Hey! Since you mentioned Pinbacker, what are your thoughts on Sunshine, and the ways in which it both mirrors and very much diverges from phm?
you sent this days ago and I keep coming back to how PHM literally is about a ship called the Hail Mary and the only astronaut on board is a guy named Grace and he's meant to die to save humanity
but Sunshine is the movie that's about religion and spirituality and faith. because imo just having lil referential names like that doesn't amount to anything. every time I see someone talking about PHM as religious allegory, I'm mostly confused because I don't see it.
there's only one moment in PHM that feels inexplicable in a way that feels beyond the natural world, and it's not even deistic/theistic, it's Grace getting a vision of the future from seemingly himself. it's internal, it's private, it's a message from his own intelligence, not a cosmic force.
compare to Sunshine which has a lot of similar grounding of its universe, hard science, logic, even a similar mission to PHM. but what gives Sunshine that cosmic horror/wonder element is that it takes all that time to ground the story and then veers into the abstract and supernatural. hell, Pinbacker's entire existence feels like something supernatural happening.
If Sunshine's Searle mentioned to Dr. Ryland Grace "sooo I think the sun might be, like, an Entity and I want to commune with it, I've been slowly incrementing how much I look at it from the observation deck lmao i guess I got a lil sunburned"
Grace would be like "oh. oh okay. that's cool. i'm just going to go back to my quarters and make sure they can lock from the inside, 'cuse me," and then have a freakout under his desk
