Sunshine: Danny Boyle’s space destroyer looks like an awful lot for an atheist | Science fiction films

Mef you were happy Project Praise Mary but you couldn’t resist its sweet message of interstellar friendship and the indomitable human spirit, then there’s a film from 2007 that might be more accurate: Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which today plays like Project Hail Mary’s older cousin.

The plot of both movies is the same: soon our sun is dying, threatening all life on Earth and prompting a sudden adventure by a bunch of plucky geeks. But while one movie came from the people who made The Lego Movie, the other was made by the blokes who made 28 Days Later.

In Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling plays a team biologist tasked with studying distant stars, where he encounters alien life and learns the true meaning of friendship. In the Sun, the life-or-death mission is very stable and iron-clad. A team of eight astronauts must pilot a star bomb – about the size of Manhattan and containing all the debris of Earth – to the surface of the sun in the hope that it will return to life.

And if naming your spaceship Icarus after the ancient Greek myth that spawned the saying “don’t fly too close to the sun” wasn’t scary enough, this is Icarus II.

The first Icarus spacecraft had launched seven years earlier but failed to deliver its payload, then crashed somewhere near Mercury’s orbit. Now it’s broadcasting a sad signal that the Icarus II team (none of whom have ever seen a science fiction movie) feel obligated to investigate. Their thinking is that, even if the crew of the old ship is dead, they can put its bomb as an aid: “The last two hopes are better than one.”

In Boyle’s eclectic filmography, Sunshine comes between two inspiring stories about young men who have shown themselves with unexpected wealth: Millions of 2004 and Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar winner of 2008. This psychedelic space slasher is similar in spirit to 2000’s The Beach, Boyle’s first collaboration with writer Alex Garland and similarly sun-soaked into madness.

With designs by Mark Tildesly and costumes by Suttirat Anne Larlarb (those brilliant golden costumes are an eternal favorite within the sci-fi canon), Sunshine pays enough respect to the visuals and design to create such masterpieces as Event Horizon, Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, while still giving Boyle enough space.

The interior of the spaceship is shot like a night club and the crew is entering the intercom – further as Cillian Murphy’s astronaut Robert Capa predicts “space and time will be disrupted” – Boyle’s experiments with double exposure, small frames and drag-and-drop architecture (seven years before taking Christopher’s notes).

The film was scored by John Murphy and electronic dance outfit Underworld, whose impressive Born Slippy (Nuxx) contributed to Boyle’s film Trainspotting and arguably became the pinnacle of 90s British club culture.

The Icarus II crew, meanwhile, is a who’s who of genius actors who were put on hold at a time when most companies couldn’t figure out what to do with them. Not only Cillian Murphy (who seems to be the go-to man for the history-changing explosions), but Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong, Hiroyuki Sanada and Captain America himself, Chris Evans – who introduces the film with an indie-mod Mighty Boosh-esque hairdo that looks as badass in 2057 as it did in 2007.

If Project Hail Mary shows science and kindness as the main things to send people to other worlds, then the Sunlight will ensure that when we leave Earth we will be less human. The film begins with psychologist Dr Searle (Cliff Curtis) spending an unhealthy amount of time in the observation room of Icarus II, sunglasses and skin looking crispy, looking deeply into the ethereal mass of a dead star (and 3.1% light – think what 4% can do). Our parents always told us that looking at the sun was bad for our eyes – Sunlight shows that it can be bad for our brains and even our lives.

Garland’s writings often reach this kind of Spielberg style, where worldly revelations are indistinguishable from existential horror. Like his later works Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), which also combined high-tech with old-fashioned schlock, Sunshine plays as the ultimate problem of atheists. Just imagine: you’ve risked your life for science fiction and traveled the bowels of the galaxy, only to find something irresistibly god-like, terrifying, awe-inspiring and unbiased to keep you alive. It is possible that the ancient traditions of sun worship were correct from time immemorial. The sun gives and takes, and if it determines that our numbers are up, what kind of people are we to argue?

• The Sun is available to watch on Stan and Disney+ in Australia and Disney+ in the UK. It is also available to rent or buy on Prime Video and Apple TV in the US. Find out more about what you can follow in Australia here