Millions of miles from Earth, a spaceship receives a distress call—so its crew changes course to investigate. Disaster follows. That’s famously the set-up for Alien, but it’s used often in sci-fi stories, including 1997’s Event Horizon and 2007’s Sunshine.
Sunshine’s been in the news since director Danny Boyle revealed he’d originally hoped it would kick off a trilogy; that never happened, because like Event Horizon, it flopped at the box office. But both Sunshine and Event Horizon have since earned new appreciation, and they share enough similarities to make for an excellent sci-fi horror double feature.
Both films riff on that Alien “mysterious transmission” as a plot turning point; both films take place in the not-so-distant future (Event Horizon is set in 2047; Sunshine in 2057). Both films take place in uncomfortable realms of our solar system, with Event Horizon in Neptune’s orbit and Sunshine near the surface of the sun. Both films discover the distress call is coming from a ship everyone back on Earth thought had been lost; in Event Horizon, it’s the titular vessel, while Sunshine’s Icarus II discovers its predecessor, the Icarus.
Further, both films feature characters who transform from regular (if eccentric) men into outrageously evil, scenery-devouring villains. And both films feature ridiculously good casts, including those far-out space nuts: Event Horizon’s Sam Neill, and Sunshine’s Mark Strong.
But there are some key differences too. While the weary crew aboard the search and rescue vessel Lewis and Clarke in Event Horizon is on a top-secret mission, chasing down the long-missing title ship, the Icarus crew in Sunshine is on the most high-profile assignment of all time: launching a gigantic payload into the dying sun, hoping to reignite it and save everyone back home from a frozen death.
Scientists and astronauts trying to save the planet from certain apocalypse was a trendy theme around 20 to 25 years ago. The Core came out in 2003 and concerns the frantic quest to drill into the center of the flailing Earth and restore the rotation of the core. A few years earlier, we had the battle of the asteroid movies in Deep Impact and Armageddon. But Sunshine, whose central conflict evokes elements of 1961 Twilight Zone episode “The Midnight Sun,” takes itself more seriously than your average doomsday tale.
At the very start of Sunshine, we learn—thanks to a voice-over from Cillian Murphy as Icarus II physicist Capa, a guy dealing with a bomb poised to alter humankind even more than Oppenheimer’s did—that the previous mission went missing seven years ago. Capa and company have been in transit now for over a year, and they’re closing in on the make-or-break moment to prevent all-out extinction.
Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland carefully seed the early part of the story with hints of the terrors to come. Naming the ships Icarus and Icarus II is a bit heavy-handed—flying too close to the sun and all that—but the mood aboard Capa’s ship is generally peaceful at first. Sure, the ship’s doctor, Searle (Cliff Curtis), is a little too obsessed with staring at the sun, and sure, the engineer, Mace (Chris Evans), is a bit hot-tempered. But even as the mission cruises into the “Dead Zone” that’ll cut off all external communications, things seem to be going surprisingly well.
Until, of course, they pass Mercury and pick up a garbled transmission from the Icarus, somehow still functioning all these years later. The debate over whether or not any crew is alive to be rescued—a cause felt more deeply by certain crew members than others—becomes a moot point when Capa decides a detour is well worth it to pick up the Icarus’ abandoned payload. Their mission is the very last chance to save Earth, so if they can have two bombs at the ready, that makes the potential for success even greater.
Adjusting their trajectory, however, sets off a domino effect of disasters for Icarus II, swiftly imperiling the most important space mission ever—and that’s before they encounter the surprise human element that’ll further seal their doom.
While Sunshine’s approach to science may not be entirely fact-based, Event Horizon goes full fantastical once things start to go off the rails. We need the sun to survive, but it’s also frightening for a lot of reasons, all of them natural. It’s hot! It’s fiery! It’ll burn you to a crisp!
Event Horizon, on the other hand, imagines that a black hole could force a wayward ship into hell—then spit it back out into our dimension with full sentience and an urge to mentally and physically torture anyone who dares step aboard.
Dr. Weir on his downward spiral in ‘Event Horizon.’ © Paramount PicturesIt’s a decidedly operatic idea and the production design backs that up, imagining a spaceship that pulls not just from H.R. Giger (an Alien hat-tip there), but also Hieronymus Bosch and Hellraiser. The Icarus ships are far more utilitarian (and while the AI on Icarus II sometimes goes against the crew, it’s always very polite about it), but they do have a key added feature: an observation room that allows crew to admire their irradiated destination with the help of carefully calibrated safety filters.
It’s there that the madness of Strong’s character, Icarus captain Pinbacker (a John Carpenter Dark Star hat-tip there), takes hold. Since we don’t really meet him before he’s become a raving, solar-mangled mix of evangelist and Freddy Krueger, we can’t say if his mind was in a good place before he headed into space. In Event Horizon, we get a meaty foreshadowing that Sam Neill’s character, Dr. Weir, is dealing with PTSD following his wife’s death by suicide—and we get a front-row seat to his complete unraveling.
However, the biggest contrast between these self-mutilated monster men is perhaps their ultimate intentions. Dr. Weir’s consciousness becomes entwined with the cursed ship he designed, and he’s determined to drag the Lewis and Clarke crew to hell with him.
That’s entirely freaky, but Pinbacker’s twisted motivation is possibly worse. He believes that the sun dying is part of God’s plan to end humanity. He’s also come to believe that God speaks directly to him, and that none of what God has set in motion should be challenged or altered.
“He told me to take us all to heaven!” he insists, explaining why he sabotaged the Icarus and why he’s determined to do the same to the Icarus II—ensuring certain death for everyone back on Earth. It’s a lot of heaven talk for such a diabolical man, as the flames from the sun’s surface loom ever closer.
Against all odds, both Event Horizon and Sunshine find their way to—not happy endings, but something resembling hope. Event Horizon bids farewell to Dr. Weir and the haunted vessel, but lets a couple of shell-shocked characters survive. In Sunshine, all the space travelers perish, but it’s implied a successful detonation has indeed kick-started the sun, and that Earth will be saved.
For years, filmmakers even beyond original director Paul W.S. Anderson have talked about digging deeper into Event Horizon’s world. Fans may never get to feast upon the film’s legendary lost scenes, supposedly excised for being too extreme, but prequels, sequels, and most recently a TV series have been floated as potential projects.
As for Sunshine, Boyle’s recent mention of a trilogy came as a surprise. He didn’t give any details beyond noting that screenwriter Alex Garland’s ideas were “interplanetary” and “extraordinary,” which intriguingly suggests they went way beyond the most obvious add-ons: a prequel following Pinbacker and his crew, or a sequel that sees the Earth bounce back from solar winter. (We’d still eagerly watch either of those, however.)
We may never get more Event Horizon or Sunshine. But both films as they are make for extremely entertaining sci-fi viewing—and you can rest assured, there’ll always be new stories about interstellar travelers picking up distress calls and flying straight into more deep-space mayhem.
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