20 great movies from the past 20 years: Sunshine

I’m counting down to the 2025 best-of-the-year season by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:

2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing

For my 2007 pick, it’s time for one of the great sci-fi thrillers of the century: Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s Sunshine. The two first collaborated on The Beach, an adaptation of Garland’s novel directed by Boyle, but the duo’s next team-up – 28 Days Later – made an even bigger splash. The two recently teamed up again for 28 Years Later, but in between, a different writer and director worked on 28 Weeks Later. Why didn't Boyle/Garland team up for that one? Well, they were busy making Sunshine. And thank god they were, because the movie rules.

In Sunshine, it’s 2057, and the sun is dying. The Earth has started to freeze, and humanity is trying desperately to reignite the sun by throwing a stellar bomb into it. Seven years ago, the last attempt was lost, and no one knows what happened. This time, a new crew is hoping to get the job done right.

Sunshine has an incredible ensemble cast – Boyle wanted to evoke Alien in the crew make-up – starring Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Cliff Curtis, and Benedict Wong. (I am duty-bound to mention how wonderful it is to see Yeoh and Sanada reuniting after their turn together in the fantastic 1986 Hong Kong action movie Royal Warriors, a personal favorite.) That’s a great place to start any movie, but Sunshine also delivers a tense, scary experience with a mind-bending sci-fi story and plenty of breathtaking visuals.

A long mission on a spaceship is a classic setting for a bad time, but Sunshine stands apart through its unique relationship to belief and what keeps us sane. Some characters find belief in their work: Yeoh’s character is the ship’s biologist, who meticulously takes care of the ship’s oxygen garden. Others find it externally, as the sun looms as a god-like figure – an all-powerful, almost mysterious force that cannot be truly beheld without driving you to madness, but one that also must be saved at all costs. For his part, Murphy said the movie cemented his swap from agnosticism to atheism. 

Sunshine borrows lovingly from many sci-fi classics – Alien, 2001 – before descending into Lovecraftian/Event Horizon-style cosmic horror in the third act. It’s a tense movie in a confined setting that is all about the fragility of life through the danger of space, jam-packed with jaw-dropping, evocative visuals. 

Sunshine didn’t perform well at the box office, and was overly criticized for scientific inaccuracies in a movie about the heat death of the universe. But as famous physicist Brian Cox, who was an advisor on the movie, put it: “Sunshine is not a documentary. It's trying to just, in an hour and forty minutes, get across a feeling of what it's like—not only to be a scientist, because obviously there's much more in it than that. So, I found it interesting to watch the kind of people that get upset because the gravity is wrong."

Film is a medium of atmosphere meant to evoke feelings, not create a perfectly accurate model of how something would happen. Don’t worry about the science: Sunshine is one of the all-time great “space madness” movies, and looks great while doing it. 

Sunshine is streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus.