Sunshine - mission on the cheap

A few months ago I went to see the film Sunshine. The reviews were excellent, so much that I wonder whether I saw a different film.
Nigel Andrews from the FT: "Even watching in a preview theatre, one spends one's time being walloped by light - flash-floods of molten gold, tidal waves of searing silver - and cowering rapturously at the boom-channel crashes and vibrations." I thought it looked more like a disco.
Whilst watching it I found it incredibly irritating, boring and pure nonsense. In retrospect, I can't help finding it very funny, despite the author's real intentions.
It's the story of a crew of astronauts sent to space to re-ignite the dying sun by detonating a super nuclear bomb and sneak away in time not to be wiped out. A previous mission mysteriously failed leaving no trace of the spaceship called Icarus I. You would, at least, think of changing the name of the second one, but no, they leave superstitions aside and call it Icarus II.
The structure of the film is the usual copy & paste from Alien, Kubrick's 2001 and so on. The characters have no roundedness or depth.

The plot is superb in its absurdity.
The astronauts come across Icarus I and think it might be a good idea to de-tour and give them a hand as there seems to be life there. A little bit of not too deep discussion ensues and the option of democratically decide what to do is discounted because the decision needs to be 'informed'. That really annoyed me. The point of democracy is, or at least should be, that decisions are taken by the majority on the basis of informed debate, not by an appointed authority. The crew, instead of being able to express their opinion, reason about the problem and participate in the decision-making, prefer letting the Captain decide. However, given that hierarchy is not good enough and they are all scientists and therefore knowledge is the most important thing, the Captain delegates the decision to the far too young to be a physicist Capa (Cillian Murphy). Capa stands in his disco room asking the computer questions and finally brings back the responsum "heads or tail". The oracle of Delphi would have been clearer but there you go. So the decision is sort of ... well, we might as well go!
And there they go, in true RAC style, they change the route to pick up the hitchhikers from the broken down Icarus I.
The guy who changes the route forgets about the position of the sun and the ship gets damaged. He cries hysterically that there were many calculations to make and he made a mistake. Why does this very expensive, state of the art spaceship, with lots of bright lights, not have a sat-nav? Couldn't they just set the new destination avoiding the toll-road? No, they have to calculate things themselves and get them wrong. Alas, all those years of study come to nothing when they actually need to put notions to use.
So the ship needs some fixing and the Captain pops out to sort it out, a bit of hammering here and polishing there, it'll be like new! While he's at it he can't resist the attraction of the sun that will soon be in trajectory. From inside, the crew shout at unison to get back, but you know what is like, you're out there floating in space with the sun shining ... Captain is wiped out by the wind of the sun, which proves my point that hierarchy is too often a result of power structures than rational decision.
Then four of the crew board Icarus I, but there's a problem with the two ships attaching to each other, so they need to jump back inside Icarus II to get back. Yep! The whingy one gets the protective space gear, the brave one stays behind and the other two cover themselves in kitchen foil ready to jump. Needless to say one doesn't make it.
Several problems and deaths later, the computer tells Capa that there's an extra crew member on board. Instead of telling the remaining crew, he pops around to see who it is. He doesn't even have the time to put the kettle on and comment on the weather that he is attacked. The attacker was one of the Icarus I crew who took too much sun and, aside from a very bad sunburn, he's become a bit of a 'sun fundamentalist', preaching that if the sun is dying is the will of God and he's God-like because he's survived being sunburnt etc. He also transforms himself into the only other remaining crew member, which I assume comes with the nutrient properties of the sun.

The meaning, if there ever was one, is supposed to be around self-sacrifice to save the rest of humanity and whether their attempts are nothing but hubris against God. Needless to say the film does not really explore the theme and does not espouse any argument coherently. It rests on too many assumptions and superficial understanding of faith, science and hubris. It seems to portray the clash between the 'rational scientist' who constructs the means to re-ignite the sun and therefore ensure the continuation of life on earth and the fatalist religious fundamentalist who views the death of the sun as God's judgement of humanity. Another flood, one might say, but in the story of the flood, Noah, his family/clan and all species of animals are saved to ensure that life continues. Sunshine's interpretation of hubris seems to be the challenging of nature/God through personal self-destruction, necessary in order to save life.
The point of the story of Icarus, however, is also to build better wings, not simply not to fly. The meaning of hubris is lack of humility and placing oneself or one's belief at centre of the universe, kaleidoscope through which everything is understood. Hubris is solipsistic consciousness that shuts out doubt, that reduces the universe to object of observation et rien plus!
Most importantly, it is about endowing oneself or one's belief as ultimate legitimate authority, a point which the film totally misunderstands.
The fact that the crew dispenses with democracy and relies on hierarchical authority and the hierarchical authority delegates to the 'rational authority' is very significant. Who decides who the authority is? Why a physicist and not a mathematician or a theologian, for that matter? Underlying this decision there's a belief in authority on the basis of a specific knowledge that is valued at a moment in time. This is the problem with pop-scientists, such as Dennet and Dawkins, and with religious fundamentalists. They are guilty of hubris when declaring that science or their particular image of God is all that there is, the truth and, therefore, the supreme legitimate authority from which everything originates and is ordained. Once you do away with liberalism and the ability of each individual to participate in society and decision-making, you descend in authoritarianism.

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