A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Even though it’s set in space, Sunshine is the quintessential man-versus-nature story; the sun is fading out, and if humanity doesn’t restore it to its former brilliance, every living thing on Earth will freeze to death. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn’t seem to realize this, because they added a superfluous (and very poorly executed) psycho killer storyline to the second half of the movie. Even more absurdly, the psycho killer is the captain of the first mission to restore the sun. He went nuts and killed his entire crew, and now he’s determined the stop the second mission too. Why? Heck if I know. There’s some confusing and badly-written dialogue in which he says he’s been talking to God, and I guess the idea is that he thinks God told him to make sure the human race finishes dying, but his reasoning (if you can call it that) is never adequately explained.

While I watched the once-promising story fall apart, I got to wondering. Was the first mission’s captain always a nutjob, and did he sign up for the mission (and somehow slip through what must have been endless rounds of psych evaluation) specifically to sabotage it? Or did something about the long journey through space drive him mad? I guess the former scenario is kind of interesting in an abstract, intellectual sense, but it has little direct relevance to the second mission, and the second mission is what Sunshine is about. The latter possibility, though, is never explored, and while it could have added some tension by making us wonder who else might go crazy, it really wouldn’t work that well, because people have had plenty of experience with long, lonely missions — on submarines, in Antarctica, and so on.

I can just imagine the story meetings that led to the addition of the nutjob captain; somebody must have been afraid that the story didn’t have enough conflict to fuel a whole movie. After all, if the stakes are “drop a bomb into the sun and save humanity… or don’t”, well, what sane person is going to choose “don’t”? There doesn’t seem to be enough conflict inherent in the choice unless you do add a psycho killer. But that argument misses the whole point of man-vs-nature conflicts; the question isn’t so much whether the characters should do whatever they’re trying to do, it’s whether they can. Flying right up to the sun and surviving long enough to drop a bomb on precisely the right spot is the mother of all impossible tasks, so there’s plenty of conflict inherent in the story — between the crew and the sun, between the ship and the sun, between the crew and the ship, and between different crew members who disagree about how to successfully execute the mission. But here’s an idea: if the filmmakers really wanted an extra layer of conflict, why not have the first mission discover that there’s intelligent life in the sun (of a very different sort than we’re familiar with, of course) and that setting off the bomb will save the inhabitants of the Earth.. and exterminate the denizens of the sun? That would be a heck of a moral dilemma, and it would create a ton of conflict — more than enough for three whole acts.