My First Ever Blog Movie Review: Sunshine

When I saw the preview for Sunshine, I thought it looked excellent - I love science fiction, especially when it is realistic. Apparently, the science advisor for this movie was Dr. Brian Cox, a physicist for CERN - the European Organization for Nuclear Research (figure that acronym out) - so if you think there are improbable portions, we can be fairly sure they thought about it beforehand. The insightful scientific portions vastly outweigh the less realistic ones (though there's still the Hollywood issue of sound in space. And also, sunlight makes noise. For some reason). The ship Icarus 2, which the crew is piloting into our dying sun with a bomb to restart it, is equipped with an enormous shield, made up of millions of giant mirrors to protect the very NASA-esque structure behind it from the sun's heat and radiation. We are reminded often just how hot and how bright the sun is at this close distance, and there are some truly beautiful shots, including a memorable one of Mercury, that make the first half of this movie a unique and compelling experience. Of course, by the end, we have three characters fighting on all sides of a giant cube that is falling into the sun, whose mass somehow allows them to stand on it at Earth's gravity, and whose spinning has no effect on them. How, praytell, did such a realistic movie degenerate into stupidity? The only reason I can think of is that the scientific portion of this movie was added to an otherwise highly improbable scenario, and at the end, its subservience to the narrative shows rather gaudily.

Now, it's not hard for me to suspend my disbelief. I am not, on the whole, a stickler about those things as long as there's a good story to be heard. The hard part for me to swallow was the tremendous irony of the point being made in this movie at the expense of its plausibility - which is that science is the last hope of mankind against, you guessed it, religious fundamentalism. You see, the whole sun-dying-man-restarting-it premise is just a rather direct metaphor for enlightenment. The sun (rationalism) is dying, and mankind must reignite it (enlightenment) through science. But of course, those evil, ignorant, conniving religious people don't want mankind to live - they want us all to die (spiral into religious fundamentalism). The villain, whom we meet about halfway through, "turned his back on science," kills his crews (Icarus 1), and stares into the sun until his whole body is covered in burns. He then subjects the moviegoer to speech after speech about how God told him to, how when God says we have to die it's not our place to stop him, how he communed with God for years - he even mistakes the protagonist for an angel. This from a man who, out of all Earth's inhabitants, qualified to be an astronaut entrusted with the fate of mankind.

I am tired of cheap, unintelligent shots at religion from every corner of popular media. I liked this movie; the direction was top-notch, the special effects were unsurpassed, the acting was excellent (though the character with the sunniest disposition was the computer... that was a little oppressive). It was truly disappointing to see that this was just another poke at my religiosity - in the grand tradition of Equilibrium, V for Vendetta, and scores of other unhelpful reiterations. These movies serve tacitly to reinforce categories and assumptions that are inaccurate representations of the world. In no way does the word "religion" denote a cohesive concept. It is an attempt to define all non-atheistic or non-agnostic views by their absolutization of the transcendent, but this is not a meaningful descriptor, not merely because of the sheer resistance of difference within the term, but because it relies on a false dichotomy. The position that there is no transcendence (or that it is utterly inaccessible) is an equivalent absolutization of it to any other declaration of faith. Furthermore, this is becoming a stock Hollywood plot, right up there with the underdog winning first prize, the conflictual ensemble becoming a family unit, the action hero who seems immune to bullet wounds in unfashionable places, and the tough woman showing up a bunch of men. In other words, it is boring.

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The other day, out of sheer curiosity (the impetus for much of my behavior), I listened to a lecture by Daniel Dennett on consciousness. He wrote a book called "Consciousness Explained," you see. Dennett is a philosopher and an atheist, and in his lecture, he showed everyone how consciousness is like a magic trick. You may think you have seen something profound - that is, "real magic" - but of course, the only magic that is real is the kind that is not magic. It is sleight of hand, or mathematics, or psychology, or some other deception, but not magic. To put it in more direct terms than Dennett would probably like, he "explains" consciousness by doing away with the philosophical subject. But of course, this is less like saying that consciousness is like deceptive but unmagical mechanics than it is like saying it is an illusion with no one to deceive. It's a great, big, dumb tautology. That is to say, when the whole point of explanation - human interest and desire for comprehension - is subjected to the means of explanation, it of course appears to be absent. I cannot comprehend my own comprehension because comprehension is the act of rising above, or casting aside, or otherwise rendering banal that which at first seems significant. I cannot rise above myself any more than I can fly by pulling on my shoelaces. But of course, Dennett, being a strict materialist, would prefer to deny that there is any such thing as "I" and risk total nonsense than to admit anything outside the causal chain of events. He would cut off his right arm with his right hand.*

My point? Modernity tends towards the vilification of "faith" at any expense. To live inside of a scientific paradigm is to render the world comprehensible and unmotivated - an unanimated, lifeless husk. It does not function as a source of meaning. But this point of view is not only prevalent - it's popular. Dennett is a New York Times best-seller. Sunshine is an average Hollywood movie. This brand of scientism is garbage, for scientists (see John Gingrich and Michael Polanyi) and for the general public. I am more than a little tired of it.

*The most amusing part of Dennett's lecture was his caveat that neuroscientists could have discovered a "Cartesian theater" inside the brain - that is, the place where consciousness resides - but they didn't, so there must not be a subject. It's odd that he would use this example as evidence, since it serves to undermine his point. If they had found the source of consciousness, we could all go home. One might argue that it postpones the debate and places consciousness at another remove, but it makes more sense that discovering some active nerve center that generates or determines the will would be a fatal blow to non-deterministic thought. As it stands, the brain appears to be a car with no driver, which begs a very important question in a very solid way.