There’s no question that Chris Evans can flex his acting skills across multiple genres. While his role as Steve Rogers/Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe firmly established him as a superhero favorite, he’s also turned in great performances in mysteries like Knives Out, action flicks like The Gray Man, and even lent his voice to animation with Lightyear. But it’s his work in sci-fi that has gone a little underappreciated and now a film he starred in that has largely been forgotten is about to leave Tubi.
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Leaving Tubi this month is Sunshine. Written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, Sunshine stars Evans along with Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, and Michelle Yeoh and follows the crew of a spacecraft on a mission to reignite the dying sun as a global freeze threatens to drive humanity to extinction. The film didn’t perform astoundingly at the box office but did go over well with critics. While it’s been almost 20 years since the film’s release, now is a great time to check it out before it leaves Tubi — especially if you’re a fan of Project Hail Mary.
Sunshine Feels Almost Like a Sequel to Project Hail Mary (Though The Films Are Not Connected)
If you read the description of Sunshine and found yourself thinking that it had a good bit in common with Project Hail Mary, you’re not wrong. In Sunshine, it’s the year 2057 and the sun is actively dying, leaving the Earth to begin freezing. Things have gotten so dire that eight astronauts are sent aboard the starship Icarus II on a mission to set off a bomb that has the intended effect of reigniting the sun and saving humanity. While the reason for the sun’s decline isn’t made clear, the story makes for a perfect companion to Project Hail Mary. In that film, we find out that the sun is dying because of an organism called astrophage and that while the dimming of the sun is slow, it will be catastrophic in about 30 years, a timeline that would put us at around the start of Sunshine.
While Project Hail Mary followed the mission to figure out how to stop the astrophage and save the sun, the movie ends with us only knowing that the mission was a success and that Earth had started suffering from the catastrophic cooling. We don’t actually get to see how humans implemented the solution Grace (Ryan Gosling) and Rocky found, but it isn’t hard to imagine something like what the crew in Sunshine does. Pairing the two films together thus makes for an interesting and unofficial completion of sorts — at least until we get a real Project Hail Mary sequel. While no official sequel is currently in the works, fans are still optimistic we’ll get more of Grace and Rocky’s story. Sunshine will just have to do for now.
Sunshine is streaming on Tubi through the end of April.
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Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
