The Four at the End of the Universe
"This is probably the audiovisual rendering of everything I've been trying to express."
The film Cosmic Exploration Editorial Office (2023) is a Chinese pseudo-documentary, and in terms of the texture of its shooting, characters, and scenes, it clearly belongs to a “poor” aesthetic. To try to give this “poor” aesthetic a philosophical grounding is tricky: on the one hand, it echoes the Daoist notion of “the great way has no form”; on the other, if it merely signifies inadequate budget or technique, then calling it “philosophical” is wishful thinking. But the film itself makes a clear commitment: it is not science fiction.
The protagonist of the story is Tang Zhijun, who looks for extraterrestrial civilizations. Alongside him are Sun Yitong—a young man taken in by the office, a kind of “holy fool” in the Eastern Orthodox sense—Na Riqu, the Tibetan driver, and Caiyrong, the somewhat dissolute food photographer. They are like the pilgrims of Journey to the West: Tang Zhijun is Tripitaka, Na Riqu the White Dragon Horse, Sun Yitong is Sun Wukong (or the holy fool who glimpses what others don’t see), and Caiyrong is Zhu Bajie. They travel together from Beijing toward Sichuan.
Their destination is not Thunderclap Monastery. What awaits them in Sichuan is not an alien civilization but a stone quarry full of Buddha statues—and a young shepherd boy from whom Tang receives an unexpected answer. The West, the sacred land toward which they journey, is not a place but a state of being: they go not to find civilization but to discover whether the universe might have prepared a meaning for them.
Tang Zhijun is a pure obsessive. His ex-wife, his daughter—all have left him; his obsession with UFOs has made him the butt of jokes. As his daughter says, his way of searching for meaning in the universe is the opposite of science: true science requires the humility to say “I was wrong.”
The film is not science fiction; it is a small, humble statement of philosophy. What drives people? Not goals, but curiosity. Not certainty, but the willingness to keep asking. The film’s ending—returning to the UFO motif—felt forced and slightly undermined what had come before. The film’s answer to “what is the meaning of life” is perhaps: we are also aliens to aliens; meaning is a feature of human rationality; and in the end, it is better to rely on yourself.