Bring me Sunshine in your smile

Is it better to tell an original story in an unoriginal way, or vice versa? Put another way, why is Sunshine (out now) quite good when The Core (2003) is utter tosh?

Both movies are based on equally preposterous notions. In the original-yet-unoriginal camp we have The Core, where the earth’s magnetic core stops spinning, leading to impending doom unless our heroes in a revolutionary digging machine can get it going again by a series of nuclear bombs. On the unoriginal-yet-original side is Sunshine, where the sun is about to die out unless our heroes in a ginormous spaceship can get it going again with just one very big bomb. Both play fast and loose with the laws of physics in the interests of a good story, both suffer damage to their respective vessels and loss of crew ...

And yet.

The Core gives us easy-on-the-eye Big Name actors playing an all-American cast, except for the token baddie who is foreign but still played by an American. Sunshine is from Danny Boyle, who did Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, and is not afraid to put the Differently Photogenic on the big screen. I’d only heard of a couple of the actors (Cillian Murphy, from 28 Days Later and Michelle Yeoh, from Crouching Tiger etc.), and they play what is obviously a truly international crew.

The Core plays to the big spectacle with fantastic gratuitous effects. Sunshine’s effects are spectacular but they are only ever used to further the story and there aren’t that many. (Well, not that many big ones, given that every time we get an external shot of the ship that is an effect. But you know what I mean. Or should.)

The Core gives us the full story of the core stopping moving ... somehow without anyone noticing (ask for yourself what would happen to the angular momentum of several trillion tons of molten iron encased in a fragile planetary crust if the iron just stopped). And then we have the recruiting drive, and then we have the fantastic machine, invented overnight. I only saw this on an aeroplane, so I have to take on faith that it also features a scene where Hilary Swank proves her piloting credentials by landing a systems-crashed space shuttle in the Los Angeles drain system; in-flight movies ruthlessly cut out anything that shows something nasty happening to anything that flies, which made the whole movie a little surreal.

In Sunshine, whatever has happened to the sun is never really explained and doesn't need to be. In fact, it’s such old hat that they’ve already been able to launch one failed mission, seven years earlier. The film starts mid-mission.

Ultimately, The Core is a tribute to all-American ingenuity saving the world, while Sunshine is a character study of a group of people gazing into the heart of the abyss. I say abyss, I mean an average sized third generation main sequence G-type star, but the effect is the same.

Those are the obvious strengths of Sunshine. On the debit side, it also steals unashamedly from 2001, Silent Running, Dark Star and Event Horizon, to name but a few, and it is packed full of logical inconsistencies. The ship has a very convincing hydroponics bay, such as a lengthy space voyage would require for O2 generation; the whole design and technology of the ship is obviously meant to be an extrapolation of where we are now, fifty years on; and yet the ship has artificial gravity that keeps working when everything else fails. Oh, and it’s somehow linked to air pressure, as the gravity comes on when the airlock repressurises, following the Moonraker school of space engineering. (Well, that might explain why we on the planet’s surface in a field of 1g experience 1 atmosphere of pressure ... right?) And even though they’ve had years to plan this voyage the only have one of everything: one payload, one mission specialist ...

But by employing better acting, better respect for its audience and overall better construction, Sunshine somehow manages to be the better movie in every way that matters. If it breaks rules, that’s because it knows the rules and knows how they can break. That’s craftsmanship, that is. The Core pays just enough lip service to science fiction to insult the intelligence of everyone watching. Sunshine just doesn't care, and you can respect that.

It’s a little embarrassing to think that if I absolutely had to write one of them – for whatever reason, probably involving lots of money and a gun at my head – I would most likely come up with something like The Core ...