RADIATING ENERGY SCI-FI THRILLER ABOUT DYING SUN A BRIGHT ADDITION TO FILMMAKER BOYLE'S BODY OF WORK.

Byline: GLENN WHIPP 

>FILM WRITER

The sun has inspired religions (Ra), artists (Monet's obsession with light) and musicians (the lullaby "You Are My Sunshine" is one of the first songs we learn), not to mention your ordinary, everyday awe, but our solar system's center has been strangely absent from movies.

Part of that has been practical. Easy enough to make a model of the lifeless moon, but representing the violent energy and radiant glory of the powerhouse sun is a far trickier matter, even with CGI.

"There was that bit in 'Lost in Space,' where they flew by the sun and said, 'Whew, boy that was hot,' and then sped away," says filmmaker Danny Boyle. "But other than that, nothing, which is strange since the sun is such a part of our DNA."

Leave it to Boyle, the director whose diverse resume includes zombies ("28 Days Later"), junkies ("Trainspotting") and saint-obsessed children ("Millions"), to break new ground with his latest, the old-school, sci-fi thriller "Sunshine," opening today.

Set in 2057, "Sunshine" turns the idea of global warming on its head.

In this future, the sun is dying and the crew of a space ship must reignite it -- with a nuclear payload -- or Earth will freeze.

(There's already snow on the roof of the Sydney Opera House.)

The modestly budgeted movie's premise sounds straight out of "The Core," but Boyle and his frequent writing collaborator Alex Garland ("The Beach"), mix in a distress call that complicates the main mission and sends the movie into tense, existentialist territory.

The presence of actual ideas makes the smart, scary "Sunshine" a summertime anomaly, the anti-"Fantastic Four," if you will.

But don't take that from us. Listen to a guy who's in both movies.

"Well, you definitely won't see ads for 'Sunshine' in your local 7-Eleven," says Chris Evans, "Four's" Human Torch and "Sunshine's" morally uncomplicated engineer.

"You might have a hard time becoming invested with 'Sunshine' if you don't like the genre," Evans says. "I always tell people to be ready to watch it twice."

While the movie contains plenty of sci-fi action, space walks and a "Ten Little Indians" approach to cast-size reduction, its solar-powered heart is a science-vs.-God debate captured in the psychological relationship each crew member has with the sun.

For some, the sun is creator; for others, facilitator.

"As they get closer, the proximity messes with their sanity," Boyle, 50, says. "And that's great because, to me, all great science fiction is about the mind. And here you've got a crew wanting to play God and explode a bomb inside the sun -- the ultimate nuclear explosion at the source of life -- defiant in their belief they can change the universe. But it can't be that simple, can it?"

Filming the $40 million "Sunshine" certainly wasn't simple, with Boyle doing his best to resist the space movie conventions, sometimes succeeding (the astronauts' helmet design), sometimes giving in.

The challenges were sometimes wearing. When asked during the shoot what item he'd bring into space, Boyle dryly replied, "A noose."

"And that answer came on a good day," the affable Boyle says, laughing. "There's a reason the great directors make one space movie and then never go back."

Those directors, the men responsible for what Boyle calls "the three titans" of the genre -- "2001," "Solaris" and "Alien" -- gave Boyle plenty to think about while making "Sunshine."

"You can feel their presence in every shot, every design meeting," Boyle says. "It's a pretty narrow genre -- 'a crew trapped inside a steel tube gets a distress signal and it changes everything.' We'll have that basic premise until we colonize another planet.

"You can't avoid the past, which is awful on one level and wonderful on another," he adds. "Awful for the comparisons, but, to know that Kubrick had meetings about the space suit and helmet and weightlessness -- that's nice company to be in."

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com

Hot topic: 'There is no sex in space'

"Sunshine" follows the rules of classic, suffocating sci-fi movies like "Alien" and "Solaris" by what it includes -- as well as what it leaves out.

Namely -- sex.

"There is no sex in space," says Troy Garity, who plays the ship's communication officer in the movie. "That's something we talked about quite a bit, actually. You never see sex in these movies."

"Sunshine" director Danny Boyle consulted a number of physicists, engineers and NASA types to get the movie's science down. Garity says they were usually less interested in life on Mars than the idea of intergalactic intercourse.

"They couldn't stop talking about this Russian cosmonaut who supposedly had sex in space," Garity says. "They were obsessed with her."

That cosmonaut -- Svetlana Savitskaya -- became the second woman in space in 1982, when she and two male cosmonauts flew Soyuz T-7 to dock with the Salyut 7 space station.

Two years later, Savitskaya was back at Salyut 7, becoming the first woman to walk in space.

But what Savitskaya is remembered for -- at least among Western science geeks, apparently -- is the completely unsubstantiated rumor that, during the 1982 mission, she had sex with her mission's two male cosmonauts as part of a Soviet scheme to conceive a child in space.

"Do I believe it?" Boyle deliberates. "Well, I believe that affairs of the heart are best accompanied by a little mystery, don't you think?"

>G.W.

Boyle's inspiration>

Does "Sunshine" fill you with a sense of deja vu?

Director Danny Boyle salutes his influences:

>"Alien": "I remember being in Britain, reading about this exotic place, Los Angeles, where they had to keep ambulances waiting outside the theaters where they screened 'Alien.'

"Of course, that was just good publicity, but seeing the movie, you could believe in the idea. I remember absolutely jumping and screaming in my seat. That was back when there wasn't so much information about movies, so I had no idea what was coming. And the ensemble acting -- it's as fine a cast as you'll ever see."

>"Solaris": "That's the big one. (Andrei) Tarkovsky had no money or means to show anything outside the ship, but he had this extraordinary idea that the planet can read your mind and give you anything you desire. I don't know what they were on in the '60s, but it can't just be the drugs. Because we still have drugs, but we don't have movies like this. Maybe the base level is so high now."

>"Das Boot": "The classic example of having this crew of people living inside a metal tube, totally at the mercy at the forces beyond their walls."

>"South Park": "One of the things that's different about 'Sunshine' is the helmet. It sounds small, but the helmet design is a massive part of doing a space movie. And most of the time, they have these (foolish) big- portal helmets so the studio execs can tell the actors apart.

Thanks, partly, to Kenny from 'South Park' we went with a helmet that has just a slit for visibility. It made the actors crazy with claustrophobia, which was great for the movie. And if people think of Kenny's hood, I love it. I call it 'the Kenny enigma.' "

>G.W.

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, 2 boxes

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) SHEDDING LIGHT ON 'SUNSHINE'

Getting into the mind of director Danny Boyle

(2) Danny Boyle, director of "Sunshine," pictured at right

(3) The cramped conditions of space travel -- and how it affects the crew -- are a major theme of "Sunshine."

(4) Things get predictibly hot for Michelle Yeoh in "Sunshine," which follows a mission to save the sun from flaming out.

(5) Things don't look good at all for Harry Dean Stanton's character in "Alien."

(6) "South Park's" Kenny inspired the "Sunshine" space helmets.

Box:

(1) Hot topic: 'There is no sex in space (see text)

(2) Boyle's inspiration> (see text)