Pacific Rim: Global Warming Causes Godzilla

Posted on July 12, 2013 by admin

Japanese Godzilla movie Hollywood style. Huge monsters created by SUV exhaust, oil pipelines, second hand smoke, and our failure to protect the California Delta Smelt.

The world is being attacked by huge monsters (called Kaiju), not from outer space, but from underneath the sea in the ocean’s crust. So the nations bind together to create huge robots (called Jaegers) to equal their size and fight back. These robots are driven by two pilots whose minds are synchronized in a neural net connection so that they can act as one. The problem is, the giants are getting too big and are kicking robot A., so they decide to drop the robot program and put all their energies into building huge walls to keep out the Kaiju. Obviously stupid decision when the walls are busted like nothing. So they gather a few of the remaining “old school” robots to fight back.

Okay, I don’t care for Japanese Humongous Fighting Monster Movies. But I must admit, I enjoyed this one as a popcorn spectacle. I think Del Toro did a good job of creating a sense of the size of the monsters and the fighting was kinda cool. Yes, this movie is filled with all the cliché formula elements: The hero, Raleigh, is a “top gun” with an attitude who doesn’t follow orders (Hey, when have we ever seen that?), a love interest of a girl who is a combat pilot with just as good fighting skills as the hero so they are equals, two goofy scientist types to provide comic relief and a scientific discovery of how to beat the monsters, and another top gun who hates the hero until the hero saves him! Oh, and also a fascinating bad guy who holds the key to helping them out (played by the inimitable Ron Perlman). But so what. THAT IS WHAT THESE MOVIES HAVE BECAUSE IT WORKS. If you accept that they are primarily about the spectacle, then just sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

But that is not to say that it does not have some character development or thematic intentions.

The whole element of the pilots needing to “mind meld” with each other and therefore enter into their brains and memories sets up a pretty cool thematic element of how hard it is to let someone into your pain and hurt, and how we must let people in or we will ultimately fail in our humanity. There is even a line by one of the characters, “It’s hard to let someone in to really trust them.” After Raleigh loses his brother (his copilot, since siblings are prime cases for synchronized minds), he of course gives up and has to learn again how to let someone in again, and YES, it has to be a girl pilot, because we want ROMANCE! (An interesting side note is that Del Toro deliberately avoids the romantic subplot implications at the end when the hero and girl DO NOT KISS. It is a kiss scene for sure, but they just lean their foreheads out of happiness that they are alive.

There is a thematic conflict between obedience and respect as Raleigh must face the consequences of his own rule breaking that leads to his heartbreak in his life.

And of course, individualism versus being a team player. The hero has much to offer with his skills, but he must learn to work as a team and ultimately to offer himself as a sacrifice or he will never be the full human he needs to be.

SPOILER ALERT: Anyway, my “agenda gripe” for the day is that we ultimately learn that the aliens are colonizers who have been waiting to take over the planet and kill us so they can move onto another planet. The problem was that in the days of the dinosaurs, we are told, the planet was not able to sustain their life forms. But then the crazy scientist says that thanks to our ozone and carbon output, we made terra firma livable for them.

This is a common thematic element of sci-fi movies, and it follows the formula from the olden days. The monstrous terror is the consequences of our own hubris. (Remember Frankenstein?) Okay, fair enough. We create the monsters that hurt us, so we must change. It’s a sociological and political statement. Just like all the monsters in the olden days were caused by atomic radiation, thus causing the terror of end of the world destruction that lay over our heads like the sword of Damocles.

Just know that every single movie about every global end of the world scenario will always now be about global warming and the accusation that humans are causing the catastrophe by our use of energy and our carbon output. Even though these anti-science flat earth like claims are demonstrably not true in our real world, every movie, every TV show and all entertainment will always make the claim. (Already happening: 2012, Day After Tomorrow, After Earth, Oblivion, probably Elysium too). And the ignorant that make up the masses will be believing it and accepting it as an assumed truth because they’ve been told it over and over. You are being propagandized through the media and entertainment. That is how propaganda works. You repeat the slogan over and over in all forms of media and entertainment and suppress all skepticism: “We are causing the end of the world through our carbon output,” “We are causing the end of the world through our carbon output,” “We are causing the end of the world through our carbon output.” And hey, wouldn’t you know it, people are thinking, “We are causing the end of the world through our carbon output.” Gee, I wonder why they think that? It ain’t cause of the facts, folks. It’s because you’ve been propagandized.

This is the new puritanical religion of environmentalism. It projects guilt for “sins” and demands repentance or the end of the world. It has a vast institution of power called Big Government that controls a multi-billion dollar empire of propaganda and control, High priests of “scientists” who damn you if you question their dogma. And it has its fanatical terrorists called Big Green who engage in inquisitions that end up killing people by withholding help in the name of their religion (the DDT scandal, genetically modified foods for the poor, and energy sources for blacks in the third world and on and on). And anyone who denies it is an “other,” a heathen, a polluter who wants to pollute the earth or being paid by Big Oil. In the movie, a guy says that some believe “The Kaiju were sent from heaven to punish us” (for our carbon output).

I would have to say though, that there is a very interesting truth embodied in this story that I am not sure the filmmakers intended because it does not fit their typical left wing paradigm. The solution in this movie (as in all these End-of-the-World scenarios) to overcome the villain, and save the world is NUCLEAR BOMBS. It kinda has to be since we have nothing bigger. But if you see where I am going… The Bad Guy Boogieman of yesteryear is now the hero solution, literally AND metaphorically, which should really tick off the environmentalist flat-earthers. Because of course, Enviromentalists successfully suppressed the expansion of nuclear power with their radical activism. But now, nuclear power is THE CLEANEST source of power we have, with virtually ZERO CARBON OUTPUT. Uh oh. That doesn’t bode well for religious science-denying dogma.

And on the other side, Nuclear weapons are the only ultimate source of being able to stop global human evil of the Kaiju kind (Islamism, Communism). Why? Because evil only respects power and force. And the bigger power and more totalitarian a monster gets (Iran, N. Korea), the only thing that will stop them is the threat of nuclear weapons. You know, those things that the current administration is trying to do away with. So, who are the real Monsters?

One word: I am not being paid by Big Oil, but if any of them would like to help fund my work, I would gladly consider offers.

Beautiful Creatures: Ugly Monsters, Anti-Christian Hate Speech

Posted on June 20, 2013 by admin

Beautiful Creatures is a YA (young adult) paranormal romance, coming of age story about a teen, Ethan, who falls for troubled girl, Lena, who happens to be a witch. In just a matter of weeks, Lena is about to reach her 16th birthday, where she will be “claimed” by either the dark side or the good side of the powerful forces that control their lives. Her uncle, Macon (on the good side) and her mother, Serafine (the wickedest witch of the west) both fight over her soul to pull her to their respective sides. The problem is that this Claiming for good or evil is beyond the powers of the witches themselves. It seems to be connected to some innate essence in them, but nobody knows which side will achieve the Claiming.

This is a tale of Fate vs. Choice and the belief that humans have the power to “make their own lives,” or “control their own fate.” It is a story about identity.

It sets up a world in the South of hackneyed stereotypes and cliché occultic powers. Christians are made out to be religious bigots who ban books to keep children from experiencing the wonderfully liberating glories of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., spout self righteous mean words about witches, reject outsiders, and of course, are racists (Since they are depicted as rejecting the book “To Kill a Mockingbird.” – Puh-leeze) In other words, they are the trumped up tired old boogeyman and whipping boy of secular bigots and Hollywood hicks who have no clue of the real world outside their cloistered mansions of vanity and self-righteousness.

Topping it all off, is the villain, who is the mean witch inhabiting the body of the most religious and uptight church lady of them all, Mrs. Lincoln, played by the otherwise inimitable Emma Thompson. The filmmakers go out of their way to show Lincoln using the name of Jesus and praying, as if we should all be aware of such “evil” people who love Jesus. Children’s prayers are shown as powerless against the young Lena, who can blow out windows with a mighty power. Hey, let’s all be pagans cause they have a more powerful religion!

Okay, so if you can get past this anti-Christian hate speech J, the movie deals with some other universal issues of coming of age and choosing our destiny for good over evil. Of course, there are good witches and bad witches, another modern bias, so it’s all about what you do with the powers you’ve been given. That’s why they like to call themselves “Casters,” (of spells) rather than the negative term “witch.” Ah, that liberal talent for euphemism and thought control through language.

But the entire dramatic question through the movie is: Can Lena control her own fate or is she subject to natural causes? The old free will debate.

This brings up a rather obvious undercurrent of theme to the entire movie, namely about the hormonal changes in young women as they come of age (the “curse” as they say), and whether or not they will give in to their emotional instability or master it. Politically incorrect, but truthful. Okay, this movie isn’t all bad. Boys and men are relentlessly chastised in our feminized society to learn how to suppress their natural urges for sex from their destructive tendencies. Finally, a story that admits girls and women have to fight their natural urges for emotional excess from their destructive tendencies. One merit.

But there’s another kind of redeeming theme that this movie wrestles with: Sacrifice. The problem that Lena struggles with is a curse brought upon her by her ancestor who was a witch during the Civil War. When this witch violated the natural order by casting a spell to bring her beloved back from the dead, she brought this curse that Lena now struggles with.

At one point in the movie, there is a scene of a preacher explaining to his congregation the power of sacrifice. He says that “Some people believe sacrifice is loss, giving up things in a world where we are supposed to be able to have it all. But I believe true sacrifice is a victory. It is giving up something you love for someone you love more than yourself.” And Lena realizes that to break the curse, she must do the opposite of her ancestor: She must let someone she loves die. She must give up what she loves most, and that will have to be her new love, Ethan.

Okay, now sacrifice is not an explicitly Christian notion. Pagans also believe in sacrifice. All religions have it through all of history, because the Creator embedded it into reality. But I still have to give some kudos for the film portraying ONE PERSON, ONE MOMENT of a real Christian speaking truth. Two merits.

And I have to give some credit to the fact that the villainess does say ONE LINE that actually resonated truth as well. Now keep in mind that what the villainess believes will be the worldview that is critiqued because the bad guy (girl) believes bad things. Got it? So when Serafine says, “Love is a spell created by mortals to give females something to play with beside power,” we see a rather poignant damnation of feminism. I’m not saying the filmmakers were deliberate here. They may not have realized it. I just don’t know. But that claim is precisely the bitterness and false accusation that feminism projects onto western culture. It is a bitterness that one of the heroes says sacrifice wins the battle against. Again, it ain’t ALL bad. Three merits.

My ultimate gripe comes with the metanarrative that drives the worldview of this story, and that is the belief that our destiny is ultimately in our own hands. We “claim ourselves,” we don’t have to be claimed by anything outside ourselves, such as society, or other people, or even natural law – or even, dare I say — GOD?

Well I have an idea where that self-righteous view of human autonomy comes from. As the SNL Church Lady used to say, “Could it be – Satan?”

Cloud Atlas: Freedom, Dystopias, and Sex Change Operations

Posted on June 19, 2013 by admin

On DVD. As a movie fan, I have a love/detest relationship with the Wachowskis. Sometimes, they poop out very terrible pieces of excrement with bad philosophy, like V For Vendetta, and sometimes they make visually stunning, thought-provoking films — with bad philosophy, like The Matrix (I give them a break. No one is a 100% hitter). Cloud Atlas is one of the latter. One thing is for sure, they always deliver consistently bad philosophy. However, like Nietzsche, their hero (they are Nietzschean after all), they are great with words. And they are excellent at embodying their bad philosophy into story. They are great storytellers, these two.

Cloud Atlas is an adaptation of the novel by David Mitchell. The film is a quite fascinating intercutting of six stories that all take place in different time periods and sometimes different planets, yet are all interconnected in their theme because as one of their dialogue memes goes, “Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present.” The brilliant hook they provide is that in each story, the same handful of actors play the lead characters in different roles. This is a very creative tactic to embody one of their themes that I will address in a moment.

1) One story takes place in the 1800s about an Englishman’s awakening to the horrors of slavery.

2) Another story takes place in the 1970s about a black American reporter uncovering a scandal by “Big Oil” to ruin the advent of nuclear power.

3) Another story takes place in the Victorian period, I think, about a homosexual music student that transcribes for an old famous composer, who uses the kid’s genius for his own benefit.

4) Another story takes place in the present, where an old geezer is forced into an old folks home by his brother and plans to escape with a motely band of other marginalized oldsters.

5) Another story takes place in the future, where a “fabricant” created for the pleasure of humans becomes self aware and turns into a sort of female messiah of revolution (One of the Wachowskis’ favorite themes)

6) Yet another story takes place in the distant future, after the apocalypse caused by that big oil scam, where a primitive man interacts with an alien humanoid and turns from a coward into a hero.

Whew! That might look like too much to follow, but it really isn’t. They do quite an excellent job of intercutting between cliff hangers of each story and bouncing around between the stories in such a way as to tie them all together in a thematic montage about freedom, oppression, dystopia, and identity politics. “We are bound to others, past and present.”

All the stories are about individuals who discover or live under some kind of oppression, whether its slavery, big corporations, old people in an old folks home, or the government in the future. They each have a unique individuality that causes them to feel constrained by their world and want to break out. Though my personal favorite was the post-apocalyptic story of a man who turns from coward to hero, the most philosophically blatant story is the futuristic dystopia. There, the society is called “Unanimity,” which obviously represents homogeneity where everyone is the same in one big “unanimous” entity. Wachowskis are GREAT with working quotes elegantly into their storylines, and Cloud Atlas is full of them. Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian intellect who wrote of Soviet Communist oppression of their own people in the post WWII era is quoted, “You can maintain power over people as along as you give them something. Rob a man of everything and you no longer have any power over him.” Beautiful truth that punches through.

Another beautiful phrase is spoken by the old man in the old folks home: “Freedom is the fatuous jingle of our civilization. Only those deprived of it have the barest inkling what it really is.” Yet another line that echoes through the stories in different character’s mouths as the revolutionary inspiration is the line of a movie, “I will not be subjected to criminal abuse.”

Like good Nietzscheans, they struggle against the very nihilism of a naturalistic world without God as several villains repeat, “Only one principle on earth. The weak are meat and the strong do eat.” The characters in this world are shaped by forces that “began long before we are born and go on long after we die.” In the future, fabricants are “expired” by being told they are going to “exaltation” (read: “heaven”), but they are only being processed into food to be given to other fabricants. In other words, transcendent beliefs are delusion. All there is is here and now and the naturalistic processes of life.

Now comes their magic trick. They attach that naturalism, a philosophy that believes in the existence of only natural causation, and therefore no supernatural, and they attach it to the villains in the stories who reiterate the philosophy that “There is a natural order to this world, and it must be protected.” They ask the question that if God created the world, then what changes and what is sacred and inviolable, and they conclude that our identities are socially, or more importantly, individually constructed.

This is identity politics, and I think is the main thematic thrust of the movie. As one character says, “All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended,” and “My life extends far beyond the limitations of me.” And lastly, as another says, “I can feel your heart beating as my own, and I know separation is an illusion.”

I think the import here is definitely the notion that our identities as humans is plastic. It is shaped by our own self-definition, not by God through his natural created order, because they believe there is no natural order of things. To them, the natural order is an oppression. And those who believe in natural law are the villains. So therefore to be a man or woman, gay or straight is oppression and we should be able to craft ourselves as anything we want, an obvious dominant theme in the Wachowski brother’s bad philosophy, and the obvious justification for Lana’s own real world body mutilation to change his gender. I suspect it will be a theme of just about every movie they make since it is at least Lana’s religion.

The way they embody this belief of theirs in the story is quite ingenious though. The same lead characters play the different leads of each story. But more importantly, just about every character plays both a male and female character (with make up of course), and a different race as well in the different stories. So Blacks and Asians play whites and visa versa. They incarnate the plasticity of human identity into their very filming, in order to show that there is no difference between men and women, different races, or even good guy and bad guy, as characters are good guys in one story and bad guys in another. While this certainly holds true for race because race is itself an artificial human construct that is of no significance, it is also applied to things that truly are significantly different, such as gender. So we create ourselves according to this postmodern nonsense.

Now, of course, this is a mixed bag, because the question of freedom and the individual is clearly a powerful and beautiful theme to reveal oppression and totalitarian control of the collective. There is much truth to this story and much beauty in its revelation of the abuse of power and order and the collective. Unfortunately, the filmmakers provide an answer of equal monstrosity, namely the absoluteness of the individual without accountability. They don’t realize that their statement about all of us being connected from womb to tomb by forces beyond us is in fact a statement about the very natural order, boundaries, and collective reality they condemn. Either we are connected to a transcendant order or we are not. Make up your minds, Wachowskis.

It represents the perpetual quest of man to reject God’s order and God’s Law as boundary conditions for our betterment. It is the Edenic rebellion of personal autonomy from our Creator.

New radio interview about Myth in the Bible and Abraham the Giant Killer

Posted on May 17, 2013 by admin

Check out my interview with Off The Grid Radio about Myth in the Bible and Abraham in the land of Giants, Canaan:

Godawa on Off The Grid about Myth and Abraham

Get Chronicles of the Nephilim on Audiobook!

Posted on May 13, 2013 by admin

As many of you know, I am not only a filmmaker, but an author of novels.
My current Biblical Fantasy saga, Chronicles of the Nephilim is being received with much love and fandom.

Chronicles of the Nephilim is a saga that charts the rise and fall of the Nephilim and just what their place is in the evil plans of the fallen Sons of God called, “The Watchers.” These rogue members of God’s divine council will stop at nothing to win their war as the Seed of the Serpent against the Seed of Eve. But God has other plans!

But I need your help.

I want to put the whole series on audiobook so more people can get the series.

So please check out my Kickstarter Campaign and consider pledging to the cause!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE COOL VIDEO EXPLAINING EVERYTHING ON KICKSTARTER

You’ll get rewards that are better than if you bought the items from Amazon or Audible.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Posted on December 17, 2012 by admin

Ordinary man changes the world. DO NOT see this in 48 fps, and DO NOT see it in 3D. The first made it look like a bad British Television Soap Opera and the 3d was completely ad hoc worthless. But other than that, it was a great movie! It took half the movie for me to stop noticing how bad the image looked with it’s video like edges. It was so interruptive in a bad sense that it spoiled that first half for me. I was thinking about how “realism” as a dominating genre or worldview can have some deleterious effects, especially when applied to fantasy.

Now, the goal of storytelling is verisimilitude. That is, the author wants the audience to feel that regardless of the fact that the story may be fictional, or fantastic, or poetic, or their opposites, it still “rings true” with human nature or the way things really are or should be. It “seems real.” Now, this not only goes for the human drama or characterization or emotions, but for the look and feel of the movie. We all know how bad makeup or monster suits can “take us out of” our suspension of disbelief and we then feel cheated. Good 3D (Like in Avatar) will make us feel like “we are really there.” HD or 4K can bring a sharpness of image that give us “more to see” and therefore more to ingest of the imaginary world. I would not deny that 24 frames per second (fps) creates an initial distortion of the looking glass to which we have become accustomed, and that all such customs are often challenged and often overturned as cultural bias. Look at the film versus digital debate. I too prefer grain, and have embraced digital only insofar as it can replicate the moods and images of film, which is often achieved through lighting and cinematography. I even prefer the video look for certain genres that require it to give the feel of “reality” such as found footage horror films. So there is a time and place for all kinds of techniques to produce effects in the audience.

But this 48 fps thing stinks.

It creates a “staged look” of a television play that intends to be more “realistic” but in fact is less so. What I mean is that when we speak of “realistic” let’s not fool ourselves into thinking “realism” is a superior genre or any less of a biased genre or prejudicial worldview than any other. The very notion of “reality” begs the question, “whose version of reality?” What often masquerades as realism is in fact a nihilistic worldview or at least a blind humanistic elevation of empirical observation. Who says that being able to see the pores in an actor’s skin is more “realistic”? Only the person who believes that scientifically observed details are more important than the spiritual journey of the character, or that ignores the fact that our eyes actually operate to obscure some details in order to see the bigger patterns of “reality.” Or consider the more “realistic” movies that don’t portray angels or demons. Why is this more realistic? Because “we all know that such things don’t exist” says the ignorant humanistic physicalist. Do you see how “realism” is just a bucket to pour one’s own prejudices into about his version of reality? I think Orcs and wizards are more “real” than most news reporting from the mainstream media since they are so manipulative and selective of facts, they almost never tell the truth. If you doubt me, just be the subject of any news report and you’ll see what I mean. I’ve had people “report” on my blog about the Noah movie as being that I “don’t like the fantasy” of it or that I had no problem with the environmentalism of it. Both of which are completely the OPPOSITE of what I wrote. But the depiction of the Trolls in the Hobbit are definitely like people I’ve known.

So don’t try to tell me that 48 fps is more “realistic” cause it’s not. It’s more Soap Operaish and ugly and that is not a good thing for a fantasy epic. Rather than watching a fantasy story, you feel like you are on the set watching the actors act.

Back to the story…

One big thematic thing stuck out to me, and that was the line that Gandalf said that embodied the entire epic, about how it’s not really extraordinary people who change the world, but the ordinary who do normal acts of goodness. That really hit home with hope because it seems that in today’s world of increasing government and societal oppression over all areas of life, us normal people, us little guys, can feel an awful lot ineffective. We’re just a bunch of hobbits who want to be left alone to enjoy our lives in our own communities. Like Bilbo, we’re not heros. We want to leave others alone to live their lives. But evil does not sleep, and evil will not stop trying to control until it rules over everyone. So by trying to “live and let live” we are actually empowering evil and its net of fear to destroy innocence and spread. We must stand up and do something to help others. This is what Bilbo learns in his relationship with Thorin Oakenshield. If he does nothing and hides his head in the ground, Great men of goodness like Thorin will die. So when Bilbo finally becomes the rallying man to save Thorin from the Wargs and the Pale Orc, we see a man who has grabbed a hold of his responsibility to fight evil in this world, even if he is small and ordinary and has no chance. And it is of particular importance that he does not use the Ring when he does try to save Thorin. If he used the Ring, it would have protected him in such a way as to preclude sacrifice. It would have been easy. But instead, he fights the enemy with full danger of losing his life in order to save the fallen Dwarf king. That single act of courage is the high point of the entire story and pinpoints Bilbo’s transformation into a hobbit of honor and courage.

When Thorin repents for considering Bilbo a worthless chap that they should have left in Hobbiton, they cement a connection that shows everyone has something to give to help in the fight against evil. It is the small things, the little things, the ordinary things of life that can change the world. When the fellowship of dwarves is caught by the Goblins, Bilbo is completely overlooked because he is so small and unassuming. The tiny Ring of course carries the destiny of Middle Earth and its held by the sniveling Gollum and then the small humble hobbit Bilbo.

Being small and ordinary is not so bad or meaningless a life. And that’s why this story is so grand and universal, because it shows that in a world of fighting titans, both good and evil, it’s the little guys doing the right things that add up to changing the world as much as any king or wizard.

It’s kind of a pity that by adding in all the back story battles, Jackson has turned The Hobbit from a lighter fairy tale type story into a darker story more like Lord of the Rings. But I reckon those who worship the mythology of Middle Earth may be pleased to have the extra material in there.

Best Scene: When Bilbo meets Gollum and they have the riddle game sequence. Gollum’s penchant for melodrama and juvenile narcissism makes him the single most endearing nemesis in all of movie storydom for me because we both hate him and have pity for him – because he is US.

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah: Environmentalist Wacko

Posted on October 29, 2012 by admin

Okay, here is the full article I wrote analyzing the Noah script. More here than where it was published online.

By Brian Godawa

As a screenwriter of films like To End All Wars and Alleged which deal with faith, and as the author of a novel called Noah Primeval about what led up to the Great Flood, I am especially conscious of issues relating to the intersection of Hollywood and the Bible and I’ve been keeping tabs on a film that lives at that intersection, a film called Noah, written by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel. I’ve also watched with great anticipation as a post-Passion of The Christ Hollywood tries to come to grips with how to reach the massive faith-friendly audience and I’m concerned about the phenomenon that I see, which is films being developed for that audience by people who don’t understand it and are thus destined to fail. Then when they do fail, as expected, smug Hollywood executives declare “See, that audience doesn’t really exist.” I don’t want that to keep happening. I want films to be properly developed so that they can succeed. It is in that spirit that I offer my analysis of Aronofsky and Handel’s Noah script. I believe that it’s never too late to right a ship that is heading in the wrong direction.

Having got a chance to read an undated version of the script for Noah I want to warn you. If you were expecting a Biblically faithful retelling of the story of the greatest mariner in history and a tale of redemption and obedience to God you’ll be sorely disappointed. Noah paints the primeval world of Genesis 6 as scorched arid desert, dry cracked earth, and a gray gloomy sky that gives no rain – and all this, caused by man’s “disrespect” for the environment. In short, an anachronistic doomsday scenario of ancient global warming. How Neolithic man was able to cause such anthropogenic catastrophic climate change without the “evil” carbon emissions of modern industrial revolution is not explained. Nevertheless, humanity wanders the land in nomadic warrior tribes killing animals for food or wasteful trophies.

In this oppressive world, Noah and his family seek to avoid the crowds and live off the land. Noah is a kind of rural shaman, and vegan hippy-like gatherer of herbs. Noah explains that his family “studies the world,” “healing it as best we can,” like a kind of environmentalist scientist. But he also mysteriously has the fighting skills of an ancient Near Eastern Ninja (Hey, it’s a movie, give it a break).

Noah maintains an animal hospital to take care of wounded animals or those who survive the evil “poachers,” of the land. Just whose animal rights laws they are violating, I am not sure, since there are only fiefdoms of warlords and tribes. Be that as it may, Noah is the Mother Teresa of animals.

Though God has not spoken to men or angels for a long time, Noah is haunted by recurring dreams of a rainstorm and flood that he surmises is God’s judgment on man because as Noah says, “At our hand, all he created is dying.” The trees, the animals, and the environment. “If we change, if we work to save it, perhaps he will too [save us].” Or as grandfather Methuselah reiterates, “We have destroyed this world, so we ourselves will be destroyed. Justice.” Oh, and I almost forgot, they kill people too, but it’s not really as important. In another place, “We have murdered each other. We raped the world. The Creator has judged us.” The notion of human evil is more of an afterthought or symptom of the bigger environmental concern of the great tree hugger in the sky.

Noah seeks advice from his grandfather, Methuselah, the oldest man alive, who lives in a cave. Unfortunately for fighting pacifist Noah, he has to go through the Watcher’s Land to get there. The Watchers are angels who came down from heaven to help fallen humanity by granting them wonders of knowledge from magic to science to stars, metal, and fire. But when mankind turned that knowledge into weapons of war and tools of environmental devastation, God banished the Watchers to earth and turned his back on them. Now, they reside as 18-feet tall, six-armed grumpy angelic complainers who resent mankind.

Through tricky movie dialogue, Noah convinces the Watchers to help him and he receives a magic seed from Methuselah that blooms a magical forest in the desert. It’s really a quite imaginative and powerful scene that shows God’s miraculous provision. Noah uses this timber to build his boat (Wait a second. Wouldn’t that make him an evil clear cutting lumberjack?). So the Watchers help him build the craft. Followed by another beautiful sequence of a magical thread of water that spreads out from the forest into all the world that calls the animals two by two to come to the ark.

Like a magical Mesopotamian Dr. Doolittle, Noah has the ability to “lead” the animals peacefully into the ark as they come from every corner of the earth. And yes, even the insects. Well, they finish building the ark, the rains start, the evil mobs try to get on the ark, but the Watchers fight them off, blah, blah, blah, movie action and we are at the midpoint of the movie, with Noah and his family on the ark, weathering out the flood.

What Noah doesn’t know is that evil warlord Akkad snuck his way into the boat and plans to kill all the men and rape all the wives to start civilization as his own brood of evil minions.

Meanwhile, Noah has himself become a bit psychotic, like an environmentalist or animal rights activist who concludes that people do not deserve to survive because of what they’ve done to the environment and to animals. Noah deduces that God’s only reason for his family on the boat is to shepherd the animals to safety, “and then mankind disappears. It would be a better world.” He concludes that there will be no more births in this family so that when they start over in the new world, they will eventually die out, leaving the animals in a humanless paradise of ecoharmony and peace. As Noah says, “The creatures of the earth, the world itself, shall be safe.” (Except for slamming intergalactic meteors, non-anthropocentric global warming, ice ages, sun spots, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and that “survival of the fittest,” eat-or-be-eaten thing. But other than that… “safe.”)

His ethical reasoning? The same as all environmentalist activists: The ends justify the means. “We must weigh those [human] lives against all creation.” Shades of Malthus and Al Gore.

There’s only one problem. One of the women on the ark is pregnant, and Noah decides that if it is a boy, it can live, but if it is a girl, he must kill it. We can’t have more of those nasty little virus-like humans swarming the earth. So most of the last half of the script is a family killer thriller like Sleeping With the Enemy, that asks the dark dramatic movie question “will Noah kill the child if it is a girl or not?” Ancient sex-selection infanticide.

The woman gives birth to twin girls, and Noah gets all the way up to killing not one but two female infants, after killing evil meat-eating Akkad. But in the end, he fails. He says “to himself, to the Creator,” “I can’t. I can’t do it. I am sorry. I am so sorry.” He is just too compassionate to carry out God’s cruel plan. Noah is more loving than God.

The denouement shows a miserable drunken Noah with his growing family of future earth-killing grandchildren being told by his daughter-in-law to teach them “about the world around them and how to live in it.” Because, “Maybe if you give them your wisdom they will do better with their world than we did with ours.”

CREATIVE LICENSE

It is no secret that Aronofsky set out to make a political propaganda piece for environmentalism. He said so himself to entertainment reporters:

“It’s about environmental apocalypse which is the biggest theme, for me, right now for what’s going on on this planet. So I think it’s got these big, big themes that connect with us. Noah was the first environmentalist.” (see here: SlashFilm.com)

Before analyzing the message of this story, we need to get a few things straight. First off, there is nothing wrong with retelling stories of the past to highlight an issue in the present. In fact, pretty much all period pieces do this. The King’s Speech was about more than courage to do public speaking, it was about standing up to global terrorism. The Crucible was about more than the Salem Witch Trials, it was a metaphor for McCarthyism. Heck, even the Bible does it. It’s the way we writers write. We interpret the present through the past and the past through the present. But is our analogy or metaphor legitimate and germane to the original meaning? Or is it a distortion akin to making someone say the opposite of what they actually said?

Secondly, there is nothing wrong with engaging in creative license, whether it is magical seeds or six-armed Watchers, or even Noah as a warrior. I don’t even think there is a problem in using non-biblical sources like the Book of Enoch or the Sumerian version of the Flood story, where unlike in the Bible, Noah receives dreams about the coming Deluge. The question is, does it support the spirit or meaning of the original story, or the original author’s intent. Bible believing Christians do not necessarily own this category of Biblical interpretation. The Bible doesn’t say what vocation Noah had before the Flood, only what he was afterward (a tiller of the soil). So if a Christian attacks the notion of Noah as a warrior shaman, he may really be illustrating his own cultural prejudice of the notion of a white bearded old farmer which is not in the Bible either. Saying “That didn’t happen on the ark,” is sheer ignorance because nobody knows what happened on the ark, because it wasn’t written down! Hyper-literalists are too often ignorant of their own unbiblical notions.

On the other hand, postmodernists fancy playing God and changing the meaning of texts to suit their agenda because they believe language creates reality. Therefore, it’s okay to “make the Bible say what we want it to say.” This is manipulative narcissistic nonsense, but that doesn’t change the fact that understanding the original intent is not always easy. All authors unavoidably bring some of their own meaning to the text. The real question is: Does the creative license or embellishment serve the meaning or theme intended in the original story or does it twist it into an alien meaning against the original story, a favorite propaganda tactic of postmoderns, leftists, and radicals.

Was Noah the first environmentalist and animal rights activist? Was the moral failure of man in Genesis, disrespect for the environment? Was that why God completely destroyed the environment and killed all of the animals of the land except those on the ark?

Of course not.

THE THEME

First, let me say that no Christian that I am aware of believes that we should carelessly pollute the environment and kill animals without concern for the consequences of our actions. Those kind of accusations are straw man caricatures from ignorant anti-Christian bigotry. The Bible itself is where we get the notion of being responsible stewards of the earth. Genesis 2:15 says that God put man in the Garden “to work it and keep it.” The basic meaning of the Hebrew text is to exercise great care while cultivating it. If anything, Adam was the first conservationist, not environmentalist, because he was to work the land, use human planning to overcome the thorns and thistles of nature. Which brings us to the next command that God also gives to mankind relating to the environment.

And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

The Hebrew words for subduing the earth and having dominion are military terms of conquest. So, we see that man is to use his technological insights to forcefully harness the wild and chaotic forces of animals and the environment to bring them into good use. This is not a command to pollute or pillage the earth, but neither is it a subordination of man as a servant of the earth. The earth was made for man, not man for the earth, unlike pagan earth religion or environmental extremism, which claims that man is made for the earth, not the earth for man.

Because the Bible was the first in history to divest nature from deity, it argued that nature is NOT a personal being or filled with animistic spirits or a part of deity. This was the foundation of technological progress that brought about a better world of extended life spans, modern science and medicine, travel, better food production, and much more. If nature is impersonal, then we are justified in harnessing it for human good. But that is not a call to exploitation as previous verses explained. The Law of God even had rules for treating beasts of burden humanely (Ex 20:10; Deut 25:4; Prov 12:10) But they were still beasts of burden for human use. Because humanity is in the image of God, animals are not.

Having defended responsible conservation of the environment, nevertheless, I have to say that the movie script for Noah is deeply anti-Biblical in it’s moral vision. While the Bible commands mankind to “work and keep” the garden of earth as its stewards, the sin that brought about the judgment of the Flood was NOT violence against the environment as depicted in the script, it was violence against God and his image in man. That’s no minor difference.

The thread of evil that leads from the Garden to the Waters began with Cain’s murder of Abel, which was considered the ultimate violence against the image of God that mankind was created in (Gen 1:27). This was because God accepted Abel’s sacrifice but not Cain’s. So the violence was based on sacred relationship with God himself. It wasn’t the ground that cried out to God, it was Abel’s blood that cried out to God for justice. Lamech then follows this pattern in killing a young man and boasting about it (Gen 4:23-24). The lineage of Cain eventually dies out and God replaces Abel’s lineage with a new Seth, son of Adam, “in his likeness, after his image” (Gen 5:3).

In Genesis 6 we read about mankind multiplying on the face of the earth. The Sons of God, angelic beings from God’s heavenly host, mate with the daughters of men to give birth to giants. Okay, this is very weird and wild to contemplate, and I don’t have time to explain it in detail here. You’ll have to read my book Noah Primeval to find out more. But suffice it to say that the main meaning here is that the heavenly beings violated a holy separation of mankind from divinity (Jude 6-7; 2Pet 2:4-10). This mixing of “images” reflects man’s perennial pursuit of trying to attain godlike status. Remember the Original Sin in the Garden? “You will be like God!” said the Serpent (who was strangely absent from the Garden of Eden in the Noah script). Man is seeking to become like God by his power over life and by his constant pursuit of divine prerogative or power. This will continue through to the Tower of Babel incident as well, when mankind tries to build a temple tower that connects heaven and earth.

The Bible then says that Noah, however was righteous, and he was “pure in his generation” (Gen 6:9). The implication here is that Noah is not merely walking with God as an obedient follower, but that he is not part of that corrupted miscegenation of angelic and human cohabitation and hybridization. Again, the image of God undefiled.

By the time God says that the wickedness of man is so great on the earth (6:5), and that the “earth was corrupt in God’s sight and the earth was filled with violence” (6:11) there is absolutely nothing that has been said about man treating the environment with violence. It is completely about violence against the image of God and rebellion against God himself, not the environment. As Near Eastern scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky explains, the concept of the earth being “corrupted” or “polluted” was a theological expression of how man’s sin against God’s image makes man’s very physical inhabitation religiously “unclean.” The earth had a physical impurity akin to the profane abominations that defiled the land of Canaan:

In the biblical worldview, the murders before the flood contaminated the land and created a state of physical pollution which had to be eradicated by physical means (the flood). Although this concept may seem strange to us, it is not surprising to find it here in the cosmology of Israel, for Israel clearly believed that moral wrongdoings defile physically. This is explicitly stated with three sins — murder, idolatry, and sexual abominations. (Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “The Atrahasis Epic And Its Significance For Our Understanding Of Genesis 1-9,” Biblical Archaeologist, December 1977, 147-155.)

And after the flood, the image of God is again offered as God’s basis for establishing capital punishment as his primary concern in justice, not the environment (Gen 9:6). Shedding man’s blood in murder would now require just recompense of capital punishment. In the primeval history of Genesis what God cares about keeping sacred and invaluable is his image in man. And the murder and violation of that image of God is what pollutes the earth, not the other way around. As Frymer-Kensky concludes, The author(s) of Genesis wrote about the Flood “to illuminate fundamental Israelite ideas, i.e., the biblical ideals that law and the ‘sanctity of human life’ are the prerequisites of human existence upon the earth.”

In the script Noah, what God cares about is the environment, not so much man. As Noah reveals, “The world squirms beneath our foot, a poisoned husk. The Creator sees this, He mourns it, and will tolerate it no longer. He would annihilate all in an instant than watch this creeping rot… We must treat the world with mercy so that the Creator will show us mercy.”

Turning the tale of Noah into an environmentalist screed and animal rights diatribe does violence to the Biblical meaning and turns it into something entirely alien to the original meaning of the text. Admittedly, the script does include murder and violence against man as an additional “evil,” but this is secondary in the story. The primary sin of the script Noah is man’s violence against the environment. Which is kind of contradictory, don’t you think? Claiming that God destroys the entire environment because man was — well, destroying the environment?

And how in the world was Neolithic man able to destroy his environment and cause global warming anyway? Exactly where did the carbon emissions come from? Fred Flintstone SUVs? Industrial campfire smokestacks? The number of people on the planet in that distant age would have less impact on the climate than bison farts. It’s really quite ludicrous, but inadvertently hints at the historical and scientific fact that far greater global warming and cooling cycles have occurred in the past without man. It’s quite natural. Consider it the Circle of Life.

PSYCHO NOAH

Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the Aronofsky/Handel script is its portrayal of God in the moral worldview of Noah. I’m not talking about the fact that Noah is sinful in the movie or that he gets drunk. That is in the Bible. That’s not the problem. The problem is that Noah is depicted as attempting to follow God’s will in the script, a will that includes the complete annihilation of the human race, as opposed to the Genesis depiction of starting over with eight humans to repopulate and ultimately provide a Messiah.

Someone could well make the argument that Noah’s journey is one of realizing that his zeal for his environmental and animal rights cause has gone too far, and that he finally realizes that killing people is too extreme. There must be a balance of interests. In one scene, Japheth accidentally kills a lizard that will now die out because it was only one of two. Noah explodes in rage upon his son for his carelessness. Then he repents and realizes that “the same wickedness is in all of us.”

But I am skeptical of this “balance of interests” interpretation of the script. Noah does not have a revelation that he has made animals more important than humans, rather he has “realized” that the evil against animals is in all of them, such as his son. Then the very next thing he concludes is that there will be no wives on the ark and they are not going to repopulate humanity after the Flood. He says, “As long as there are men, creation is not safe.” Add to this, the fact that the animals aboard the ark help Noah to pin down his family so he can kill the infant girls. That clearly supports the notion of God being behind it all.

Also, at the end, when psycho Noah realizes that he cannot kill the baby girl to stop the human race, the reason is not because he realized he was too extreme against humans, but because he was too weak to follow through with God’s commands and his “higher cause” of genocide. This Humanistic worldview certainly tugs at the heartstrings of our hubris. Man’s weakness of compassion makes him superior to God.

Killing all humans but eight in order to start over (As the Bible portrays) may seem harsh to our thoroughly Modern Millie minds, but it reaffirms that Image of God in Man that gives man value despite the evil. God always saves a remnant of the righteous in order to bring about his Messianic plan of redemption. In Noah, man has no higher value than the animals and the environment. Noah wants to get rid of us all and return the environment to its pristine condition untouched by the presence of man. What is so disturbing is that this motivation to violence is exactly the worldview of many extremist leaders of environmentalism. Here are some documented samples of their human hate speech and dog whistles to violence:

“Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed we must destroy the Judeo Christian religious tradition.”
(Australian philosopher Peter Singer, the “Father of Animal Rights.”)

“If you’ll give the idea a chance… you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions of other Earth-dwelling species.”
(The Voluntary Extinction Movement, quoted by Daniel Seligman in “Down With People,” in Fortune magazine, September 23, 1991)

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing…”
(Editorial in The Economist, December 28, 1988)

“Man is no more important than any other species… It may well take our extinction to set things straight.”
(David Foreman, Earth First! spokesman, quoted by M. John Fayhee in Backpacker magazine, September 1988, pg. 22)

“We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem to mankind. They have… more value – to me – than another human body, or a billion of them… Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
(David M. Graber, National Park Service biologist, in a review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, pg. 9)

“I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.”
(Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace, quoted in Access to Energy Vol.17 No.4, December 1989)

“We, in the Green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year old children to Asian brothels.”
(Carl Amery of the Green Party, quoted in Mensch & Energie, April 1983)

This violent hatred of humanity that is displayed in the movie script of Noah also seems to emanate from significant quarters of the environmentalist movement. But ironically, it is logically inevitable that if you deny the image of God in Man, and you elevate the environment over humanity, then you will inevitably wish to eliminate humanity for a better environment.

THE WATCHERS

Another significant deviation from Biblical truth in the Noah script is the identity of the Watchers. In the script, they are portrayed as misunderstood rebels who, like Noah, also are more compassionate than God. It seems everyone in this story is more compassionate than God.

As previously indicated, the Watchers of Biblical fame are Sons of God, or angelic beings who violated God’s separation of the heavenly and the earthly, and mated with human women (Gen 6:1-4; Num 13:32-33; Dan 4:13). The New Testament quotes from and paraphrases a non-canonical Jewish text called 1 Enoch that has retained a tradition of respect within Christian history (Jude; 2Pet 2:4-10). Though it is not considered Scripture, its picture of the fallen angels cohabiting with humans affirms the Biblical notion of these being rebel sorcerers, not well intentioned educators who get blamed for mankind’s misuse of good gifts.

Aronofsky apparently uses some of his notions of the Watchers from the book of 1 Enoch, such as the names of the angel Samyaza (1Enoch 6:3) and their act of revealing secrets to mankind as well as the idea that they helped Noah build the ark (67:2). But the script’s view is the opposite of the Biblical/Enochian view of the Watchers as rebels who reveal occultic forbidden secrets that are part of the reason why God sends the Flood.

There is one line of tradition in the pseudepigraphal book of Jubilees (chapter 10) that depicts the Watchers as teaching Noah their secrets of herbs and healing to counter the corruption caused by demons, but this is not the Biblical or Enochian view.

Also, the script seems to equate the Watchers with the giants, whereas in both Enoch and the Bible, the giants are the progeny of the Watchers uniting with human women. An additional use of the name Og for one of the Watchers reflects a muddled reference to an apocryphal Book of Giants that refers to the exploits of a giant Og at the time of the Flood.

FADE OUT

All in all, the script for Noah is an uninteresting and unbiblical waste of a hundred and fifty million dollars that will ruin for decades the possibility of making a really great and entertaining movie of this Bible hero beloved by billions of religious believers, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. This movie will be rejected by millions of devoted Bible readers worldwide because once again it subverts their own sacred narrative with a political agenda of pagan earth religion that is offensive to their Faith. In a very real sense it engages in the very sin of the primeval history in Genesis: A denial of the image of God in man.

If Noah is released, and as I am predicting, does horrible numbers at the box office after being rejected by traditionalist Christians and Jews (in spite of the studio undoubtedly hiring faith-based marketing companies to spin it as “faithful”) as well as mainstream viewers who will instead choose whatever feel-good movie is in theaters that week, studio executives will gather in their suites on Monday morning and cluck about the elusive faith-based audience and how they never turn out for “their movies,” when it was in fact a movie made by someone outside of their community that was insulting, degrading and contrary to their deeply held beliefs and values.

Brian Godawa is the screenwriter for the award-winning feature film, To End All Wars, starring Kiefer Sutherland, and Alleged, starring Brian Dennehy and Fred Thompson and the author of Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. His most recent book is Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story and Imagination. His new novel series, the Chronicles of the Nephilim is an imaginative retelling of the primeval history of Genesis, the secret plan of the fallen Watchers, and the War of the Seed of the Serpent with the Seed of Eve: www.ChroniclesoftheNephilim.com
The first book in the series is about Noah and the Ark, Noah Primeval available at Amazon.com.

Super 8

Posted on June 17, 2011 by admin

Kid’s Creature Feature. E.T. gone bad. Well, not really, but that’s how it plays out until we discover that the alien that was captured by the US Air Force by the nefarious Colonel (Aren’t they all nefarious in Hollywood movies?) escapes and we learn he just wants to build a spaceship to get home. There is not much to this popcorn movie, but I must say, I was very partial toward it in a nostalgic sense, since it takes place in 1979, “my era,” and contains my era music and kids making movies, and monster models and Super 8 Filmmaking magazine, and a Eumig camera and projector – all stuff that I personally did when I was a young kid. Wow, I teared up with identification.

The negative thing that stood out to me was the cliché Hollywood worldview about the “military industrial complex.” Movies do not get made in a vacuum. They often reflect the prevailing zeitgeist of propaganda in the Media, and this movie is no exception. When the world changed on 9/11/01, terrorism came of age and took the spotlight in global politics. With the last ten years, it seems the new zeitgeist that has developed amongst the secular elites, and the Press has been to construct a theory that blames America and “western imperialism” for the violent jihad of Islamism. As the narrative goes, “we created these monsters” through our military industrial complex. They just want to “go home.” In classic blame-the-victim Marxist political religion, Imperialist Islamic terrorists were made violent because of American Expansionism or “colonialism.” They are the poor oppressed victims who are lashing out in desperation against the oppressive hegemony of imperialist western power. Never mind that Islamism has been imperialistic since its inception, seeking to conquer all peoples into subjection to Allah and Muslim law. No, that’s not imperialism, the American superpower is inherently imperialist with its military strength (since Left Wing radical theory defines all power as inherently oppressive UNLESS it is in the hands of Left Wing powers). So, this movie reflects that Hollywood pop political theory because we discover that the alien is a violent monster only because he is being oppressed by the evil US Air Force, and all he wants is just to go home. So the American military MADE the monster through it’s intent to oppressively control the alien.

Priest

Posted on May 20, 2011 by admin

Post-Apocalyptic Sci-fi horror. “Vampires have always been with us.” In the future, after the vampire threat has been nullified by the Church’s vampire warrior priests, life is back to normal, and those warrior priests are put back into normal life by the Church. Their vampire hunting is made illegal so that people will feel safe again in their walled in dystopic grungy city. Meanwhile, the vampires have been growing far away in huge hives. And they have been planning a takeover feast of the city. So, when vampire hunter Priest, played with stoic coolness by Paul Bettany, discovers his niece has been captured by vampires in order to turn her, he goes to rescue her against the commands of the Church, which is trying to lull everyone into an institutional sense of safety. So Priest becomes an outlaw.

This movie is what used to be called “anti-clericalism,” that is an attack on the institutional church in favor of individualistic spirituality. The phrase that is repeated multiple times throughout the film in order to make the point is, “To go against the church is to go against God.” Another phrase spoken by the high priests: “To question the authority of the clergy is absolutely forbidden.” This is an obvious reflection of the Roman Catholic Medieval Church’s phrase, “There is no salvation outside the Church.” But this is not quite so simple as an anticlerical call to Protestant Reformation of the priesthood of all believers, because the Priest at first decides that if he is going against God to save his niece, then he will give up on God. So he saves the day and destroys the vampires who reflect original sin because “they are what nature made them to be.”

The Priest concludes, “Out power does not come from the Church, it comes from God. With or without clergy, we’re still priests.” So, the theme is a confusing mixture of individualistic spirituality and anticlericalism with the residue of Protestant Reformed notions. Quite a bit different from say Martin Luther, who affirmed obedience to the authority of the Church as long as he possibly could until he was forced to deny his conscience, at which point he then asserted that God is the ultimate authority over even the Church. The Reformation may have resulted in creating an individualist piety that we suffer from today, but it did not necessarily start out that way. Still the resonances are there for a rather positive Protestant worldview.

Season of the Witch

Posted on January 2, 2011 by admin

Supernatural period horror. Behman and Felson start as Crusading knights fighting wars with Muslims (not mentioned as such in the movie) who appear to be more mercenaries than holy warriors. But when leaders start making them kill innocent women and children of conquered cities, they excommunicate themselves from the Crusades to result in being outlaws on the run. So when they come upon a town afflicted by the plague, they are commissioned to transport an accused witch to another city that hosts a holy monastery of priests with the ability to legally try the women to discover her innocence or guilt.

Because of their bad experience with the Crusades, Behman and Felson are highly dubious of the woman’s guilt, but still maintain the hope of a fair trial by the church so they take on the task with hopes of being pardoned of their desertion.

The movie plays with the possibility of the woman’s innocence, but eventually we see that in fact, she is not a witch, but is possessed by a demon whose goal is to draw the men to the monastery, now destroyed, in order to capture the last book of exorcism ritual that they carry with them. If they can destroy that book, they can run amok in the world.

This movie is an interesting mixture of anti-institutional Christianity with a positive support for individual spirituality and the reality of the Christian vision of the supernatural. Okay, the “magic” book of exorcism is a fiction, but the movie uses the audience’s anti-Christian prejudice based on the Crusades to subvert that prejudice by depicting a world very supernatural where Christianity wins out. The monk who travels with the heroes is hinted at being a lecherous rapist (a common bigoted stereotype in the modern cinema) but alas turns out to be a good guy who is libeled by lies. Quite refreshing and original.

In contradiction to this subversion, there remains another modern libel against Christianity in the movie. It seems that the name of “Jesus Christ” is only mentioned in movies as a cuss word or in the mouth of an evil criminal and never as a positive expression of specific faith. So in this movie the only time “Jesus Christ” is mentioned is in the mouth of an evil Crusade Leader who yells to his soldiers to “kill all the infidels in the name of Jesus Christ!” (repeated later in the movie to make the poinkt) Interesting that they used a word that was not used by Christians, but Muslims. Christians used the word “heathen,” and the word “infidel” is commonly known to be connected to Islamic imperialism. So, maybe the filmmakers were trying to make a predictable moral equivalency of institutional Christianity and institutional Islam. In any case, Season of the Witch portrays a balanced world of false and true Christianity within a paradigm that affirms supernatural evil and supernatural good.