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 the film, 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 deciding democratically 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 opinions, 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 and 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 much for science vs. democracy!
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 shouts 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 understandings of faith, science and hubris. It seems to portray the clash between the 'rational scientist' who uses science and technology to re-ignite the sun therefore ensuring the continuation of life on earth and the fatalist religious fundamentalist who views the death of the sun as God's judgement of humanity. This disregards the fact that you still need a philosophy on which science can rest and a value system which tells you that life is worth saving. And that doesn't come from science.

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 (as in the Greek myth), 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, a 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 that 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 towards authoritarianism.

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The danger of religion?

Interesting article on the FT today by Professor John Gray. He is right in pointing out that secularisation has been shown not to be the inevitable process resulting from industrialisation and scientific progress as postulated by Weber and Durkheim, among others, and, I might add, taken as ‘gospel truth’ by most of the academia until recently. He concludes by stating that “the issue is not how to exorcise religion from society. It is how rival faiths can learn to live together in peace”. I disagree.
The challenge posed by the current de-secularisation process, does not lie in the potential clash of rival religious faiths, rather it lies in the coming together of conservative religious groups in ‘unholy alliances’. This was the case in the UN population conference in 1999 where the Vatican, Sudan, Pakistan and Egypt coalesced to stop the implementation of family planning policies to counteract overpopulation and the spread of HIV. More recently, in the UK various religious groups came together to oppose gay adoption. Such high-profile campaigns in the public arena are often the result of internal divisions or rivalry between the conservative and progressive elements of a faith, as I mentioned in a previous post. However, what is of concern is the attempt by conservative faith groups to establish their interpretation of a particular faith and identity by distorting the government’s equality strands’ agenda. Whilst conservative religious groups might not aim to impose their own set of beliefs in a pluralist environment, by appealing to religion as an ‘equality strand’, they risk essentialising and reducing the religion to which they belong to their own particular understanding of it. It follows that, if the government had allowed discrimination against homosexuals by certain service providers on the grounds of their specific interpretation of a religious tradition, such interpretation would have had a legal recognition possibly over and above any other interpretation of the same religious tradition. This is why it was religious groups, opposed to the creationist fundamentalists, who fought against the teaching of creationism in Arkansas in 1981. The danger is not religion per se but the imposition of certain dogmas or interpretations on the members of a religion.
The great inheritance of the Enlightenment was not secularisation, but individual autonomy. What religious and secularist fundamentalists want to take away from us is the ability to interpret our identity and belief system, to find meaning and exercise our free will.

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