rated R

Anyone who’s ever spent a hot afternoon working in the garden will be perfectly familiar with the dual nature of the Greek sun god Apollo. The very same heat and light that so vitally draws forth grass and trees and delicious zucchinis will just as innocently scorch the flesh right off your back if you give it half a chance. In Greek mythology, Apollo was worshipped as the patron of healing, light and truth. But he was also known as the archer-god of the hunt, whose arrows fell to Earth wreaking inescapable plague, desolation and death. It’s generally a bad idea to screw with Apollo.

It would seem that the writer/director team of Alex Garland and Danny Boyle, who’ve worked together on such diverse fair as “Trainspotting,” “The Beach” and the genre-bending un-zombie flick “28 Days Later,” have clearly been cramming on their Greek mythology. In their new sci-fi thriller, “Sunshine,” our closest and dearest star is presented as a colossal and magnificent god—a roiling, churning behemoth dominating everything in its light. The problem, as defined in the opening lines of the film, is that this all-powerful, life-giving deity is dying, and as its vibrant light begins to wane, the Earth has been cast into perpetual winter. Days of all life as we know it are numbered and dwindling fast.

The science involved here, although intricately detailed and exhaustively explained, is all fiction. Yes, our sun is, in fact, doomed to fail eventually, but probably not for another couple of billion years and change. “Sunshine’s” action takes place a mere 50 years hence, and, as such, the technology and solutions on display are comfortably familiar. There are no “positronic graviton accelerators” or “warp field generators” or “flux capacitors” or any of that kind of nonsense here … just good ol’ nuts and bolts NASA know-how. Turns out, however, when global Armageddon looms, Hollywood would have us believe that the universal Plan A is, naturally, to build the highest-tech vehicle ever, strap onto it the largest explosive device possible and catapult a highly trained group of specialists into the abyss on a suicide mission to blow the problem to hell. Huge asteroid hurtling toward the planet?  Execute Plan A. Earth’s core has stopped spinning? Plan A should do the trick. And what if the Sun is prematurely fizzling out? Well, naturally, Plan A to the rescue. In this case, the theory is that a nuclear weapon, described as literally the size of Manhattan, should be just the thing to reignite the solar body and save the human race.

“Sunshine” does bear some significant differences from its more vacuous “Plan A” predecessors. For one, there’s no Plan B at all. In fact, the crew we follow on the perilously named “Icarus II” spacecraft/payload delivery system is actually a second attempt at Plan A. (If you refer again to your mythology textbook, by the way, you’ll recall Icarus was the crackpot who strapped on a pair of artificial wings and flapped close enough to the sun to forever be remembered only as “that crackpot”). A first Icarus was apparently lost in an initial attempt seven years prior to the film’s setting, and the discovery of its dusty old husk drifting in orbit over the sun’s furious, boiling surface is really just the beginning of the Icarus II crew’s troubles. The conflicts in the first act are studiously mathematical: How long will the oxygen last? How many degrees must the protective heat shields be angled to correct for a course change to investigate the derelict ship? As human error rears its inevitable head, it becomes clear that within all the benefit/liability assessments, the balance of human life is at stake, and the import of all these cold calculations starts hitting home. As 2,010 things start to go wrong, the issues begin to get more intimate, more psychological.

Beyond its silly “Plan A” ethos, however, “Sunshine” begins to reflect some of space film’s heavier hitters, and the film actually does attempt an ambitious exploration of an uncommonly intellectual event horizon. Navigating some of science fiction’s finest themes, Boyle masterfully balances the vastness of space against the depths of the human psyche, the profundity of human emotion against its ultimate insignificance in the endless darkness of the celestial clock. The great seething sphere of the sun is mirrored in innumerable close-ups of the characters’ wide, staring eyes, and viewers get a haunting impression that as they are looking into it, as Nietzsche might say, it is looking into them.

It could be said that the core of filmmaking is really the art of capturing light and using its radiance to illuminate truths we would otherwise not imagine. It’s wholly appropriate, then, that an artist of Boyles’ range should take an opportunity to try some experiments of his own. As the story brings us closer and closer to the sun—and deeper and deeper into the characters’ eroding minds—images begin to blur and shift, colors bleed and saturate. Sharp edges burn away in harsh overexposures that twist and beguile and confuse. As the conclusion draws near, the action becomes uncomfortably visceral. By the last act, just like the remaining crewmembers of the Icarus mission, we are clearly no longer in the same space as we were when we started. Boyles’ uncomfortable turn into the supernatural in the final reel may not be perfectly executed, but it does effectively provide a further illustration of the work’s pervasive dualities.­­ Boyles’ bid to marry so many opposing qualities—light versus dark, mathematics versus emotion, contemplation versus terror—is an ambitious one, to be certain, and succeeds on many levels. Ultimately, however, for all the director’s high-minded efforts, the film burns out as an ill-fated, overcooked space odyssey directly into the heart of loving it versus hating it.