The book was banal, the film is marvellous

Rating: 10/10 (17 May 2009)

That film had been expected for a long time because we knew the book and we had found the book slightly easy on some details and on the end. Luckily the director did some house-cleaning and got rid of the details of unbelievable absurdity like running around in Rome alone with no police help whatsoever and especially the end: to fall from the top of the sky directly into the river without a parachute, and survive. It also got the sentimental part out since it really brought nothing to the film and even made it weak. Then the film is better than the book. What are the stakes? The first stake is that of science: science does not aim at the truth because the truth is not rational. Science only aims at discovering some natural processes, trying to understand and reproduce them into a model of some kind, or even producing some natural element artificially. But that is not the truth about the existence of this world because, big band or not, the beginning of things has either to be negated and then we live in something that has no origin and will have no end. Question: Where does it come from? Or it has to be stated and then the question is: How did nothing produce something? This of course gives that nothing an existence and even an essence since that nothing has produced the present universe in which we are living, and us men at the same time. The second stake is about the human species. Is the ever-developing science of our world the result of an evolution of our species, hence of its capabilities that would be growing, or is it the cause of an evolution, that is selected by natural and social selection, of the human species that would grow new possibilities along with the new scientific knowledge and power it accumulates. That stake is far from being solved with some who want to believe that the intellectual and mental powers of man are inbred, are inborn, meaning then that homo sapiens has always had these capabilities; and those who see an evolution and explain the ever-growing capabilities of man as the result of his adaptability and flexibility, i.e. his purely material potential in the number of cells and the organization of these cells into organs, especially the brain, is always better used and more used than before, each step in his knowledge pushing him into restructuring his own use of his own cells, of his own organs, of his own body. What is inbred in him is in no way one particular capability in any field at all, even walking, but the potential to develop capabilities from the flexible organism he is. He did not have the inborn capability to use a language, but he had the structural ability to invent a language on the basis of the material need to communicate in order to rationalize the life of his social order based on transmitting knowledge to younger generations. The third stake that appears very clearly in the film is the nature of religion. The film manages to get away from the easy and superficial exposing denunciation of the anti-scientific obsession of the Catholic church. It shows how the "purga", the crackdown onto scientists in the sixteenth century from the church gave birth to a terrorist order that aimed at destroying the church. Here the film is short because it also produced the free mason movement, or at least gave it a new momentum and that movement is the ferment of the democratic development of history, not the terroristic destruction and negation of the church and even religion. The film shows very well that the reactionary trend in the church does not come so much from the top of its hierarchy as from some middle men who more or less infiltrated into the hierarchy and try to defend their privileges and their narrow-minded conceptions against the hierarchy itself. Note along this line protestant churches not having any hierarchy gives the whole power of the church to the middle men and some are extremely active in the anti-science, anti-democracy and anti-evolution, not to speak of their anti-freedom campaigns. The vision advocated by the film is that religion is – at least – a human invention necessary to organize and guide millions if not billions of people who need guidance in the narrow straits of life. That guidance can only be enlightened if it comes from a distant enough top of a hierarchy that is able to hear, listen to and feed on what the various levels of it can say, think, produce, advocate too. And that is the best part of it. The future of humanity is in the alliance of three different trends in our world: religious wisdom provided it accepts debates; academic and intellectual knowledge and research provided they accept the concept of relative-ness; and science(s) provided they accept they do not control the universe but only use it to produce the better-off future of humanity. And they all have to unite against two dangers: the criminals who want to appropriate inventions and knowledge for their own profit and politicians who are always trying to hijack the power this knowledge represents and provides in order to impose their own sectarian and fundamentalistic absolute and unethical power. In one word, this film is outstanding.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID