5 Reasons Why Danny Boyle's Sunshine Is Still A Stellar Film

3. The Tense Environment

While the prospect of gliding around in spacesuits seems promising at first glance, the film goes to show that they prove to be the most dangerous gamble when trying to make repairs. But the spacesuits aren't the only danger lurking around in "Sunshine". In fact, the environment as a whole as an everlasting effect on how key events play out in the film.

One of the most familiar aspects of a disaster film that involves saving the world on a spaceship is that something always tends to get broken. It's an easy way of ratcheting up the plot and tension, and puts the entirety of what's at stake at jeopardy. "Sunshine" is has its fair share of moments, and quite early on as a matter of fact. One such event involving the use of the aforementioned spacesuits has one of the crew mates making a slight miscalculation of trajectory with their solar shield, which protects them from the intense heat of the sun. Due to this small but disastrous mistake, the shield ends up damaged and must be repaired manually. So two members of the crew, Capa and Kaneda, don the suits and travel into the outer reaches of space to risk their own lives for the better part of mankind. Things don't go according to plan, and Kaneda meets an unfortunate fate by the flares of the sun.

Another incident involves the loss of their oxygen garden for which another crew member, Corazon, is mainly responsible for. During the damaging of the shield, the heat of the sun manages to sneak past the shield and on to the Icarus itself, laying waste to whatever it touches. They lose their communications (which they could probably live without) and their oxygen garden (which they most certainly can't live without). This untimely event sets up a persisting danger throughout the rest of the film, where a very limited amount of oxygen is left for the crew mates to breathe. Disaster scenario 101: always have a back-up plan in case main source of oxygen is cut off. The environment for which these people are in is all part of the grand setup behind the peril of the film. The fragility of the Icarus II makes even the slightest of touches in engineering turn it into a doomsday device. Accepting the fact that these brave men and women knew what they got themselves into requires the highest level of patience, fortitude, and mental sanity to survive. They must have also been confident enough that they could fix any situation that presented itself, labeling them as the best of the best. But what really makes the environment an enemy of the film is the idea of containment. One major theme of the film is isolation, with each crew mate somehow being in an area that looks and feels so crammed that claustrophobia is only mere seconds away. Being locked inside a spacesuit with a limited amount of air. Walking down miniature corridors for several meters without doors or windows. Sitting inside small cubicles, sending video messages back to Earth. Even having Capa toil around with payload in this vast open area with only your echoing voice, talking to a computer that runs the ship warrants enough isolation. Even though eight crew members share the same ship still makes it somewhat lonely to be on. Take into account the amount of air they have left to breathe, and you have a linear, concealed cage where the mice have nowhere to go but slowly die off one by one.