biolog

George R.R. Martin, most prolific in the ’70s, wrote a fascinating short story back then about life on a planet orbiting a smoldering sun. In the House of the Worm, the refugees lived below the surface in ancient winding tunnels built from an earlier race. Society, at this late stage in their existence, comprised a largely inbred aristocracy and an oppressed labor force of a separate race–somewhat resembling the situation in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from Prospero down through Caliban.

The Caliban of this story is an exceedingly deceitful brute, who, despite succumbing to the protagonist’s blade, ultimately prevails the way Mel Gibson’s William Wallace does in Braveheart, by sharing a little of himself with a fair lady. It’s not entirely accurate to call the protagonists in Martin’s stories anti-heroes; they are by no means immune to all the injustices of a cruel and indifferent world(s), often more susceptible than most. The failure to meet whatever challenge Martin throws their way is at once personal and tragic but also epic, with reverberations felt across the cosmos–it’s science fiction after all.

Danny Boyle’s distant future sci-fi flick, Sunshine, also involves the fate of a species tied to a dying sun. Unlike Martin’s worm-people–it’s unclear whether they are descendants of humans evolved to subterranean life or an alien race on a distant planet–Boyle’s characters are not only human but overtly American. Their can-do additude over a mission to the sun in the hope of reigniting it via nukes constrasts the worm-people’s fatalism (For the worm-people must adapt, even if it means out-crossing with an inferior race, or go the way of the dodo). Even without knowing that the payload of nukes hurling toward the sun is only the size of a large city when a typical solar flare exceeds nine earths, it’s easy to see how Sunshine’s plot is outlandish: you don’t get warm by throwing a match on a pile of cinders; you find more fuel or another fire (this is usually the point in a movie like this where I tell myself how much Hollywood needs my name in the credits under the title Disbelief Consultant).

Plot logic aside, the director of The Beach, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later, uses dialogue to great effect in his films. Movies such as The Abyss, Event Horizon, Star Trek, Serenity, and Sunshine, which spend much of their time moving about the cramped innards of a ship, can quickly become tedious without engaging conversations and clever banter. Sunshine even manages to do without sex.

Unfortunately, things unravel into complete incoherence toward the end of the movie. Remember Boyle’s  forgettable The Beach? Of the two themes in Sunshine–sacrifcing a few to save the many and immortality–only the first gets properly explored throughout the course of the movie. Immortality, a challenging topic, is cleft between trite references of materialism on the fact that we’re all stardust, and rapture ready scenes of a lunatic sunburn victim killing for God. Actually, since this walking carcinoma immolates himself in solar radiation, perhaps this is sublte commentary on America’s two popular pastimes, religion and sunbathing.

Science and scientists play a centrol role in the film, and I’ve never seen it and them represented more accurately on celluloid. Too often, directors feel the need to humanize both in their movies. The first is an excuse to skip over any actual explanation of the science and the second becomes a quest for the scientist as Tinman in search of a heart.

On a final note, in light of creeping climate changes on the scale of solar winters and global warming, how much hubris is it that we are capable of organizing the resources in time to affect change, or is it more likely we’ll go the way of the worm-people and learn to adapt or slowly die-off?