I have known about the 2007 science fiction thriller film Sunshine for years now and always found the premise interesting, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to see it until this October. I had always heard that it was a very divisive movie, with most people having mixed opinions about it and the review scores being middling at best. The only thing that viewers seem to have formed a consensus on is that there is a sudden and jarring tone shift in the last thirty minutes where the film becomes “basically a slasher” out of nowhere. I knew all of those details going into the movie, so I braced myself for an out-of-place genre shift to take place in the final act.
I was surprised to find out that no such tone shift occurred and that Sunshine never once changed its genre or label through the entire film. What seemed so obviously to me to be a cosmic horror piece from the very beginning was taken by general audiences as a more grounded science fiction, even though it never once claimed to be one. I was genuinely baffled coming out of it how everyone who saw this film for nearly two decades at this point had missed this. Maybe it was due to audiences in 2007 not having as much familiarity with the cosmic horror genre, or maybe the film’s advertising gave people a false impression of the tone. Regardless, Sunshine is one of the best pieces of space horror ever made and I highly recommend anyone with an interest in the genre to check it out and ignore the general audience’s opinions.
This is a movie that looks at our own universe and makes the observation that the sun is a vast, unknowable entity that simultaneously gives us life and will destroy us if we look at it too closely. It makes the accurate assessment that it is the closest thing in reality to an outer god like Nyalarthotep or Hastur, and then forces a small group of fragile humans to adapt to its force or die. The final act is just the culmination of this, and a modern adaptation of the classic stories of the cultists who got too close to the entity they worship and were destroyed by it. The constant on-screen distortions and treating or referring to the sun as a “god” throughout the film even by the more scientific-minded characters should have clued more people into this intention, in my opinion, and I hope that it will come to be regarded as a cult classic one day.