Last Sunrise (2019)

directed by Wen Ren

China

103 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

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I was a little disappointed by this because it seems like I didn't get as much out of it as other people did, according to the reviews. I think I was expecting something a little more thoughtful and artsy, but this is a full-on, big-budget science fiction drama without much to it below the surface level- no metaphor, no unconventional character backstories, basically just what you'd expect. That's not a bad thing, and this was an enjoyable movie, but... there's nothing to it, really, and I had hoped for more.

I had trouble getting past the premise, or at least the way it was presented. It takes place in a future where we've gone fully solar, ditching fossil fuel for good after it runs out and converting everything to solar power resulting in a cleaner, cheaper, and much more reliable source of electricity for the whole world. Until the sun just disappears one day, plunging the planet into freezing darkness. I'm not usually one to complain about a story being unbelievable- I watch a lot of sci-fi, and sometimes I think I'm more interested in it for the "fi" part than the "sci" part. But ironically it's the fact that they do explain where the sun went that made me unable to vibe with that part of the plot. It's ridiculous and silly, and then a bunch of other ridiculous and silly space stuff happens like the planets all go drifting around the solar system like pool balls and Earth careens off into the galaxy yet everything is... well, not fine, but livable if you can get heat. I think that the whole idea of the sun going out after we become reliant on solar energy may have been intended more as a cautionary tale of why you shouldn't lean entirely on any one source of energy, but taken literally it doesn't make for a believable plot.

I was impressed by how this looked as a vision of the future. There are a couple of scenes in the alleyway outside the main character's apartment that look like a more plausible depiction of an alternate-energy future than a whole lot of other films. The stalls hawking dirt-cheap solar technology, the convenience store whose conveniences are massively ahead of our current time, the little personal motor vehicles everywhere- it all looked natural but still visually interesting as well. Sucks for that random confused white guy who happened to be in the convenience store when everything went belly-up.

Ultimately I just felt like there should have been more to this. It has a lot of messages and ideas that I did like, but with the bigger picture it does virtually nothing. The main character and his ride-along encounter a couple of difficult situations over the course of a short period of time, but eventually make it to a somewhat hopeful end. That the scope of the movie was so small is a big part of why I felt let down: I was hoping for a longer-term view of the apocalypse, but this really seems like it all happens in the course of maybe a day or even less after the initial disappearance of the sun. There's no long-term suggestion of what life on Earth will look like as we fly aimlessly into the cosmos except a sort of vague notion of "it will be fine".

The heart at the center of this is why I liked it, though- that "it will be fine" mindset, even though sometimes I wanted to run up to people and go "none of this is fine! it is physically not possible to survive this way!" was kind of nice to see. I liked this future where we just keep rebuilding and we lend each other a hand along the way, and we have confidence that we'll continue to adapt and live. It seemed like no care was ever given to how long we might live- nobody conceptualized about the far future, they all just took it as a given that we would figure out ways to continue surviving and thriving together. This did feel really arrogant when I looked at it from certain angles, but it mostly just felt like a continuation of the film's lack of a scientific perspective. If you take it as more of an allegorical thing, where the sun catastrophe is just a stand-in for any event where civilization finds itself at an impasse, the end message of the film- survival through collaboration, innovation, and community support- is reassuring and hopeful.