★★½              By Z.P. Kibbleworth               January 6, 2090

There is ambition in Seven Sunrises, no one can deny that. It takes guts to make a film that runs from the beginning of humanity all the way into a distant, only barely recognizable future. It takes even more guts to make that film as esoteric as this, eschewing a traditional narrative for a series of vignettes in varying styles, deliberately keeping its audience off-balance and unable to pin down exactly what the film is. How such a film gets financed in this day and age when all anybody in the business with money seems to want is the safest of bets is a marvel, and the filmmakers deserve applause for having gotten their movie made. But perhaps what gave assurance enough to investors is the fact that, for all its conceptual boldness, Seven Sunrises actually has very little interesting to say.

The film is made up of seven short sequences, each running ten to twenty minutes, each set in a different time and place across human history. There is a sequence at the dawn of prehistory when humans were still primitive hunter-gatherers, very reminiscent of the prologue to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a sequence set in present day on the moon, one in Ancient China, one on Mars two years into the planet’s colonization, one in the far reaches of space some thousands of years in the future. As the title suggests, each sequence is centered upon a sunrise in some way, whether as a religious ritual, the occasion for a duel to the death, or merely as a backdrop to some ordinary day. The film covers multiple styles through its various chapters, including different aspect ratios, color palettes, and methods of sound recording. One sequence, set in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20^th century, is shot on hard-to-find 35mm film stock. There is clearly an effort being made to capture as wide an impression of both human and cinematic history as possible, to in two hours give as complete a picture of our world as one can. Something tells me the directors Clivespogger and Munk think of their film as one they could show to the aliens should the Argus missions ever find any to show them all of who we are. But all the very loud choices the film makes in its setting and style just feel like empty posturing.

What I see in Seven Sunrises is a film in love with the idea of stylistic and creative diversity, but which is reluctant to actually put in the work to realize it. If the film wanted to commit to telling stories about the sun from all cultures and viewpoints humanity has to offer, then it may have been better served as an anthology piece, with each segment helmed by a different filmmaker offering their own perspective on this great celestial orb. Instead, Clivespogger and Munk have the audacity to do it all themselves, and the work suffers as a result. The different color schemes and aspect ratios make each chapter of the film look different, but this is only a veil clouding more or less the same filmmaking scheme across all its sections. The directors are reluctant to shoot in close-up, instead opting for a heavy emphasis on background to contrast with the subjects of the shots. The editing rhythms are consistent and somewhat monotonous; insert shots are used copiously, and there is always a flashy shot with a moving camera held on for a long time to punctuate a particular sequence. The filmmaking stagnancy stands out particularly in the sunrise sequence of each chapter. When the film’s unchanging craft is applied to the same subject seven times over, the lack of real diversity in its approach becomes obvious. One would be tempted to think all these sequences are really just the same footage of a sunrise presented through different filters.

In terms of style, the film leaves unfulfilled the potential of its concept. In terms of meaning, I’m not sure the film ever really had much potential to begin with. The intention is clear: to draw a connecting thread between all of the instantiations of humanity through an object of importance in all of them. To express the notion that despite our differences, we all live under the same sun. The intention is clear enough, in fact, to be trite. The film perhaps feels the need to be so outspoken in its surface level stylistics in order to distract from the fact that its core is merely a banal platitude. Despite spending its entire runtime focusing on the sun and our relationship with it across history, there is very little investigation of what the sun might actually mean to us, what it represents, why we find it so important. All the sunrise is to the film is something which makes for pretty images. Seven Sunrises is an ultimately hollow film, one with no real ideas to support its self-described importance. Thus all its sequences, all the times and places and people it encompasses in its scope, get flattened into fodder for a preschooler’s bedtime story.

What Clivespogger and Munk have tried to do with Seven Sunrises is not exactly novel; they are clearly inspired by works like Tadgh O’Sullivan’s 2020 film To the Moon and Martina Wisczynskidung’s 2051 film Textures of Shit, works that both find a deep beauty and mystery in a universal phenomenon. But those films, in resources and concept, were limited, and so Clivespogger and Munk wanted to do the big one. On paper, it all makes sense. The sunrise is one of the most universally revered natural occurrences across planets and periods. A film about that ought to work. But the great treachery of art is that one cannot make something great out of what ought to work. These filmmakers set out to do something with the sunrise, but lacked a creative spark. This was a film reverse engineered from what a successful film about the sunrise would probably look like, rather than driven by a true need on the part of the artist to communicate something. All the ambition in the solar system cannot disguise that. And so, rather than the undefined humanity-affirming message the filmmakers hoped I would come away with, all the film affirmed to me was this: there is nothing new under the sun.