For our annual summer countdown, we are looking at our favorite 25 movies that were not huge hits during their initial release, but mean a lot to us. Check out last year’s Summer of Stars countdown or the year before when we did blockbusters! Find the rest of the Flop and Fizzle series here!

by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

“So, if you wake up one morning and it's a particularly beautiful day, you'll know we made it.”

As a lover of sci-fi psychological horror and thrillers set on ships, there’s nothing quite like Danny Boyle’s 2007 film Sunshine. The sun is dying and Icarus II, filled with interpersonal issues, compromised mental capacities, and Cillian Murphy’s super blue eyes, is the only thing that might save humanity. Especially after the Icarus I failed the same mission seven years prior. This is the final attempt to stop the Earth from freezing, which makes it a deeply desperate one.

And this is the kind of story I feel like Danny Boyle thrives at telling. Maybe all his films aren’t “humanity is dying” stories, but almost his entire filmography is made up of stories about desperate people. I just happen to think Sunshine is the best one—and I always have. Unfortunately, I was one of the many people who didn’t see Sunshine in theaters. It’s on our flop list for a reason, after all. However, like many of the films we’ve already written about, and that will be covered later in the month, Sunshine has reached a kind of cult status since its release on home media.

The third film in the Danny Boyle/Alex Garland teamup series, Sunshine was made for around $40 million and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures (a company whose biggest film was still to come from Boyle, himself, in 2008 with Slumdog Millionaire). However, the film only made $32 million during its theatrical run—well below its budget. Which, as many of us know, means it actually lost everybody even more than that, since often reported budgets don’t take into account marketing and distribution costs. 

Before what would undoubtedly be Danny Boyle’s most successful film with Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, his biggest release was The Beach, a Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle from 2000. However, that film wasn’t reviewed particularly well, though it was the beginning of his relationship with Garland. Their next film would be the critically successful, ultra low-budget zombie flick 28 Days Later, which would bring Boyle back into the American public consciousness. But despite all of that, Sunshine seems like it was set up to flop. It was a costly film (post-production took entirely too long by “normal” standards) that had its release date in both the UK and the US moved multiple times. Not to mention that, allegedly, the film was only shown in 10 theaters for its US opening (it went a little bit wider than that later). There was no chance for this film to make it while it was still in theaters—it feels like it was forcibly destined to be a home movie cult classic. 

All that being said, here are some things that make me feral about this film and why I think it works so magnificently. First, I know that Boyle has said he’s done with science-fiction after making this film, but the way he conceptualized shooting and maintaining the atmosphere for the film is supreme. During the main crux of the story, we never really cut back to Earth, despite it being the main driving force of anxiety. He also generally avoids shooting Icarus II from the outside, except when it matters to the plot, making the area that our characters live in feel even more enclosed. Both things really add to the claustrophobic nature of the ship and the mission, and I think it gives us a great understanding of the mental states of everybody onboard. Subconsciously brilliant, and executed in ways many sci-fi filmmakers only dream of in the modern era.

Second, the production design and costuming is god tier level to me. Sci-fi movies like this, the ones that are actively trying to be deeply realistic, are always interested in being as factually accurate as possible. Your mileage may vary with Sunshine (in terms of how much you care about that), but I’ve never found it to be a particularly interesting or important part of these kinds of stories. However, I’m always interested in how that pursuit affects things like production design and costuming. In Sunshine, it looks like the gold-leaf shielding in the film was based off of NASA satellite designs. The design of the ship itself was influenced by a nuclear submarine, with the NASA consultant’s advice that they should have bigger spaces because smaller quarters would affect the sanity of the crewmembers. 

And then, there’s the space suits. Gold with a weird shaped head and a single horizontal slot that would, in context, be there to protect the wearer from radiation and heat (like the gold paneling on the ship), Boyle has said that this design ended up being based off the character Kenny from South Park. Which… is potentially the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Within the film, the image is stark, weird, and unsettling. It rules all the way around.

But besides all of that, the thing I love the absolute most about the film is Garland’s script. Scientifically accurate or not, I think Garland and Boyle have managed to create some of the most interesting characters and dynamics that I’ve thought about constantly since I first saw the film. As the mission starts to fall apart around them, picking them off one-by-one to keep everything going, the crew on Icarus II behave in ways that are honest and true. They are at once doing everything in their power to save humanity but, in equal and interestingly hypocritical measures, being selfish in many of their choices. Sunshine is a film about people desperate to find hope. Hope for humanity or hope for themselves. But it’s about people who realize that often helping humanity, as a whole, is the only way to save their own lives and souls.