Left Field Cinema

WARNING: Contains spoilers for both films.

It is important to clarify that Danny Boyle’s new film Sunshine is a highly derivative piece of modern cinema. No one can deny this fact. Depending on your view point the film either “bumps” into other films of the same narrow sub genre, nods to those that have come before it, or simply plagiarises some of the best science fiction films ever made. Each argument can be successfully made by anyone with a knowledge of cinema or who have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris (Tarkovsky and Soderbergh versions), Event Horizon, and Alien.

The comparisons are frequent and easy, and the line between homage and theft is very thin as any film maker will admit. Danny Boyle takes a different approach, confessing to a heavy Alien influence and lesser influences from Solaris and 2001; any other similarities are a result of the tight confines of this type of film. For the purposes of this episode, the similarities are going to be dismissed. Sunshine probably would not exist were it not for the existence of Alien – but this is not going to factor into the debate. This episode shall simply analyse each film on the contained merits (with obvious exceptions to be made for technical superiority of Sunshine because of the near thirty year advancement of special effects.)

Despite the obvious comparisons, there are vast differences in the plot lines of these films. Alien is a stripped down, incredibly simple story of the crew of the Nostromo, who are prematurely awoken from hyper sleep and sent to investigate an SOS signal from an alien ship. The alien boards the Nostromo and begins killing off the crew one by one as they desperately try to find a way to destroy and later escape the beast. That is almost the entire story of the film. Sunshine however is more complex, the concept can easily be summed up: the crew of the Icarus II are sent to re-ignite our dying sun, the plot however is not so easy to describe. When boiled down to the basics and without considering all of the surrounding achievements in other departments, Alien is essentially a monster film - a glorified B movie when viewed strictly on its plotline. Its greatest strength is simultaneously its greatest weakness: the simplicity of it all. There are no back stories to either the alien or the crew, we don’t know where the alien comes from or how it came to be on the planet and we don’t know anything about the past of the crew members; all we know about anyone or anything in Alien is how they or it reacts to any given situation. This is a strength, because it creates one of the purest examples of minimalist narrative, and a weakness because it appears only surface deep. Feminist and Freudian readings of the film have appeared in news groups and film studies literature for years, however metaphorical theorising about the meaning of Alien is often completely sub textual with no textual grounding for the ideas. The interpretation that Ellen Ripley is being chased around the ship by a giant penis is commonly invoked because of the phallic shape of the alien head; and this sort semiotic reading is easier with Alien because there are no textual counterpoints. However beyond interpretations of this nature, the film is entirely superficial, that is not to imply mediocrity, but there is no direct meaning in this film – hence it is a monster movie at its core. The fact it remains probably the best monster movie to ever be made is what gives Alien its continued and considerable status.

Sunshine by comparison can not be simplified so easily, the premise is singular, its execution is not. Sunshine is simultaneously a snowballing disaster movie, a road movie, a science fiction thriller, a horror movie, and an exercise in existentialism. The entire plot line is propelled by a single choice made by Captain Kaneda, to act on the recommendation of his chief physicist to change their course and head to the Icarus I. This one mistake creates a crisis which leads to another and another, each more deadly than the previous. While Alien is purer than Sunshine in its single mindedness, Sunshine counters it with a wider and more dynamic range of situations for the crew to deal with, and a broader set of genre parameters to explore.

One area that critics of both films have addressed is a lack of character development, neither the crew of the Nostromo, or the Icarus II have a particularly wide arc. But does it matter in films of their nature? Ripley is such a non-descript character that she’s almost androgynous, in an earlier draft of the screenplay Ripley was actually a man, and only later was the character re-written as a woman, but the majority of the changes made to the script in order to encompass the gender switch were merely replaceing “his” with “her” and “he” with “she”. Sunshine’s potential crime is to split the leading man duties, and make it leading men instead with Capa and Mace fighting it out for main character status – with Capa just clinching it by narrating the opening scene, surviving ten minutes longer than Mace and finally completing the mission. The crews are different, different types people, but they fulfill similar roles as the narratives progress. There are no androids hidden in Icarus II, but Ash has some of the same characteristics and character purpose as Captain Pinbacker from Icarus I. The saboteur, the human-like villain who supports the main antagonistic factor. Even some of the criticisms which have been leveled at Sunshine since its release relate to what has been referred to as an “unexpected” shift in the story towards horror, with the arrival of Pinbacker, who then begins killing the crew; this criticism could just as easily be made about Ash who is “unexpectedly” revealed to be an android and also begins attempting to kill the crew. The only real difference is that Pinbacker is more successful than Ash when it comes to killing anyone. There are approximately the same amount of precursors to both revelations; in fact Pinbacker is more appropriate because he continues one of Sunshine’s thematic explorations; Pinbacker represents the extremist theological point of the film, where as Ash is merely a catalyst and a twist.

Captains Dallas and Kaneda are present for two reasons: Dallas is played by Tom Skerritt who at the time was the most famous of the cast and had top billing over Sigourney Weaver; his demise in the second act of Alien was designed to shock and show the audience that no one is safe. The second reason is to prematurely remove the key authority figure and allow the hero to rise; this reason is shared by Kaneda’s death as it allows both Capa and Mace to rise up to the occasion.

Other characters also share similarities with their counterparts, Lambert reacts in panic and fear, Harvey reacts in panic and is a coward. However most of the characters in Alien are not reflected in their Sunshine equivalents: The closest to Kane would be Dr. Searle but where Kane dies involuntarily from his curiosity, Searle chooses his way to perish. No one from the Icarus II is as head strong as the Nostromo’s Parker, or as indifferent as Brett (not that Brett really has much chance to be anything other than indifferent.) Likewise no one from the Nostromo is as guilty minded as Icarus II’s Trey, or as ethical as Callie. The main reason for the lack of comparable crew in these situations is because despite resounding similarities in size of cast and type of location - the story of Alien is completely different to Sunshine.

In terms of performance, both films are strong, Alien is more naturalistic with large conversations involving many of the crew, with characters stumbling and muttering over each other, Parker, Lambert and Ripley show the most emotion in the film. In particular being overwhelmed by the revelation of the company complicity in trying to bring back the alien for further study, sacrificing the crew in the process. Weaver’s performance is very strong; it is also incomparable with any performance moment from Sunshine because there is no situation of that nature present in the film.

In camera work Sunshine is entirely appropriate to the film, as it is in Alien. It is probably worth mentioning that the themes of the films are so vastly different that camera work and music in particular are not worth comparing. The antagonist of Sunshine is the sun, and the crew is seeking it out, in Alien the antagonist is forced upon a crew who don’t even know of its existence. The stakes are higher in Sunshine; the crew are going to save the world on an almost certainly doomed mission, in Alien the crew are simply returning home from a routine mining mission when disaster strikes. One film is about saving the crew, the other is about saving humanity. The music as expected is appropriate to each film, Jerry Goldsmiths simple and sinister tones perfectly adds to the tension of the piece, John Murphy and Underworld’s epic score just as perfectly adds a sense of importance to Kaneda’s death scenes or Capa’s jump between the separating sections of Icuras II. The same is true of the films editing, building tension as Dallas searches around darken tunnels and the motion sensor shows the Alien approaching, and equally appropriate for the descending sanity as the boundaries of reality come crumbling down for Sunshine’s crucial final reel. Neither film is particularly innovative in its edit, perhaps only Sunshine’s freeze frame technique is a new addition, but a rather bespoke one with the awkward side effect of making the viewer believe their DVD player is broken when watching for the first time on that particular medium. Also to the credit of Alien the design department made massive innovations, using H.R. Giger ideas for the titular alien, and making something completely unique from all the previous types of aliens that have ever been presented in film. With a title which is particularly definitive in this area, Alien manages to create the definitive alien, something completely otherworldly and like nothing that had ever been seen before. The interior design for the ship and the costumes for the crew were also a different direction than previous science fiction outings, giving the crew and ship a more realistic feel and invoking an image of mechanics in space rather than astronauts. Sunshine’s main innovation come in form of heart-stopping spectacle and greater sense of perspective as they approach the source all life, from the moment we see Mercury orbiting the sun to the final seconds of the mission as the payload plummets into the surface of the sun – the imagery is staggering and the sense of scale is enormous.

Alien doesn’t diminish on the small screen, it’s not like 2001, spectacle is not the films selling point, terror is. Perhaps the film improves on being watched at home, alone, rather than in a crowded and normally safe environment of the cinema. The exact opposite is true of Sunshine, given its epic status, and the visual/audio tapestry which Boyle and crew created, Sunshine was most certainly designed for the big screen and is one of the best examples of this in recent memory.

Perhaps the bar was raised with 2001, then challenged by Solaris, cleared by Alien, mishandled by Event Horizon, Mission to Mars and Red Planet, then challenged again by Solaris only finally to be cleared by Sunshine. Or perhaps to compare any of these films is unfair and unjust. Alien and Sunshine have as much content to distinguish them as they have common ground, and Boyle’s admission of heavy influence is only in terms of character and location set-up, and other similarities are superficial for the most part; ultimately when examined on their themes and story the films are fundamentally different. Perhaps Sunshine should be the last film of its kind, and the book should be closed on this particular genre for a few years.

The comparisons of these films will not end here and this article only scratches the surface in many respects. The best advice on these films is probably not to compare them, they suffer from similar faults and this is where they are closest in many ways.

Sunshine takes as much influence from Alien, as Alien does from 2001, as Soderbergh’s Solaris takes from Tarkovsky’s Solaris. They’re a family of films in many ways and should probably be viewed as relatives rather than competitors. In no sense is Sunshine attempting to out do Alien, and nor should it as they’re not heading to the same destination.

M.Dawson