The real subject of the film is mortality—its inevitability and its shockingness—and for that purpose seeing the young and vital bite it is much more powerful anyway. The film’s freshness comes from establishing a scenario in which the characters’ deaths are inevitable, their lives expendable, and then, unlike so much recent sci-fi adventure, not flinching from that setup. As every character’s death becomes more and more of a foregone conclusion, the stakes become how they will die—heroically or indignantly or in horrible suffering or, usually, in ways that combine two or three of those things at once. Characters are incinerated by the sun and frozen in the vacuum of space, they are slashed and impaled and crushed, they face asphyxiation and hypothermia and insanity, and they do it all 93 million miles away from a home that’s a dying planet anyway, while orbiting an impossibly giant ball of fusioning hellscape.
Every death is inevitable; most fiction lets us forget that by providing an arbitrary end point beyond which a character need only survive in order essentially to live forever. Aside from being simply thrilling and beautiful to look at, Sunshine gets its power by reminding us of that fact. You walk away from the movie with a sense of your own mortality that’s not only heightened but also elaborated, a consciousness of the infinite possibilities for extravagant suffering and irreparable harm that lurk just beyond the safety caps of our everyday existence, and that are bound to be visited on all of us sooner or later. But you walk away, too, with a deepened sense of what it might mean to give meaning to that death—that the ultimate act of sacrifice can’t be to give up one’s life so that someone else can live, because everyone dies and, as Derrida (roughly) said, no one can die in my place. Rather, the ultimate reality of heroism—if that means anything—is to suffer, to suffer greatly and potentially without limit, for the sake of a good that you yourself will never see.
