Without spoiling things too much I was trying to make more of an overarching general statement, but I guess it all depends if you consider characters to be acting 'selfishly in their own self interest' or 'altruistically' I suppose! I am always left ambivalent at the very least by Danny Boyle's films (including yes Sunshine and 127 Hours) of whether the hero should really be celebrated for all their flaws. And usually more repulsed by their actions, or at best just seeing them muddle through to some kind of satisfying resolution against the odds. Though maybe that's the point: that everyone is flawed and has the potential within them to claw their own arms off for the chance to continue their existence either in specifically personal, appropriational terms (which I think ties in more with the nakedly aspirational, single minded drive side of many of Boyle's films) or because their sights are set on loftier goals (which ignore the people around them, or use them as pawns in their bigger plans).
In a way the Christopher Eccleston character in Shallow Grave is the equivalent of Pinbacker in Sunshine, as the figure who has been corrupted by getting too close to the dangerous but seductive source (forced into reckoning with it by drawing the short straw in having to deal with the situation the first time around), and has broken under the strain and has been driven insane by it, whilst our heroes manage to keep a kind of relative (although kind of callous in their lack of ability to empathise with the main 'villain' of the piece) distance by their more pragmatic approach to their situation. Even if their curiosity about the previous expedition almost proves to be their own downfalls (certainly almost scuppers the bigger mission) and it all still ends in a bloodbath from which few escape unscathed, physically or mentally!
Which is to say that I kind of want to see a Danny Boyle remake of Kiss Me Deadly some time! Though that may have been Trance? :-k
It does feel as if Boyle's films of the last decade have been trying to internalise this into different aspects of a single character: the internal struggles of the main character in 127 Hours, the main character of Trance (though to say why would constitute a spoiler, though I have talked about it in its
dedicated thread) and going more deeply into Renton in Trainspotting 2 come to mind (even if that remains an ensemble film at heart). Though The Beach is probably the earliest example of that, even if the critique of the main character's actions bringing about the entire downfall of the secret hedonistic beach colony is softened quite a bit from the Alex Garland novel, presumably because of those commercial pressures to make a 'fun film starring Titanic heartthrob Leonardo Di Caprio', similar to those Boyle mentions regarding Shallow Grave in that Moving Pictures segment linked to earlier, where he mentions that he would have liked to have gone further into the claustrophobically enclosed world of the flat but it was felt that it could be more of a 'commercial success' if they did not do that (It took until Panic Room for a major film to get
that single set enclosed, and even there the writer's commentary mentions that they still felt it necessary to add on those outside of the house and bulk of the action bookends to that film. Rope probably still remains the main example of a film all set in a single location without any jumps outside of that). The Beach as a film
does end with a "passionate high", but it is one that is ironically overwriting the truth of the situation for a more (self?) comforting image of collective happiness, doing that classic thing of only looking back on your holiday through the posed snaps of the best moments rather than remembering the traumatic way that it all ended. A pre-computer version of 'virtual reality'?
