Chris Evans and Cillian Murphy’s ‘Sunshine’ Climbs HBO Streaming Charts

When it comes to world-ending cinematic events, the ’90s trained us to only appreciate big-budget spectacles like Deep Impact or Armageddon. Audiences were less interested in character-driven pieces and more excited by witnessing carnage unfold on screen. While those kinds of films are all well and good, the attention these titles earned at the box office meant that other, more sophisticated stories were overlooked, which is exactly the case with director Danny Boyle’s 2007 sci-fi movie Sunshine. Luckily, streaming has proven to be a bit of a salvation for the movie, with enough fans revisiting it for it to become the #6 most popular movie on HBO Max worldwide at the time of this writing.

Whether you already saw the movie or are enjoying it for the first time, one of the most shocking elements of the picture is its cast, which is comprised of a cavalcade of contemporary all-stars. Oscar-winning Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy reunited with Boyle after having been integral to the success of 28 Days Later, and he’s joined by a pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe Chris Evans and a pre-Oscar Michelle Yeoh. Also starring in the movie is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You‘s Rose Byrne, Avatar: The Way of Water‘s Cliff Curtis, Doctor Strange‘s Benedict Wong, and The Imitation Game‘s Mark Strong. Shōgun‘s Hiroyuki Sanada, who has won both Emmy and Golden Globe Awards, also stars in the picture.

A Different Kind of Apocalypse

Written by Alex Garland, on paper, Sunshine doesn’t sound all that unique when it comes to a universal disaster. Set in 2057, scientists determine that the Sun is dying and the Earth is freezing, sparking a mission that sends the world’s best scientists to the Sun in hopes of setting off a bomb inside it that will reignite it.

As you can imagine, things don’t pan out quite the way the crew expected, forcing them to make a number of decisions that might doom their own lives yet be the only way to save the planet and everyone they love. Whether it be mechanical failures, inter-crew conflicts, navigational errors, or existential realizations, the Icarus II sees multiple setbacks.

This movie was far from the first to tackle these concepts, but Sunshine explored many more existential elements of what it means to save the world, if the world is worth saving in the first place, and what the difference really is between being alive and being dead. As Cliff Curtis’s Searle explains to Capa in the face of possible death, “We’re only stardust.”

A Taste of Greatness to Come

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Looking back at the cast list, it’s difficult to deduce which actor has become the most accomplished in the two decades since Sunshine‘s release, and what makes the movie all the more impressive is how it feels like a true ensemble piece, with each performer bringing out the best in one another. Before playing J. Robert Oppenheimer, Murphy plays physicist Robert Capa, with his knowledge of the Sun’s inner workings and the bomb they’re bringing making him the most valuable asset on Icarus II, whether he wants to be or not. Evans, meanwhile, plays engineer James Mace, whose military background causes him to always put the mission before his own safety and livelihood, which are character traits we’d see play out in his Steve Rogers in the MCU.

Boyle had a cult following thanks to his films Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and The Beach, with his first post-Sunshine movie, Slumdog Millionaire, winning him Best Picture and Best Director. That success was followed by 127 Hours, Steve Jobs, and last year’s 28 Years Later. Despite how strong a glimpse Sunshine would be of Boyle’s future, it arguably was a better indicator of the type of pictures Garland would deliver.

After Sunshine, Garland would offer audiences some of the most thought-provoking and ambitious sci-fi stories of the past 15 years. Not only are Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Civil War – all of which were written and directed by Garland – considered genre-defining explorations of alternate realities, but Garland also found the time to develop the TV series Devs on Hulu, whose exploration of AI was just as sophisticated as any of his films.

Sunshine isn’t the first sophisticated sci-fi movie, but with movies like Interstellar, Moon, The Martian, and Arrival all coming in the years after Sunshine, it does feel like it opened the door to a much more thought-provoking sci-fi experience that audiences never knew they needed.