Romantic Comedy. Obese high schooler grows up, gets hot and successful, comes back home 10 years later and tries to bed the only woman he loved in high school, who loved him as JUST FRIENDS. To anyone who has ever experienced this terror of “just friends,” and I have a couple times in life (including with my wife, who I finally caught), this movie rings with deep truth – and humor. A bit crass at times, but more restrained than say, Wedding Crashers or 40-Year Old Virgin. Chris, who loved Jamie, but was not loved back with the romance that he felt, goes away, gets ripped, gets successful in the music business and becomes promiscuous with women, since his rejection taught him true love was not possible. So when he ends up in his home town, rediscovering his old flame, he tries to catch her for all the wrong reasons: Just to bed her, just to bring closure sexually. But he soon discovers that he is still in love with her. Unfortunately, he is not a quality person who deserves her because of his promiscuous lifestyle which he must learn to reject. And what is really great is how his rival, Dusty, is a reflection of Chris, with the same dorky high school crush on Jamie, but now, Dusty is everything Chris is not, a dashing Paramedic who saves Jamie, plays the guitar, works at the hospital with old people, gives concerts to children in churches. He’s too perfect, too manly and too sensitive for Chris to compete with – until he realizes that its all a scam by Dusty to bed women. So the cool redemption in this story is Chris seeing himself in Dusty and seeing what a louse his promiscuous using of women really is. What I didn’t like about this movie is the Rock and Roll Slut that Chris, as record producer, had to pacify on his stay in his home town. In one sense it was a great mockery of the insanity and sheer immaturity of the Rock Star world. They made great fun of her. She’s stupid, bawdy, ignorant, uncultured and insensitive. But she’s also horny and one of the subplots is Chris’s younger brother trying to sleep with her. This stuff was inappropriate. HOWEVER, it is interesting that he never does sleep with the rock star girl which is really rather moral, since he is only like 18, and usually movies fulfill that male fantasy with its irresponsible sexuality. The fact that he does not sleep with her is quite a positive moral statement. It was also cool that once Chris gets the opportunity to sleep with Jamie, he doesn’t – because he knows it is wrong to use her in that way. They never have sex and his return to her involves the desire to marry and have children with her, so it is a rather Christian morality to the story. A promiscuous man learns that true love is possible and promiscuity is irresponsible using of women.
Sci-Fi Fantasy
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Children’s fantasy. Five children receive lottery type tickets to tour the world’s most amazing Chocolate Factory of the elusive and oddball Willy Wonka. Tim Burton has a unique viewpoint but is not a very good storyteller to me. His visuals are fascinating, and his characters are quirky, but often very distant or alien. This story was a mediocre remake. Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka is entirely alien and unsympathetic despite the attempt to show his flaw originating in an unloving Dentist father who denied him the pleasure of candy. He is just so heartless in his reactions to the kids that I despised him. I like the morality fable nature of this story though. It shows these five kids, all products of bad parenting, who reflect their parents in their worst faults. There is the suburban competitive girl who is the overachiever. There is the fat German boy who is a symbol of conspicuous consumption. There is the spoiled little rich girl who controls her parents with her whining, getting everything she asks for. There is the selfish video-game antisocial boy. And of course, there is Charlie, who is a member of a poor but loving family who sacrifices their needs for his happiness. The theme of family as most important in life is a great one, even showing Charlie’s grandparent’s, both sets, living with them. When each of the children’s own selfishness gets them into trouble and they receive their comeuppance, the Oompa Loompas sing their song mocking their faults with moral humor. I liked the different versions of music used, but could not understand many of the lyrics. But the most selfish of all is of course, Willy Wonka, who offers Charlie the factory if he only leaves his family, because as Willy says, family only gets in the way of creativity. I found this an amazing deliberate reference to Hollywood itself. The fact that he chose to say “creativity” rather than say, “pleasure” or “fun” or some other child oriented thing, shows the storytellers were addressing the individualism of the artist or the creative type versus the interests of the community. I find this rather ironic as well, since that movie itself was no doubt made with dozens of the people on crew and cast who in fact HAVE put aside family and community for their individual creativity. Hollywood is a kind of “Pleasure Island” of this kind of lifestyle choices. But back to Wonka, this is all a very nice circle because all the kids, who are archetypes of kids today, are all selfish narcissists who have become the monsters they are because of indulgence, and yet, Wonka is the selfish antisocial type he is because of the opposite, the denial of pleasures. So we see that Charlie, who doesn’t get everything he wants, but who is also not an ascetic monk in his family, is the perfect balance. Charlie’s family may not have much but they sacrifice little things to bless each other, and make each other happy. It’s all quite communitarian in its essence and I think a mediocre tale of a good morality.
Three Extremes
Japanese horror trilogy. Two of the stories were just too esoteric for me to appreciate. One on the damages of incest that was a Kabuki like drama, and the other was a killer who traps a movie director but I wasn’t sure what it was all about. But the first one, called Dumplings was the most incredible film about abortion that I have ever seen. I am reminded of A Modest Proposal, a satire by Jonathan Swift written in 1729. Here is it’s full title: “A Modest Proposal: For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public.” Swift was a Christian man whose satire addressed the English attitude toward the Irish with biting sarcasm. Dumplings is a Chinese “Modest Proposal.” It is the story of a woman in China who sells a special meal of dumplings to Chinese women who are seeking to revitalize their youthfulness. The dumplings are in fact made from chopped up aborted fetuses. This film portrays abortion as the cannibalization of the young, for the benefit and convenience of older women. The woman in the story is trying to win back the love of her husband who is seeking younger women for his pleasure. At first, she has a hard time eating the dumplings, swallowing them with difficulty, but after a few times, it becomes a delicacy to her. And then she wants a more potent version of the food, so she gets a late term abortion of a little boy, to which we are shown the abortion and how the young girl dies from the secret abortion she receives from the dumpling woman. But the filmmakers are not arguing to make abortion illegal because of the “back alley” consequences, but rather they are saying that the abortion industry is cannibalistic. And finally, though the woman is past childbearing age, the unholy concoction works and she conceives a child. But in the end, she is so consumed by her selfish pursuit, that she commits her own abortion and eats her own child. It is a truly gruesome in concept, but a very poignant and biblical kind of prophecy, something Jeremiah or Isaiah might proclaim to our modern culture of death.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Boring British stuff. Although it has my favorite character name of all time, Zaphod Beeblebrox. I just love saying that name. Anyway, this story is a road trip movie without much real heart to keep interest. I fell asleep during it. Earth is destroyed to make way for an intergalactic highway, which is clever. But then the escaping hero jets around the universe with his hitchhiking friend meeting all kinds of strange aliens until he can finally get together with the girl he had a crush on. What makes this movie particularly distasteful is that it makes mockery of man’s quest to find meaning and purpose in life through transcendence and religion, in the tradition of Monty Python, and ends up concluding that it’s just in romantic love that there is any meaning. This humanistic romanticism is unsatisfying and insulting to the truth. It’s the attempt to satisfy man’s internal need for the eternal with the temporal. It doesn’t hold water and ends up unsatisfying, as are all naturalistic reductionist love stories. Woman and man cannot fill the need for the eternal God. The finite cannot meet the need of the infinite.
A Sound of Thunder
Not Recommended. This is a movie based on the famous short story about time travel by Ray Bradbury about time travelers who go back into the prehistoric era and step on a butterfly, which changes the entire course of history. I love this premise of the “butterfly effect” and I love time travel movies which are all about changing bad choices in the past to avoid the bad consequences in the present. A worthy premise. But this movie, even though it had a budget of 80 million looked very B-movie with terrible cheesy blue screening and a B-plot rip off of Jurrasic Park but with evolved Baboon-reptile creatures instead of Raptors. There are a lot of deus ex machina moments like the subway collapsing on the sea monster just as it is about to eat Ed Burns, the hero. Oh, it’s not all that bad, it’s just a B-style execution. But worse than that, it is an atheistic evolutionary fairy tale that is deeply dissatisfying. The idea is that when they disrupt something in the past, they don’t affect the future right away, but rather time waves occur bringing instantaneous change every day or so, that climbs up the evolutionary ladder. So, the time travelers kill a butterfly, but when they get back, everything is the same, until a time wave occurs and the vegetation sprouts around the city, taking it over, then some animals start appearing that evolved because they never went extinct supposedly. And of course, it becomes a game of survival until the hero can get back in time to stop the moment where the butterfly was killed. It all just felt like gimmicks and scare tricks rather than an actual intense story. Oh, and the humans turn into fish like amphibian creatures, what a hilarious laugh. But here’s the real goofy kicker: The angry female scientist who rants and raves about scientific responsibility to the greedy capitalist business man who is using the time machine to make money. She is all morally indignant and yells that “If you mess with this time travel, you mess with the whole of evolution,” and she tells the hero, “You have to set things right.” As if there is a right and wrong in evolution?!!? Hello?! There is no right or wrong in evolution, people! There is just change. To make a moral judgment on people meddling with evolution is ludicrous within the evolutionary story. A gazelle thinks it unfair that a crocodile kills and eats it. So, the crocodile thinks Gazelles have no rights. So humans kill off species and devastate rainforests. So do fires and parasites. So what? These atheist evolution stories make all these moral judgments of human behavior as if there is some kind of moral system they are supposed to be following other than their natural drive to destroy, exploit, and eat. Meddling with time travel cannot be wrong upon atheistic evolutionary presuppositions. Evolution is simply the universal fact that everything changes, sometimes slowly, often times through cataclysmic destruction. So a volcano destroys an entire ecosystem. Do these self-righteous self-appointed guardians of evolutionary morality yell and complain to volcanos about their moral responsibility or how about the plague carrying insects that wipe out whole populations or all the animals that make each other go extinct? Then why in HELL are they griping at man when he disrupts the ecosystem? He’s just another animal in the chain of being who adds cataclysmic effects into the equation. How is that wrong or immoral in a universe of matter in motion without morality or right and wrong? There is only survivors and change. So, man kills off a species and then another survives in its stead. So what if man kills everything? The bacteria and viruses will survive and evolve into new organisms cause that‘s just the way it is. So man eats up everything like sharks, I don’t see anyone protesting shark behavior. So humans trample over the environment like a herd of elephants. I don’t see anyone protesting Elephants. If man is no more special than any other animal in the great chain of evolutionary being, then you made your bed of genocidal atrocities, now sleep in it.
The Brothers Grimm
Partially recommended. This Terry Gilliam creation has a fictional version of the brothers who created the famous somewhat gruesome fairytales, as charlatans who exploit the superstitions of medieval peasants to make money. So, they manufacture a fake witch with middle ages technology and then vanquish her, knowing that since witches don’t really exist, there won’t be any real trouble and it will appear that they stopped it all. UNTIL THEY MEET REAL SUPERNATURAL magic and witchcraft and haunted woods. One brother is a “true believer” whose belief in magic beans ruined his destitute family’s life, and the other brother is the consummate materialist who quotes the infamous Hobbesian dictum, “life is short, brutish struggle and then you die.” He is certain “there is a rational explanation for everything.” This is a great set up for the materialist brother by the end to humble his pride and acknowledge not merely the existence of the supernatural, but also the reality of the things that go with it, like love and honor and courage. And he learns it from his naïve brother who keeps seeking the magic and its origins. So their redemption lies in being forced to save a small community haunted by monsters. Their charlatanism is cured and they find true love as well as save a group of about 12 children. They have some great subtle lines that recall famous fairy tales but worked within the story, like “Who’s the fairest of them all” and “huff and puff”. The whole point of this story is the Romantic notion that the onset of rationalism and science stole the mystery out of life, and that has blinded the eyes of the modernist who cannot see the evan vitale, the magic, the supernatural of life. A rather noble sentiment, coming as it does, from one of the atheist Monty Python gang. But then again, his view is more likely to be that of Bruno Bettleheim and the Jungian belief in the archetypes of the collective unconscious. And fairy tales tap into that collective unconscious and unite us in humanity rather than in God and his image. But alas, I do not think that Jungian analysis is the last word in the interpretation of fairy tales. In the tale, the witch must have the blood of others to maintain her eternal life or she returns to her corpse self. Well, that is clearly a substitutionary atonement theme that also reinforces the belief that evil people will consume or kill others in order to benefit their own future and hopes. Kinda sounds like abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research doesn’t it? Consume and kill the young, the old, the less fit and helpless in order to advance your own interests and survival. So the story, like a dark version of Shrek, begins as a deconstruction of fairy tales, but ends up a rather traditional fairy tale.
Sky High
Recommended. This is a live action version of The Incredibles, and I loved it. And it is an example of my inner tension over comic book super heros. On the one hand, Movies like the X-Men franchise seem to be secular god substitutes in being myth carriers like the Greek and Roman pantheons, which causes a nagging dislike for them. On the other hand, movies like Sky High seem to use “super powers” more as a strict metaphor for the specialness or uniqueness of the individual and their contribution to society. Same artistic approach used for different worldviews. At least that’s how I see it. And I’m willing to admit this may be a subjective thing. I think the fact that the typical comic book movie tries to be “realistic” in taking itself more seriously, while Sky High is more tongue in cheek comedic analogy. Maybe that’s what makes it feel different to me. Anyway, the theme of Sky High is about Winners and Losers, the juvenile categorization of high school society. There is a one to one correspondance between how “sidekicks” and “heros” are treated with the winners and losers or the cool and the nerds in high school. The fact that each of the side kicks end up using their “minor” powers to help save the day is an obvious analogy to how each and every person is special and can contribute value to the community. It is very reminiscient of the biblical notion of the Body of Christ. There are some uncomely body parts and some more comely, but ALL are important to the health of the body. There is also a subtle anti-technology theme running in there that is another reflection of The Incredibles. That is, the villain is a technopath that can arrange technology with her mind, while the corresponding love interest for the hero boy is a girl with the powers of nature. She can call forth nature. And both are vying for the hero’s affection. This is much like the villain in The Incredibles who mimics superpowers with technology because he is jealous that he does not have any naturally. So technology here is a tendency toward destruction of our humanity.
The Island
Recommended. Okay, Michael Bay, formula action movie with tons of non-sequitur action sequences. But so what. It brought a transcendence that lifted the formula out of its typical action emptiness and gave it some real heart and soul, something so many action movies just lack. It is an exploration of cloning ethics that bears directly on our current issues of the definition of persons and the value of human life. Truly astounding. It’s the story of some clones who discover they are being bred to harvest their body parts for rich clients. They are born and raised in a facility like cows and are lied to that there is a contamination on the outside world that keeps them locked up in their facility. But there is a lottery that you can win and leave the facility to go to the one uncontaminated paradise left, The Island. Of course, they are actually taken and harvested for their organs and killed. Here is some of the obvious pro-life rhetoric in this film: The company that makes the clones says, “It’s a product, not human,” when questioned about the destruction of such clones (read: embryos). One of the clients tells his clone, “You’re not human. You’re not a person like me.” So the definition of personhood is challenged as well, because we see that the clones are obviously persons who have been defined away as non-persons, much like the Nazis did with the Jews. It’s the power of image showing the attempt to deny the obvious. The pro-clone people see the clones as “Organs in a jelly sack.” And they keep them away from the real world because people would see that they are living breathing human beings, NOT products without souls. When someone wins the lottery to go to the Island, they’re called “Chosen” and this is made a very big point several times throughout. This is an obvious allusion to “Choice” the fruit or results of “choice” is the death of these people. There are some powerful connective allusions to other atrocities of man’s inhumanity to man in history. They are branded with a number, like those in the Holocaust, A black man mentions how his people were called “less than human” in history, and some clones are herded into a gas chamber, another reference to the Holocaust. These are the same arguments made by the Pro-life movement that the declaration of the unborn or clones as “non-human” or “property” is exactly what was done in Nazi Germany and the Slavery movement in America. And to top it off, when the clones are being created, they are in big sacks in fetal positions sucking their thumbs. Another obvious reference to the unborn. Of course for sci-fi to be able to deal with clones that are aged the same as their donors, they have to create a way to grow a clone unnaturally fast, so in this story, they take some tissue and inject human DNA into it and it enables it to grow to the same age as the donor. Whatever. They hide the humanity of the clones by defining them in terms of the “mass of tissue” that they start out as. The point is that the entire run for their lives that the clones are doing is a metaphor for the lives being hunted down by the predators of the pro-choice and cloning movements. We have become a predatorial society that eats its young to sustain its aged. We have become a monstrosity that is dehumanizing humanity, the necessary first step in genocide and atrocity to alleviate the moral guilt. Interestingly, there are some side elements about religion and God that are somewhat ambiguous. On the positive side, the cloning guy says the clones are the “holy grail of science. They have no souls. I will cure leukemia. How many can do that?” (Science as religion) The hero replies, “I guess you and God.” In other words, the old point that scientists try to eliminate God but end up trying to be God in their power. On the negative side, I think the cloning city is made out to be a bit like religion. The point is made that “Contamination is the one global threat” to keep the clones from searching and discovering their true identity. Almost like a slam on the Garden of Eden and God’s curse for eating from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the Island becomes a sort of metaphor for Paradise, or Heaven, and the hero says, “I wish there was more than just waiting to go to the Island.” This worldly, rather than otherworldly. Which really, most Christians would agree, but it is nonetheless a caricature of religion as pie in the sky. But then again, the clones are NOT told anything about God, which is part of the censoring. So when the hero clone hears about God, he asks his secret helper who works for the corporation what God is. He replies, “When you want something and you close your eyes and wish for it. God’s the guy who ignores you.” The clone hero’s donor says he made his clone because he got hepatitis, “a parting gift from God for all my philandering.” So God is mostly dealt with irreverently and negatively, making me think the filmmakers’ were trying to have morality without God, which really only makes them look foolish and hurts the consistency of the philosophy behind their story. When the hero clone tells his love interest that “the Island is real. It’s us.” I think this may be a humanistic turning inward saying, either, “There is no pie in the sky Island paradise, humanity is paradise,” or a more positive version: “we are the means to the end of others to achieve their island.” So the God thing could have been a stronger angle, but may have been deliberately downplayed because of their own worldviews.
Fantastic Four
Ambivalent Recommendation. I say ambivalent because, while on the one hand, I enjoy comic book movies, Fantastic Four was my favorite comic as a kid, and this one was pretty good as those go, I have a growing suspicion of the comicbook superhero culture which I will explain in a minute. First, this one translated the characters pretty well, from the ornery Ben Grimm to the weasley Reed Richards, the sexy Sue Storm and the rowdy juvenile Johnny Storm. The interrelationships of these people suffice as a sort of family structure. The idea that a superpower reflects also the point of weakness for a character works extremely well here. Grimm has an anger management issue which makes him hard as a rock, Johnny is of course, adolescent and passionate which translates to the flame, Sue has the issue of being invisible to the man she loves, Reed, and Reed is so waffling and rubbery in his manliness toward Sue that it causes relationship issues. And even the villain, Dr. Doom, is a steely heartless Tinman. Well, the unique tack of this story was that it was more personal of a villain and goal. Dr. Doom had big designs, but this story was about him trying to eradicate the Fantastic Four in order to carry out his ultimate designs (which, I don’t even remember if he said what those were). Anyway, this personal edge that was atypical from the usual comic book villain trying to take over the world was on the one hand different and refreshing. On the other hand, halfway through I found myself getting bored because it seemed so petty of a goal, that is, personal vengeance on the Four not being an important enough arena to sustain interest. I don’t know, maybe I’m just impossible to please. I enjoyed watching them use their powers together to save people from a major accident scene on the bridge. I enjoyed their discovery of their powers, and I especially enjoyed their troubled relationship with each other. Their superpowers do not make them super virtuous. They are after all, humans too. And in that sense the audience can identify with them and they become mythological models of the pursuit of virtue. My problem with these superhero movies is a nagging little thought at the back of my head of how similar in function comic book superheros have become to the pagan pantheon of Greek and Roman gods. The similarities are scary. The Greeks and Romans did not believe that their gods were real, any more than we do watching our comic book superheros. They were stories to explain the origins of meaning and the values of the culture. The pagan deities were in fact projections of humanity at it’s greatest potential for both good and evil. Just like Superheros and supervillains are in fact, normal humans given extraordinary powers. The pagan pantheon was petty, bickering and struggled with vice, just as the FF bicker with each other, or the X-Men are demigods, yet frail. A big difference is that the Roman/Greek gods were religious, and superheros are not. But is that really true? What I mean is that the deities were worshipped as deities and were somewhat transcendent. But now, deity is relocated INTO nature, that is an intrinsic guiding process of change that operates with providential control through scientific laws. I see the new trend toward super power origins to be rooted in evolution. In the 50s and up, powers usually came from some atomic accident, marking the danger of science as well as it’s ultimate modernist saving hope for mankind. A delicate balance. But with XMen and now, FF, powers come from evolutionary adaptation. In Fantastic Four, the cosmic storm cloud that gives them their powers is described in the beginning as the source of life on earth as it interacted with the elements billions and billions of years ago. So, we see how the metanarrative mythology of evolution (unguided chance processes) is replacing the mythology of humanism (Accidental human genius). But of course, they are really just two sides of the same coin of modernity. But really, modernity is just a naturalistic religion that substitutes chance for fate or providence, substitutes immanence for transcendence (this worldly rather than otherworldly), and substitutes human love as ultimate in place of love of one’s creator. But modernity, or evolution, operate as systems of salvation where man is “saved” from his ignorance and superstition by his intellect, rationality and science. Ignorance replaces sin in this religious paradigm of modernity. So the point is that modernism does not replace religion with a non-religious paradigm, it merely replaces one religious paradigm with another religious paradigm of secular scientism and evolution, which still operates to explain the same questions of origin and meaning that religion does. Therefore, evolution is really just another religious story meant to give meaning to the world based on a faith commitment to an ultimate that cannot be proved, namely naturalistic chance processes. Okay, back to superheros. It is interesting that in FF, Johnny Storm muses that their powers are “a higher calling,” that “fate turned us into gods.” So there is an explicit metaphoric likening to deities that is recognized in the film itself. I am not making this up in my mad little mind. Just a cursory comparison of superheros with pagan deities will give you a taste of the likenesses.
Human torch – Vulcan, Roman god of fire
Be Grimm, The Hulk – Mars, Roman god of war
Superman – Hercules
The Flash – Mercury, Roman messenger god of speed
Aquaman, The SubMariner – Neptune, god of the sea
Of course, I am not suggesting a one to one correspondence, but merely a common paradigm of exalted humanity that replaces the One true God with many gods, a common impulse since the Fall. My point: Superheros have a tendency to operate as secular god substitutes in a postmodern pluralistic culture. They give us hope, they save us from evil, they provide an example of virtue and illustrate for us what we could be. Every system has an ultimate reference point and that ultimate reference point or standard is the deity of the system. The deity of pluralism is polytheism. Pluralism means “many truths,” which means, “many gods.” Having said all this, I am not condemning all superhero stories. I may be missing what separates the two mythologies. I am simply wrestling with thoughts that are creeping up in my mind as I interact with these myths and think them through. One fine example is The Incredibles, where I see superpowers, not as a secular god substitute, but as an obvious metaphor of the potential for extraordinariness and uniqueness of each individual. Maybe that’s not all that different from Fantastic Four. I’m not sure. Still thinking it through.
War of the Worlds
Not recommended. Another humanistic epic that destroys transcendence and in so doing, destroys the goodness that makes a movie a fulfilling story. First of all, the FX are fantastic, but ultimately empty because they are so devoid of “human” quality making this on the level of those old old flying saucer movies of just big robots killing and destroying everything. Well, that gets boring real quick without the personal element of the aliens explored. The most interesting part of the movie was the sole scene where aliens come down and the heros are hiding out underneath their noses. But then this scene accomplishes nothing for the story and tells us really nothing about the aliens. Compare this to the brilliant “personal” intimacy of Alien, and it falls like a sack of potatoes. I must say though that Spielberg is a brilliant mythologist. He knows how to create mythos like nobody else. One one level, this story reminds me of his rendition of Kubrick’s A.I. It is very boring and impersonal, but it is very mythologically deep. Like A.I. this is a quest of someone who discovers his humanity through the existential experience of seeking a goal (bringing the children back to their mom and “home” – in A.I. it was finding his maker) and staying alive. Existentialism. On the other hand, also like A.I. it’s a quest in a meaningless universe. Do you see the pattern here in Spielberg? Let me explain. First of all, it is based on a novel by the humanist socialist, H.G. Wells, who was also a materialist. And it stays true to the overarching essential premise that the aliens are unstoppable and the only way they lose is because of their biological unfitness. They are killed by the common bacteria that as the movie says, “humans have earned the right to survive from because of billions of death,” or our rights based on our immunity. Biology is destiny. Simple minded evolutionism, naïve reductionism, diabolical humanism. Cruise is the humanist hero who is rather anti-heroic in that he has no courage other than to survive by running, and he never changes, never wavers from that goal, and in fact turns out to be an insipid, boring, and coward, not a hero. His son was more heroic, willing to fight the evil, and yet he ends up accomplishing nothing. This of course illustrates that it was foolish to try to fight, the major theme of the film. But the only reason he doesn’t die is Spielberg’s commitment to Hollywood endings. You can’t have the kid die, the family has to get together in the end. I’ll talk more about this in a minute, that I think it contradicts the humanism he is trying to preach, which evidences that in his heart of hearts, he is driven by the knowledge of truth, but is struggling against it in his ideology, or as Christians like to point out, his sin nature that suppresses the knowledge of God. Anyway, this happy Hollywood ending is not insipid or unrealistic as naïve realists (who are actually undercover nihilists) claim. It is actually the inherent understanding of Eucatastrophe, as Tolkien called it. The pointing toward an ultimate righting of the all the wrongs in the universe, the eschaton of Final Judgement that is inherently embedded into creation. Happy endings in storytelling or art do not point to happy endings in this life, but to the ultimate eucatastrophic happy ending promised by God. It is God’s image in man that makes him long for such happy endings and in fact makes story telling unsatisfying that does not in some reflect at least a hinting towards it. So back to humanist. It is no coincidence that Spielberg has a church be the big dramatic building that crashes to the ground first when the giant alien robot explodes out of the ground. In this humanistic view, religion is the first to go with the triumphalism of scientific materialism. And then the reduction of people to masses of foolish herds trying to survive and turning on each other shows that humanity cannot rescue itself, we don’t have the goodness to do so. Actually, I concur with this, though not for the same reasons as the humanist suggests, that we are the products of billions of years of such arbitrary death and destruction and through such dying those who survive are the strongest, not the righteous. Then, the big “message” sequence is when Cruise and his daughter are holed up in a basement with a survival nut who believes in resistance, played by Tim Robbins. This is the man who says that we must not run and flee, but fight and resist. And of course he is a crazy. And his hopes are ultimately shown to be foolishly naïve, thinking that he can hide and then get the jump on the aliens, and then he is digging a tunnel with a shovel saying they will have underground tunnels to live in and resist the aliens, when of course he won’t get but 10 feet with his little shovel. It’s all to show that resistance is futile. Now, here are some interesting contradictions that I don’t think Spielberg is even aware of. Here is a man who made Schindler’s List, who supports a just war in Saving Private Ryan (although it’s a bit deconstructed, but that’s another story). Here is a Jewish man who is haunted by his people being the victims of one of the worst atrocities of genocide and now he makes a movie that suggest the opposite of his other movies. Fighting great impossible evil is foolish. So, what if the French Resistance didn’t fight back against the Nazis? What if the US didn’t fight against the juggernaut of imperialist Axis of Evil in WWII? And he makes obvious holocaust references with the revelation that the aliens are “exterminating” humans, and then he has a mist of blood in the air that is based on the using of humans as energy and spitting out the excess blood, an obvious reference to the snowflakes of ashes created by Nazi crematoriums. YET, I think War of the Worlds suggests that fighting great evil is futile. Thank God our ancestors did not believe such tripe. Thank God for the Bravehearts of this world. This mixed message is further complicated when we see Cruise ending up in Boston at a statue of Paul Revere or some other Founding Father coated with the alien vines, another obvious reference to freedom from tyranny. It made me think of the superiority of Independence Day, which played like a political tract out of the American Revolution itself, but so what, it used the mythology of that Revolution in a creative entertaining way and validated that humanity is at its greatest when it won’t stand for evil, no matter how impossible the odds. This is greatness, this is courage, this is humanness as it should be, which is why Independence Day blows War of the Worlds away. Because Independence Day was transcendent and touched that seed of truth, that image of God in all of us. Yes, history is littered with failed attempts to stop evil, but it has FAR MORE successes against impossible odds that prove not that you will always win, but that it is worth it to die trying, something the self destruction of the Tim Robbins crazy character tries to disprove. But verrrrrrry interesting that Tom Cruise KILLS that character to try to protect himself and his child. Now this is surely one of the most abominable choices in the movie. Think of the political implications of such reasoning in the modern war on terror (And that’s what this movie is about, let’s face it. Spielberg hinted at this in a Reuters article: “There are politics underneath some of the scares, and some of the adventure and some of the fear,”, the machines being planted underneath us and then “awakened” is an obvious analogy of sleeper terrorist cells). So this idea of Cruise killing the Robbins kook is an act of violence and hatred against those who believe in fighting tyranny. The hypocrisy is so staggering that it makes you hate the hero, it turns him into an unsympathetic hero. Not because he killed the guy to protect himself but because he was a pacifist seeking to stay alive and run and not fight back who kills his own people while avoiding fighting the true evil. Pacifists who will kill Patriots, like animal rights people who hate humans and would kill them before they would an animal, or environmentalists who would destroy humanity to save the environment. So the Cruise character just illustrates what’s wrong with the humanistic liberal hero, he is unsympathetic and cowardly, and uninteresting. I also find it interesting that America is always criticized as being imperialist in its origins, that Europeans marched into the New World and brought their diseases that wiped out the poor innocent indigents. But in this movie, by giving victory to those who are biologically more equipped to survive, Spielberg unwittingly justifies Europe’s taking over the New World. The Indians just weren’t evolutionarily prepared, tough luck, baby, only the most adaptable survive. Ah, the monstrosity of evolutionary humanism. Unsatisfying. My personal motto: Ideas have consequences, folks. Ideas have consequences.