PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

I was lucky enough to get tickets to the Irish premiere tonight of Sunshine , Danny Boyle’s new sci-fi space movie, written by Alex Garland. To commemorate the event, the IFI organised Danny himself, lead Cillian Murphy and science advisor on the film Dr. Brian Cox for a post screening Q&A.

The cinema was buzzing and the event sold out. the rest of this paragraph removed by request

The film is set 50 years in the future and is something of a cross between Armageddon and Alien. The sun is dying and a crack team of astronauts and scientists have been sent to explode a bomb directly into the sun, in order to cause a chain reaction and light up the earth again.

Whilst the premise is absurd, as Boyle pointed out – there have been very few films made about the sun. This is interesting in a world context where global warming is the topic du jour and society is living in something of a fear of the sun – despite our pathological tendency to worship it as the source of all life.

A series of catastrophes befall the crew as their mission draws toward its climax. A simple mistake whilst changing trajectory causes heat damage to the ship and a mysterious message coming from a ship from a failed mission seven years previous divides the crew in their opinion on how best to complete their task.

Whilst there’s no huge performances, Murphy is solid here as Capa, the physicist hero who must be kept alive at all cost in order to deliver the bomb to the surface of the sun. The other performances are believable and real – the claustrophobia of how it might feel to be a million miles from home flying into doom is adequately portrayed, if a little contrived.

The climax of the movie is more art than adventure, more reflection than action, but a clever Alien style twist three quarters in to provide the drama for the climactic centrepiece was wonderful to watch. The villain of the piece, a crazed astronaut driven crazy in space, was perhaps not used to his full potential, but his presence provides just enough madness to make sure that Capa’s job isn’t quite straightforward.

The Q&A following the screening was prerty standard Q&A fare. The former head of Education and Access with the IFI, Grainne Humphries, currently doing something arty on the Dublin International Film Festival committee led the proceedings with a bunch of stock questions derived from what sounded like a brief conversation she had with Danny before they got up.

He went through the script writing process (35 drafts!) and the process of getting to the central issues. What I liked was his resolution to compete with the greats. He mentioned that the major sci-fi hits of the 70s & 80s set the bar and it was imperative that he “kill to get there”.

Cillian Murphy answered a few stock questions about just how hard it is to move around in a space suit. Most interesting, perhaps, was Dr. Cox (with a name like that…) whose insistence that “we are doomed anyway” was always accompanied by a large grin.

Cox summed up the theme of the film brilliantly – that Capa’s actions and attitude were motivated by scientific awe – a fascination about the universe that almost has a spiritual dimension. It’s that wonder that all true science should be motivated by – even to the point of touching the sun at the moment of death, in order to save the world.