The sun will die, our world will die, our race will die, and everything that matters so intensely to us now will in a sense come to naught. In that sense, there is no final “saving” of humanity, any more than a doctor or fireman definitively “saves” the life of one who will inexorably someday be a corpse. In the end, the sun is as mortal as our race and our world. Yet an existential bleakness leaps beyond these vagaries to the final inevitability. It may or may not happen tomorrow: An inexplicably barren world could at last produce a miracle child, and a desperate mission to jump-start a dying sun may or may not be successful. Here, the extinction of man looms not so much as a threat to be averted as an inevitable reality, possibly to be resisted, but ultimately to be accepted and lived with. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine - following last year’s Children of Men, a similarly downbeat, stylish, middlebrow sci‑fi film from a non-Hollywood director - is haunted by the shadow of the mortality not of each human being but of mankind as a whole.
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