Death music

When I was fishing around for the second movie of a double feature last night on the projector in the garage -- I always try to bust out the projector on long weekends, and this is a four-day one -- I came across Danny Boyle's Sunshine, and decided that Project Hail Mary had put me in the headspace for a second viewing of a movie that I'd always considered to be a bit undone by its ending. Or was it a third viewing? (If you want to read about the disastrous circumstances of my attempted first Sunshine viewing, read here.)

(The first in the double feature? Last year's remake of The Naked Gun, now streaming for free on Stan, which I watched for the second time in the space of three months.)

Mild Sunshine spoilers ahead. 

I'm really glad I watched Sunshine again, because even though I still don't like that "serial killer ending," it does not fatally undermine all the rest of the things the film does right. Which is quite a lot, as it turns out. Including a number of what at least I come to space movies to see: scary deaths that only occur when you're on a space ship. 

What I want to talk about today, though, is the music. 

As it becomes clear that the heroic Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) of the ship Icarus, which is trying to deliver a nuclear payload to "restart" the sun, is about to expire while outside fixing the solar shield, and that his sacrifice must be celebrated through inspirational yet somber music, I heard a piece of music that I've heard in a ton of different movies. Little did I know, this was the very first instance of its usage. 

The piece of music is called "Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor)" by John Murphy, but of course you won't be able to identify it by that title, because there are no lyrics, unless you are my friend John, who is a violinist himself and knows a ton about movie scores. 

But this should probably clarify it for you:

And you'd probably be able to tell from the title that, yes, it originated in this movie.

Now, I do not know about movie scores the way John does -- my friend John, not John Murphy, but I assume he does too. But if this hasn't become the most used new piece of film music in the past 20 years, I don't know what it is.

Just check out the number of uses listed on Wikipedia. There's a special section on the Sunshine soundtrack page addressing just the widespread use of "Adagio in D Minor."

The only one I was sure I remembered from that list was Kick-Ass, when I believe it plays both at the end and possibly during Nicolas Cage's death scenes. (Oops, spoiler for Kick-Ass.)

Because when you hear this song start in a movie, it means, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a character is about to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. There's just no other possible outcome once that music kicks in. That music is basically a promise that this is serious, and there are no takesies backsies. Some other character, at some other point in the movie, might be improbably revived or saved by a deus ex machina, but not this character in this moment. This character is going down with the ship, going out in a blaze of glory, and probably saving a lot of other characters from certain doom.

I do find it remarkable that I happened to look this up during Sunshine, because I've heard this piece a dozen other times at least, including in some of those trailers mentioned on Wikipedia, and I would have had no reason to believe it would have originated in the film where I finally Shazam'd it. 

Although this is the thing I'm writing about Sunshine, my biggest takeaway is that I feel this film is rehabilitated in my opinion now, after a disastrous first viewing experience with Danny Boyle (now you want to click on that earlier link I bet) and then the eventual full theatrical viewing, which revealed the disappointing serial killer ending. Nineteen years later, I'm glad to know that this is a truly interesting addition to the genre of films where people fight great odds in space and die in horrible ways, and that it reduces Boyle's number of misfires -- an already very low number -- even further.