In which a movie review sends me off on weird tangents...

I don't know why Sunshine opened here in Thailand before anywhere else on Earth, but I'm damn glad it did - and not merely because it affords me a rare opportunity to gloat. I'm one of the three people on Earth who liked The Beach, by the same team, so add the appropriate grains of salt hereafter.
Sunshine's admittedly implausible premise follows a desperate mission to jumpstart the dying sun with a vast fusion bomb, thawing the snowball Earth and rescuing the remnants of humanity. Try to suppress your disbelief at this central conceit, and you'll find a very rewarding film.

Sunshine isn't nearly perfect - its thoughtful pace might less charitably be called sluggish, and its latter third introduces a needless, jarringly incongruous horror element that threatens to drag the film into the witless realms inhabited by the grossly inferior Event Horizon and Supernova, or even the hideous, little-known Solar Crisis. The superficial similarities to these films may alienate some potential viewers, but this movie is stylistically far closer to director Danny Boyle's own 28 Days Later, with obvious inspirations from 2010 and (presumably, since I haven't seen it) Solaris. Substantively, it's much more like... ummm... nothing else I can recall.

I loved Sunshine because it gives a better sense of the naked, audacious vulnerability of space travel and the titanic energies at play out there in the universe than any other film I've ever seen. 2001 was a glorious film about the cosmically unfathomable, but Sunshine at its best is a movie to make one simply feel very small - an experience hard to find in even the best films. Space kills in this film, very quickly and plausibly, and the radiant indifference of the sun vaporizes unprotected matter in microseconds, imbuing space with an awesome and entirely fitting dread that I've never felt in another sci-fi movie. Cold vacuum and the unrelenting solar wind are more palpable and terrifying in this film than anything a slasher or zombie flick has ever thrown at us.

I was so enthralled by what I saw that I barely registered the acting, which I belatedly realize ranged from serviceable to excellent. The human story revolves convincingly around the psychological stresses of years spent in space, which is nicely underlined by a creative but not overly conspicuous score. But the setting offers visuals of unexpected ingenuity and power: the replicating sparks of nuclear fusion inside a fantastic bomb; the inferno roaring along the surface of a kilometres-wide solar shield; a brief but gorgeous journey into the core of the sun. Every one of these drove my heart into my throat. If you've ever enjoyed a space film, you'll find Sunshine a surprisingly moving experience.

Brief and extremely nerdy tangent here (which might offend a highly sensitive few): I wonder what it says about me that the concepts and cosmic settings like the ones in this film affect me far more than any religious story I've ever read. I had this thought towards the end of the movie, and spent the walk home pondering it. I concluded (probably not for the first time) that my key frustration with religion is that it shrinks the entire universe down to a human scale. I know this is the main attraction for many - religion thus infuses random events with a mostly benign agency, and provides a comforting . But in depicting the cosmos as a construct built mainly for our benefit, faith closes most religious minds to the vast wonders that are out there for anyone to see if only they're interested in looking.

In all seriousness, walking on water and turning it to wine are laughably feeble "miracles" next to the awesome forces at work every instant inside an exceedingly ordinary star like our own. Are we really supposed to be impressed by this? How can I get worked up over a story of one man rising from the dead 2000 years ago - even if it's true - when we can look out into the universe and see galaxies colliding with one another at this very moment? Nothing in horrors of the Biblical Apocalypse, even approaches the scale of the furious energy the sun releases in a microsecond. It's not just Christianity that cripples itself so. No religious tradition that I'm familiar, from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Bahai narrative to the entertaining inventiveness of Hindu mythology, even hints at the energies the universe flings about with routine abandon. Even less do any of these traditions help us to understand real miracles like the spectacular births of galaxies. Dig through every religious text on earth for something that sounds like the unimaginable beauty of a supernova or the mind-wrecking weirdness of a black hole - you won't find a thing. Great minds like Carl Sagan have worked to reconcile this incongruity not by shrinking the universe down to a human scale, but by trying to expand the concept of God to encompass the wonders we can now see. (Go read Contact. Now!) But far too few even try.

Nothing we see through a telescope precludes the possibility that it was all created by a supreme being - indeed, some of what we see suggests that may be exactly what happened. But it does make the "greatest stories ever told" look awfully small by comparison - and more than slightly patronizing. To my eyes, the world's religions all share one unforgivable fault - a pitiful poverty of imagination.