In 1999, Nate Parker and Jean McGianni Celestin were accused of raping a woman at Penn State University. In 2001, a court found Parker not guilty, mainly due to a testimony that he and the victim had had consensual sex before the incident, but Celestin was convicted and sent to prison. This conviction was overturned four years later. In 2012, the victim, who received a settlement of $17,500 from the university (it had failed to protect her), committed suicide.

Early this year, a film, The Birth of a Nation, directed by Parker, starring Parker, and written by Parker and Celestin, dominated the press's attention at Sundance Film Festival because of its subject (the slave revolt led by Nate Turner in 1831) and the amount a Hollywood studio paid for it ($17.5 million). This weekend the studio, Fox Searchlight Pictures, began the long and hard work of recovering that large sum of money and making a profit, but the film, which was timely (we are in the age of #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsTooWhite) and opened in a lot of theaters (2,105), failed at the box office ($7,004,254 in four days). It is fair to say that the events of 17 years ago are haunting this movie and keeping a lot of people away from its theaters. We also happen live in an age that's increasingly recognizing the prevalence of rape culture. Indeed, as one post on Slog put it recently: rape culture is running for president.

A week before The Birth of a Nation hit the screens, the talented social commentator and Black Lives Matter activist Ijeoma Oluo wrote a review of the movie for the Stranger, but we could not publish it because of "legal concerns." It's not that we disagreed with Oluo's position about rape culture, but the fact is Nate Parker is an innocent man according to the law, and we could not publish anything that contradicted this legal fact. Oluo then posted the review at the feminist website The Establishment.

This, however, left a hole in our film section. I decided to fill it by watching the movie this past Sunday and providing an opinion the following day. But as I headed on the Link train to the 4pm screening at Pacific Place, I felt more and more depressed about having to watch a film that many in the press were associating with a rape case that most likely ended in a suicide and would show a lot of black suffering—blacks getting lashed, shot, and raped. Two weeks before, I had read Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad (which is set around the same time as The Birth of a Nation, and concerns a young black woman fleeing the brutal oppression of a Georgia plantation), and its relentless depictions of the horrors of the system that established the American economy had exhausted me. I just did not have the strength to be exposed to more black misery, pain, and death, even if it involved a black-empowering rebellion. I decided instead to watch Terrence Malik's Voyage of Time at the Pacific Science Center IMAX Theater. Narrated by Brad Pitt, and running 40 minutes (there is a longer version narrated by Cate Blanchett), this film is about the birth of the universe.

So, I entered the dome-like theater, took a seat, leaned back a little, and watched on a massive screen how all of the troubles of the world began.

Something expands from a tiny speck into gigantic gas clouds, large and small stars, clusters of flying galaxies. The sun turns on and the solar system forms. One of the planets in this system, earth, cools and life appears in its seas. Eventually life invades the land. Trees rise from the ground and dinosaurs run and roar in forests. Oddly enough, these mighty animals appear to want more out of life. One dinosaur stares longing at the sun setting on an ocean. Suddenly, a comet with earth's number on it blazes across the sky and explodes into fragments that fall into the sea. The dinosaurs exit the story of the universe. Enter the primates. They begin in the tops of trees, then they reach the ground, then they are using tools, then they are a funky-looking human staring at his own reflection on the surface of a river, then they build the Burj Khalifa. After an American girl walks down a city street, the sun expands and destroys the earth. After that the fratricidal sun drifts through space, it is gobbled up by a black hole. And that's all folks.

Maybe I should have watched The Birth of a Nation.

Or I should have just stayed at home and watched the episode of Cosmos (made in 1980!) that describes the evolution of life with greater scientific sensitivity than anything you will find in the spectacle of Malik's cinematic cathedral.