, but while many seemed to find that shift jarring, I feel like it tells you that’s where it’s going pretty early on.