And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
-- J.G. Magee, High Flight
It's a terrible shame that the second half of Event Horizon belonged to one of the worst science fiction films of the 1990s, because the first half promised one of the best.
Dr. Weir (Sam Neill) and his team head into space to investigate an experimental spacecraft, thought lost seven years before when a test of its faster-than-light engine went awry. There's a whole universe of possible explanations for its reappearance, from aliens to temporal anomalies to quantum somethings-or-others, until Weir speaks those ludicrous, devastating words: the ship has returned from "a dimension of pure evil". It's not just a wretched turn of phrase; it's not just that the anticipated twist is the equivalent of "Christine in space" or "HAL666". It's a betrayal.
Science fiction is science fiction, and scientific endeavour is founded on one basic principle: given time and study, given logic, curiosity and empirical investigation, we can figure it out. We can find out what makes it go. We can reverse-engineer the secrets of the universe.
By contrast, Weir gloats:
Did you really think you could destroy this ship? She's defied space and time. She's been to a place you couldn't possibly imagine.
Another character describes the ship's destination as somewhere "beyond scientific reality", "hell". These are not the words of a scientist; they are the words of a priest. Event Horizon invokes the inexplicable supernatural and thereby becomes fantasy. Its moral is the moral of Babel or Icarus: who are we, mere mortals, to touch the sky?
Sunshine, written by Alex Garland (28 Days Later) and directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), is a significantly better film, though its science is almost as dubious and it echoes its predecessor's painful tumble into creature-feature horror. A team of astronauts are sent aboard the ship Icarus II to reignite our dying sun with a nuclear device, but events take a turn for the Horizon when they discover the Icarus I, thought lost seven years earlier when it failed in the same mission, intact but apparently abandoned.
When the crew have their corresponding encounter with an entity beyond easy understanding, it's with nothing so abstruse as extradimensional evil: they find the sun. Even for the audience it approaches the spiritual. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, some of the most memorable moments are long, slow shots of objects in space; and though the discordant post-rock score couldn't be further from 2001's classical, the effect is the same. At once beautiful, frightening and inspiring, the images hint at the sublime. In Sunshine, they are images of the sun, so massive, so bright, so fundamentally alien to human experience that an emotional response is inevitable.
For the characters the experience is palpably religious. They dream about it at night; Searle (Cliff Curtis) sits in the observation chamber and bathes in light until he burns. Pinbacker (Mark Strong) makes it explicit: he looks into the sun and finds God there. The Icarus myth had already been registered in the names of the ships, but he invokes it again in his attempt to sabotage the mission. He is the instrument of God's will: in accordance with the divine plan, humanity must be allowed to die.
Pinbacker is a murderous psychopath; the crew sensibly refuse to believe him. Humanity wins, and God's plot (or Pinbacker's interpretation of it) is foiled. That is not to say that the spiritual element of the film is diminished, but for the remaining characters it is a purely secular matter. Capa (Cillian Murphy) at one point comments that their computer simulations are inedaquate, because the high heat and the high gravity are enough to bend time and space. The phenomenon is graphically illustrated in the penultimate sequence, and though obviously unscientific -- Boyle has quipped the warning, "Kids! Don't stick your arm in the sun!" -- it's a figurative expression of the same sense of wonder that most of us find in our interactions with the natural world. A flower is no less perfect as the culmination of millions upon millions of evolutionary generations than it is as the work of a divine craftsman. The sun is no less magnificent as the product of purely natural energies. Even the irreligious can appreciate sublimity.
In Event Horizon's defense, it's not necessarily unscientific to claim something as unimaginable: human brains have limits. We evolved that way, coded to survive as hunter-gatherers. We were not coded to imagine the ten or eleven dimensions postulated by theories of quantum mechanics; it's hard enough to accept that time is a fourth. (How do you visualize four dimensions on a three-dimensional plane?) Less esoteric but no less true, most of us couldn't easily distinguish between a hot oven at 200°C and one at 250°C. To a primitive brain it hardly matters: both are hot enough to burn. How then can we deal with the surface of the sun, closer to 5000°C, or the core, over 12000000°C? Death occurs too soon for nerve impulses to even reach the brain. "Unimaginable" is an appropriate label.
But imagination isn't the end-all, and even if it fails we're still capable of comprehending the difference between "two hundred" and "twelve million". One of the many glories of science is that "unimaginable" is not the same as "indescribable".