Sunshine (2007) and the rejection of dystopia

Since science fiction’s inception, its themes have always expressed both an awe of technology and fear of it. The Scientific Revolution first broke open the contradictions of a world increasingly dependent on its discoveries while desperately clinging to its superstitions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often credited as the first of its form, and the slew of 19th century works that followed captured the Romantic anxieties toward an Industrial Revolution that was re-making the world in often cold and destructive ways. The theme of alienation did indeed carry on into the 20th century, however its use has not remained static. Reflecting the historical upheavals of its time, the Romantic period molded its parables around Industrialization, while the later Dystopian trend expressed suspicion of the movements for global emancipation. Its cynicism is a precursor to the postmodernist rejection of emancipatory ideologies, and its fear of imposing a rational (read: egalitarian) society on human beings. Its present historical role therefore serves to justify inequality, while under the guise of opposing “totalitarianism.”

If we begin with Frtiz Lang’s Metropolis we must first establish its historical context. As Chris Harman noted:

Yet of all the upheavals after the First World War, it was the events in Germany that prompted British Prime Minister Lloyd George to write:
‘The whole existing order, in its political, social and economic aspects, is questioned by the masses from one end of Europe to another.’
Here was a great revolutionary upheaval in an advanced industrial country--in the heart of Europe. Without an understanding of this defeat, the great barbarisms that swept Europe in the 1930s cannot be understood. The swastika first entered modern history in the uniforms of the German counter-revolutionary troops of 1918 to 1923--and because of the defeat in Germany, Russia fell into the isolation that gave Stalin his road to power.

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the political forces in Germany began to fight over its future following the abdication of the Emperor. The defeat of the socialists emboldened the nationalist militias in what culminated with the Beer Hall Putsch by the Nazi Party in 1923. Lang’s 1926 film is arguably sympathetic to the coup, as it’s filled with “strong fears of economic collapse and Communist revolution.” David Desser goes on to argue in his essay that the film carries “the ideological motifs central to Nazism: anti-urbanism, anti-modernism, anti-communism, and anti-Semitism.” While it is acknowledged that the working class is subjugated, as a whole they’re portrayed as ignorant and easily manipulated into mob violence. Its solution to German anxiety is a handshake of reconciliation. With the head (rational) and the hands (mindless workers) needing to be mediated by the heart (a call to spiritualism). The Nazis too, wanted to reign in big business, while crushing the working class. As Isaac Deutscher described, the fascist:

looked up with envy and hatred to big business, to which he so often helplessly succumbed in competition; and he looked down upon the workers, jealous of their capacity for political and trade union organization and for collective self-defense… At big business the small man shook his fists as if he were a socialist; against the worker he shrilled his bourgeois respectability, his horror of class struggle, his rabid nationalist pride, and his detestation of Marxist internationalism.

American dystopianism was also a reaction against the international socialist movement. In both literature and film, future societies are described as cold and sterile, where decisions are made through calculation, not emotion. While considered “subversive” (which they are, but only in limited ways), the dystopian genre is reactionary liberalism. Because the liberal buys into the idea the competition over resources accurately plays to our true nature, the act of eliminating that through a "rational" society only leads to conformity, numbness, and totalitarianism. What underpins Brave New World is the belief that society will only accept equality if its drugged. On the surface, these stories extol the virtues of “individuality,” but opposed to what? In Huxley’s Revisited we get the tired caricature of communists and conformity, “Throughout the Communist world tens of thousands of these disciplined and devoted young men are being turned out every year from hundreds of conditioning centers.” In STNG, the Borg epitomize McCarthyite stereotypes. Julia Witwer describes the Borg function as “a hive full of pure white ‘worker bodies.’” The Borg Cube is commanded by a “collective” consciousness, as opposed to the regimented command on the Enterprise. The Borg are mindless, efficient, and rational—all supposed “characteristics” of socialism. We are asked to root for Picard’s immense individualism that overcomes the Borg reprogramming. Political cynicism is encouraged every time the Borg pronounce their culture’s superiority by the fact that they’re “equal.” The message is clear: instead of saying that people, free of the constraints imposed by the State, would never accept inequality, they are out to prove the opposite: it would require the deadening of human nature for humans to accept equality. However, Christopher Hitchens nails the hypocrisy:

The enemies of socialism never ceased to sneer about its supposed attachment to regimentation and uniformity, whereas its real history is full of great moments when it actually broke open the “barracks” system of factories and slums, places where humans are actually treated like machines—to say nothing of its opposition to militarism and imperialism, two other features of the old world which involved regimenting and conscripting people while using them as property, or as subjects in grand experiments.

The socialist movement enabled universal suffrage, the imposition of limits upon exploitation, and the independence of colonial and subject populations. Where it succeeded, one can be proud of it. Where it failed—as in the attempt to stop the First World War and later to arrest the growth of fascism—one can honorably regret its failure.

While the 50’s paranoia films were much more blatant examples, its political agenda made it much easier to dismiss. Their reactionary implications do not allow them to stand the test of time. The films are now novelty, their message anachronistic at best. On the other hand, the dystopian stories are continually held up as human nature, its passages readily called upon in times of distress. While their intentions were unmistakably humanitarian, liberalism accepts that economic and social equality go against human nature. And the more we attempt to fight against this “truth,” the more inevitable totalitarianism becomes. For them, what it means to be human is the individual struggle in spite of a solution. It is the compulsion to resist tyranny, but not the possibility. Every attempt at revolution, instead, leads only to conformity and terror.

The main criticism levelled at Danny Boyle's under appreciated film was how much it borrowed from Kubrick's 2001 and Ridley Scott's Alien. However, I'll argue that what sets Sunshine a part from its peers and predecessors, is its decisive break with genre conventions.

Screenwriter Alex Garland made it clear that his story was about atheism. Rather than the Icarus system, or some other technological "Other," it was in fact Man's superstitions made out to be monstrous.

The question the film poses is this: Does mankind deserve to survive, in spite of the wishes of God (or nature)?

In the reality of the film, the universe made its decision. The earth no longer needs to survive, and its power source begins to die off. But because of our technological advances, we've theoretically come up with a way to preserve ourselves for a little while longer. Is it arrogant of us? Are we going against some sort of "plan?"

Icarus 1 huddles together in humility and sacrifices themselves to the Sun, while Pinbacker bides his time, ensuring that God's plan goes through without our meddling. Here, it is human irrationality being posed as the problem, and our ability to understand and act on nature presented as a virtue.

No other visual fleshes this theme out better than Capa's reach for the bomb. Here is Man, caught in between its past and its future, fighting desperately to survive.

While other stories answer the question of what it means to be human with appeals to pre-history, Sunshine answers it this way: what makes us human is our will to survive.


Science fiction is a genre that lends itself to allegory most easily. Its fantastical exaggerations allow enough detachment to see through the purposefully confusing present. But that’s not to say that its conclusions are free from the politics of its time. Capitalism tore down the intellectual authority and dependency on the Church, but because it could not deliver a classes society, illusions were still necessary. The fear of “rationality” is really a fear of human audacity. It dismisses those who believe that it is possible to reign in all of society’s technology and wealth and use it to transform our own nature. There can be no declaration that is universal to the human condition other than change. As Antonio Gramsci put it:

We can see that in putting the question "what is man?" what we mean is: what can man become? That is, can man dominate his own destiny, can he "make himself," can he create his own life? We maintain therefore that man is a process and, more exactly, the process of his actions. If you think about it, the question itself "what is man?" is not an abstract or "objective" question. It is born of our reflection about ourselves and about others, and we want to know, in relation to what we have thought and seen, what we are and what we can become; whether we really are, and if so to what extent, "makers of our own selves," of our life and of our destiny. And we want to know this "today," in the given conditions of today, the conditions of our daily life, not of any life or any man

Capitalist ideology has created a very interesting contradiction—arguing on the one hand that the individual chooses whether he/she succeeds or fails in life, while fervently denying our capacity to collectively choose our future. Everywhere we are urged to buy into the American Dream, and deny the world we actually dream of.

If I were one of the celestial bodies, I would look with complete detachment upon this miserable ball of dust and dirt. I would shine upon the good and the evil alike. But I am a man. World history which to you, dispassionate gobbler of science, to you, book-keeper of eternity, seems only a negligible moment in the balance of time, is to me everything! As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future
-Leon Trotsky