Synopsis

Stars do not live forever. One dies in the universe every second. Our closest star, the Sun, is a nuclear fusion reactor the size of a million Earths. It burns 600 million tons of hydrogen per second. Scientists estimate the Sun has enough fuel to burn for another five billion years. What would happen to the Earth if it doesn’t? What would happen to mankind? Fifty years from now, the sun is dying, and mankind is dying with it. Our last hope: a spaceship and a crew of eight men and women, the Icarus II. They carry a device which will breathe new life into the star. Deep into their voyage, out of radio contact with Earth, their mission is starting to unravel. There is an accident that destroys their food source; a fatal mistake with the shield protecting the spaceship, and then a distress signal from the Icarus I which disappeared seven years earlier. Soon the crew is fighting for their lives and their sanity.

What The Critics Say

"The last time that Scottish filmmaker Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting", "Shallow Grave", "The Beach") turned his hand to the sci-fi genre, the result was the bone-rattling, knock you back in you seat zombie-virus thriller "28 Days Later", which successfully bent genre conventions while also maintaining a handle on the essentials. After detouring with the warm family drama "Millions", Boyle returns again to sci-fi, but this time drifts into more cerebral, esoteric territory with the unusual but highly compelling Sunshine." Erin Free FILMINK "Danny Boyle, who’s barely struck a bad note in his stellar career, has found a happy medium. No, make that an overjoyed medium, because that’s how you’ll feel emerging from the theatre, knowing the science fiction genre has been restored to its former glory. Boyle lets the dialogue, effects, music and drama prop each other up, none of them struggling for room or taking centre stage, and the result is pure science fiction as it always should have been." Drew Turney WEBWOMBAT "Brilliantly mixes eye-popping effects and edge-of-your-seat action to make this sci-fi scorcher the hottest ticket around." Johnny Vaughan SUN ONLINE "Screenwriter Alex Garland (who teamed with Boyle for "The Beach" and "28 Days Later") avoids Hollywood sentiment and there is a grim tone to the film, which sci-fi lovers will appreciate. "Sunshine" is worth seeing for the visuals alone: opening with a striking shot of the sun, Boyle utilises state of the art special effects to create a fiery Sun and sweeping external shots of the Icarus II." Mark Beirne YOURMOVIES

"An extraordinary film, operating simultaneously at visceral, psychological and spiritual levels as it takes us on a voyage into space with the fate of mankind at stake." Kirk Honeycutt HOLLYWOOD REPORTER "A blazingly intense sci-fi thriller and a blinding visual experience. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, who so effectively re-invigorated British horror with 28 Days Later take a delirious trip inwards and outwards in a film that spacewalks between metaphorical grandeur and the urgent demands of genre. Sunshine is Boyle's most expressly cinematic film to date." Jon Fortgang CHANNEL 4 FILM "The only thing more dazzling than the angry star throbbing at the centre of our dying solar system is the production design on Danny Boyle’s visually arresting sci-fi picture." Wendy Ide UK TIMES "Aside from a last-act blip when everything goes a little bit 'what the hell?', this is a knuckle-gnawingly tense, glorious action thriller and marks yet another genre nailed by Danny Boyle." Olly Richards EMPIRE MAGAZINE

Meet The Stars Of "Sunshine" Irish actor Cillian Murphy was cast as Capa, the Icarus II’s Physicist and the only crewmember who really knows how to operate the incredibly sophisticated bomb the ship is carrying. "Unlike the other members of the crew Capa doesn’t have a military background, isn’t an engineer or a career astronaut," explains Murphy. "I don’t think his people skills are as good as they could be which makes him more of an outsider and slightly removed from the rest of the crew."
American actor Chris Evans, who plays the Human Torch in Fox’s 2005 hit comic book adaptation Fantastic Four, was cast as Mace, the ship’s Engineer. "Mace is from a military family and background and he’s very cut and dry, morally uncomplicated,” explains Evans. “He is the guy on board who understands exactly the way the ship works and has a very level head which enables him to operate fairly coherently under pressure-filled situations."
The filmmakers were looking for an Asian actor to play the most experienced astronaut of the crew, Icarus II’s Captain Kaneda. Boyle had seen Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada in Yoji Yamada’s highly acclaimed THE "Twilight Samurai". For Sanada, "Sunshine" was his second English-language feature. "I love Danny’s films, they have good tension and rhythm in the world he creates," says Sanada. "The script has great human drama. A group of people spending a lot of time together confined in a spaceship, it is not only serious entertainment but also has very profound meaning and a deep soul."
Asian superstar Michelle Yeoh plays Corazon, the Biologist in charge of the Icarus II’s oxygen garden — the ship’s primary source of oxygen and fresh food. “I almost want to say that Corazon is the luckiest crew member as she has the oxygen garden," says Yeoh. "She just keeps on running her experiments and growing food. This movie has turned out to be much more psychological and spiritual in a way. The crew is on a very intense journey. When you look out into space, what are you looking for? If you stare into the abyss long enough, you might lose your soul." Australian actress Rose Byrne plays Cassie, the Pilot of the Icarus II. "Cassie is probably the most emotional crewmember in the sense that she wears her heart on her sleeve," explains Byrne. "I think the reason she is on board is because of her even temperament. She doesn’t have a breaking point, which gets her through the journey. It’s life and death all the time."
Troy Garity, who took the role of Harvey, the ship’s Communication Officer. "Harvey is second in command to the Captain. He is the only one on board who misses his family incredibly but hides it from the rest of the crew," explains Garity. "The likelihood of survival is not great and each of us in the film deals with it in different ways. Some more honorable, some more spiritual, and some more accepting. I think my character imagines himself to be brave, but he proves just to be normal and human in the end."
New Zealander Cliff Curtis was cast as Icarus II’s Medical Officer. "My character Searle is the doctor and psychiatrist on the ship who becomes obsessed with the Sun. He realizes something went wrong with the previous mission, and potentially could go wrong with theirs, and so he uses himself as a guinea pig. Searle theorizes on the possibility that to some the Sun may be the face of God."
Benedict Wong plays Navigation Officer Trey. "I found the script really exciting and the story very plausible, so it was something I immediately wanted to be involved in," Wong explains. "Trey’s back story is that he was a child prodigy. As a petulant teenager he created a computer virus that destabilized one sixth of the world’s computers. His job on Icarus II is to navigate the ship towards the Sun safely, but he makes this huge error which eventually costs him his life."
Mark Strong was cast as Pinbacker, the Captain of the Icarus I, the first mission to the Sun. Strong has been decribed as "a six foot two inch Anthony Hopkins." To achieve the look of the hideously scarred Pinbacker, Strong had to endure a grueling five hours of makeup before he even stepped on set. And, he had to have his head shaved every morning. The Inside Story "The premise of Sunshine," explains producer Andrew Macdonald, "is that in 50 years from now the Sun is dying. It is no longer providing the energy and the light that mankind needs to survive on Earth. The entire global community pools its resources to send a mission into space to deliver a bomb to reignite the part of the Sun that is failing. Our story concerns the eight astronauts and scientists who lead this mission. On their journey towards the Sun the crew stumble upon the ship that was sent on the same mission seven years previously, the Icarus I, drifting in space. From this point on things start to go very wrong and it’s about how the crew react under the enormous pressure of their endeavor to save mankind." Screenwriter Alex Garland came up with the concept for "Sunshine" back in 2004 after reading an article in an American scientific periodical. "I always had a desire to write a certain kind of science fiction film," Garland says. "I wanted to explore the idea of man traveling into deep space and what he discovers there, as well as what he finds in his own subconscious. I had been looking for a storyline to hang this idea on when I read an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based atheistic perspective. It contained theories on when the Sun would die and what would actually happen when it eventually did. Man needs the Sun’s energy to survive and when that energy runs out it will lead to man’s extinction. What I found interesting about that was that it is easy to speculate about the potential end of mankind, but what if it was a certainty within our lifetime. What interested me was the idea that it could get to a point when the entire planet’s survival rests on the shoulders of one man, and what that would do to his head. That became a trigger point for the story." Eight months later Garland arranged to meet director Danny Boyle in a West End pub and gave him the first draft of his script to read. Boyle called Garland the next day enthusing that they should go ahead and make the film. "What I love about Alex’s work is he has these big ideas," explains Boyle. "The British film industry tends to make quite small films, but Alex’s writing always contains these massive ideas and concepts, which is wonderful, though complex to finance and realize." For producer Macdonald, Garland’s script was a real page-turner. "I think Alex writes tremendously visually, and, unlike a lot of scripts you read, "Sunshine" has got a driving narrative that really pulls you along. Some scripts are quite academic and hard work but with Alex’s scripts you can easily visualize the story as you read it." The trio of Boyle, Macdonald and Garland had previously teamed up for Fox Searchlight’s 2003 smash hit "28 Days Later". "We share a love of certain types of films, but we all have our own opinions of how they should play out, which I think makes the relationships stronger,” says Macdonald. “One of the key things is that Alex is very much the writer and Danny is very much the director and they both have very strong voices. My job is to help them realize what is in their imaginations, while at the same time balancing that with the practical realities of making a successful film." "I think we are all very ambitious people but for some reason when we get together we abandon our egos," Boyle notes. "I kick into the script and Alex kicks into the film and we are quite blunt and honest with each other and that helps the process enormously." Boyle was drawn to both the Icarus II’s literal voyage to the Sun as well as its crew’s psychological journey as they head out across the cosmos. "Traveling to the Sun is great visually, but also very interesting psychologically," he explains. "We wanted to make the film as psychological a journey as possible. There is the question about what happens to your mind when you meet the creator of all things in the universe, which for some people is a spiritual, religious idea, but for other people it is a purely scientific idea. We are all made up of particles of exploded star, so what would it be like to get close to the Sun, the star from which all the life in our solar system comes from? I thought it would be a huge mental challenge to try and capture that." In their desire to present, on screen, a believable space mission rather than a piece of science fantasy, the filmmakers looked first to NASA in their research, watching numerous space documentaries as well as classic science fiction films, and meeting with as many scientists and astronauts as possible. Macdonald had seen the young British physicist Dr. Brian Cox on a BBC TV program and contacted him with a view to discussing the project. Thereafter Cox, who works at CERN [the Centre for European Nuclear Research], the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, joined the production as scientific consultant, and his input was to prove invaluable. On hand to give the cast and crew a better understanding of the Solar system, he also worked intensively with Cillian Murphy, who plays Capa, the ship’s Physicist. "The science is extremely sound in the film," explains Cox. "You can tell Alex is a fan of science as well as a science fiction fan. There were a few edges we ironed out but basically it was the back story rather than the plot that my expertise was needed for." Adds Boyle, "You become obsessed with the accuracy of the science and you do try to obey the rules of physics and make it as real as possible, but in the end you have to abandon certain elements and just go for what is dramatically effective." In line with social and economic predictions regarding the continued growth of China as a global superpower, the filmmakers concluded that any future space mission would include a significant Asian contingent. "The film has an American/Asian crew because we felt that in 50 years time the Chinese and American space programs would be the most developed and that they would have the economic power to bankroll such an endeavor," says Boyle. "But ideally we were looking for actors from all around the world." Auditions were held in Los Angeles, New York and London, with Boyle eventually bringing together an impressive international cast, with actors hailing from America, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Britain. The Verdict "I was thinking right up to the last 8 - 10 minutes that I would be pretty generous with my rating of Danny Boyle's latest film, "Sunshine". In those few minutes of the final act, at the culmination of what had been a very exciting journey with the crew of the Icarus II, everything suddenly went right off the rails. It was as if everyone involved with what had so far proved to be a most rewarding experience suddenly reached for the 'stupid pills'. I mean, why do such a wonderful job and then derail yourselves. Did they suddenly get overcome with their own self importance, creativity or something else, to go flying off the tracks like a derailed train hurtling into a messy end? It's enough to make you want to give them one heck of a bitch slapping. Come on you guys, did you really think audiences would accept such a stupid premiss. If you did then it shows how out of touch you were! Look: great special effects; hardly noticed it was Rose Byrne (she finally gives a good performance); the sun images are awesome; the spacecraft proved totally convincing and 95% of the storyline had me sucked in. Really worth seeing as it is exceptionally well done. Highly recommended. Take off 1/2 a mark and "Sunshine" gets a well deserved 3 1/2 STARS." Cast & Crew Bytes "SUNSHINE" stars .......
Cillian Murphy ["Batman Begins", "Red Eye", "Breakfast on Pluto" and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley"]; Rose Byrne ["I Capture the Castle", "The Night We Called It a Day", "Wicker Park" and "Marie Antoinette"]; Chris Evans ["The Perfect Score", "Cellular", "Fantastic Four" and "TMNT"]; Troy Garity ["Bandits", "Barbershop", "Barbershop 2: Back in Business" and "After the Sunset"]; Cliff Curtis ["Collateral Damage", "Whale Rider", "River Queen" and "The Fountain"]; Hiroyuki Sanada ["Ringu", "Ringu 2", "The Last Samurai" and "The White Countess"]; Mark Strong ["Sunshine", "Revolver", "Syriana" and "Tristan & Isolde"]; Benedict Wong ["Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang)", "Dirty Pretty Things" and "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"] and Michelle Yeoh ["The Soong Sisters", "Moonlight Express", "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Memoirs of a Geisha"] as Corazon.
"SUNSHINE" was .......
directed by Danny Boyle ["Trainspotting", "The Beach", "28 Days Later" and "Millions"]; screenplay by Alex Garland ["The Beach" and "28 Days Later"]; production design by Mark Tildesley ["Insomnia", "24 Hour Party People", "Millions" and "The Constant Gardener"]; costume design by Suttirat Anne Larlarb ["Garfield: The Movie", "Alfie", "The Skeleton Key" and "The Namesake"]; cinematography by Alwin H Kuchler ["Heartlands", "Code 46" and "Proof"]; edited by Chris Gill ["28 Days Later", "Millions" and "The Dark"] and produced by Andrew Macdonald ["Trainspotting", "Beautiful Creatures", "Strictly Sinatra", "The Last King of Scotland" and "Notes on a Scandal"]. Run Time 107 minutes Rated M [AUST] Copyright ©2007 - Fox Searchlight Pictures - All Rights Reserved ©2007 All Rights Reserved - Protected by Australian & International Copyright. Trademark Laws Apply.