Sci-Fi Fantasy

The Adjustment Bureau

Posted on by admin

Humanism and Open Theism. I got a chance to see an advance screening of this theologically and philosophically rich film, so you’ll want to come back later after you’ve seen it. It does prove once again, along with the blockbusters The Matrix all the way to Inception, that you can tell a good story and make a good movie AND have a rich philosophical discussion as the essence of it all.

David Norris is an aspiring Senator in New York who loses his latest bid and in a fit of authentic honesty, admits that so much of politics is poll driven (by controlled research) and not from the heart. But then one day, we see strange men with hats who are following him and we learn they are from “the adjustment bureau” following the orders of the “Chairman” and are controlling David’s life, along with many others’ lives, or at least intervening at key moments to keep him on track with the Chairman’s plan for his life. They carry little books that show blueprint like pages with moving lines to show them directions of people’s lives as they are making choices.

One day, David is supposed to spill his coffee, but the agent who is supposed to cover him falls asleep and David does not spill his coffee, thus making it in time to a bus he was not supposed to be on, and thus having a second encounter with a woman he had fallen for in a chance encounter during his campaign. The thing is, according to the Chairman’s plan, they are no supposed to be together, so the rest of the movie is David pursuing this woman and the bureau agents trying to stop that from taking hold.

But when David spills his coffee he sets in motion a series of events that allow him to get out of the sight of the bureau agents, and he stumbles upon something he is not supposed to see: The agents are engaged in a “readjustment” by freezing everyone at David’s work and scanning their brains to make them change their minds and get back on course with the Chairman’s plan for them. When David sees them, lead Agent Richardson is in a predicament of having to explain to David the behind the scenes scenario. He then tells David that he must not get together with the woman, Elise, because it will ruin the Chairman’s plan for both of their lives. As it turns out, David eventually learns that the plans are for her to become a world class Ballet dancer and for David to eventually become president of the US, and both would do great good for people. But David does not understand why he can’t have both, and like Jacob fighting with the angel, he determines to make his own way in life with his free will and fight for Elise.

Though the movie judiciously avoids saying it explicitly, the metaphors are obvious, the agents are angels, and the Chairman is God. The entire struggle of this film is between free will and determinism, or predestination. Are we absolutely free to make our own way in this life or does God control everything? The view of the storytellers is Arminianism, and more particularly Open Theism. The Chairman has a plan for most everyone, but mostly very important people who will do great things. The rest of us are mostly on our own. So people have free will AND there are chance events that keep mucking up the Chairman’s (God’s) plan so God has to send angels to try to fix things to some degree to keep things on track. But there are not enough angels to do so, so there are quite a lot of things that get out of God’s control. One higher up explains to David that throughout history, God has tried to give man free will and he messes it all up so God takes control again to fix things. So, in this movie, God gave men over to free will and we had the Dark Ages, and then God took back control and we had the blessings of reason and the Enlightenment and Renaissance (The Reformation is studiously avoided), and then God gave free will back to us in 1910 and we had the World Wars, so now God is trying to fix it all again. This is exactly the viewpoint prejudice of the Enlightenment that created the derogatory term “Dark Ages” out of its antisupernatural bigotry.

This points to another theme of the movie, that ultimately the reasoning intellect of man is safe and in control (which is a parallel to the Chairman’s control), but the emotions of man are unpredictable and messy. So the battle between free will and determinism is also a battle between control and chance as well as a battle between the heart and the mind, or emotions and reason. They’re all linked. Thus, our hero is an impulsive man whose impulses get him in trouble in the story. But the real trouble happens when he learns that if he stays with this woman with whom he has fallen in love, they will both not meet their dreams, she will not become a famous dancer, but will end up a simple teacher, and he will not be president and help the nation. So his choice is: should he “follow the plan” and give up his dreams of love or should he pursue his dream and ruin both their potentialities for goodness in society? So for the sake of his love for her, he gives up their love and let’s her go, only to be haunted by that decision for years.

By chance, he stumbles onto her again much later, but by now, he has decided that he wants both. Why can’t they have both love and greatness? David’s original design to be a politician is revealed to come from his inner emptiness for meaning. He seeks the “love” of the masses to fill a hole that only true love can fill: Another humanistic theme – human love is the ultimate meaning in life. So David fights to stop Elise from marrying another man and to show her why he had avoided her all those years: Because of the angelic plan. But revealing the behind the scenes is a dangerous no-no, and David will have to have his brain erased, because they can’t have the secret get out.

With the help of a rebellious angel, David decides to grab Elise and make a run for it to the Chairman to plead his case. He never makes it, but his sheer “free will” for love has so impressed the God Chairman, that God changes his plans, and allows the two to be together. The last shot, we see the plan book, with the two moving lines of David and Elise moving out of the planned zone and into a white area of undetermined uncertain future, but we all know it is hopeful and free will gives us the hope of uncertain but unlimited possibilities

The problem with the scenario is that it is ultimately unsatisfying. The God of this film is unwittingly the best argument against the Arminian notion of absolute free will, by depicting a God whose will is so often thwarted by humans that he is virtually impotent, running around fretting over the mess that he cannot seem to keep up with. God here is the antagonist, the enemy that man must free himself from, much like The Truman Show. This God is not very all-knowing either, as he is the one who realizes his plan was wrong for David and Elise. Rather than David struggling with God and learning a lesson about meaning and purpose beyond himself, God is the one who learns a lesson from David that true human love is better than a deity’s plan, that people should make their own meaning instead of accept God’s meaningful intent for them. Also, it is the God of Open Theism that only knows the future in the way that a very intelligent being can know where someone is headed based on intimate knowledge of the way a person thinks and acts – but this foreknowledge is really an educated guess not actual foreknowledge.

This is Open Theism. This is not a satisfying deity that is worth worshipping. In fact, watching it makes one repulsed at the pathetic excuse for such a meddling, inferior, half-assed puppet master getting his strings tangled on the few puppets he is trying to manipulate. One can only think, “For God’s sake, if it’s all too much for you to maintain control, then get out of the way and let us try to make our own way in life.” And that is in fact what happens in the movie. God gets out of the hero’s way and lets him have his “freedom” to chart his course in an unknown uncertain future determined only by human “love,” NOT God’s purposes. This is the humanistic existential man telling God to let him alone to create his own meaning and purpose in life out of his own emotional desires. In this story, politics may appear to help people, but it is ultimately a form of control that is determined by polls and manipulation. So David’s redemption lies in giving up his dreams of politics for the sake of individual love, in the same way that God must do so.

The Sovereign God of the Bible may be in control of every sparrow that falls from the sky, but at least such omnipotent power also comes with a Shepherd’s loving promise that is worth trusting. At least this God can actually accomplish his promises to work all things out for the best, and maybe he knows a little more than me, and maybe the world does not revolve around me and my passionate desires. Maybe it’s not all about me, me, me

To be fair, there are resonances with many Biblical characters in this story. One is reminded of Job who complains to God for his misfortune; or Jacob who wrestles with God and won’t let go until he is blessed by God: or Moses who persuades God to change his mind about destroying the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness.

And yet, one cannot help but see the differences that make this deity a false idol of the one in the Bible. For we do not see a God who rebukes and humbles Job into submission, or the God who won’t let go of His purposes for Jacob. Nor do we see the God of Moses who changes his mind on the basis on his own glory, and who separated and destroyed the rebellious Israelites for the sake of a remnant.

Shrek Forever After

Posted on by admin

If you remember, the original was an apparently traditional fairy tale that made fun of traditional fairy tales but ended up being a traditional fairy tale. A hero rescuing a maiden from a tower protected by a dragon, true love’s kiss redeeming the maiden. And the twist was that the maiden who was an ogre by night and a blonde human by day, was actually an ogre as her true self. Some Jungian analysis about the self etc.

But in this fourth installment it seems the storytellers went back to the original spirit. In this tale, Shrek has now been married with Fiona and has cute little triplet ogres and they are living happily in their village. But Shrek has a mid-life crisis and pines over the loss of his youthful free spirited ogre life of scaring people and being a basically selfish rogue. All the responsibility has taken the fun out of his life and he makes a deal with an evil Rumplestiltskin to have one day as his old single self in exchange for one day that Rumple picks out of Shrek’s life. Well, after Shrek has his fun, he discovers that Rumple has picked Shrek’s birth date as the one day he gets. So Shrek is never born and Shrek is now trapped in a world where he didn’t exist to free Fiona from her tower and the evil Rumple has taken over building his exploitative kingdom in place of the good king and queen. Shrek now realizes what a mistake he has made and tries to find Fiona, only to discover that, because Shrek never rescued her, she had to rescue herself and has now become a hardened warrior leader of the ogres who are oppressed by the kingdom. So now Shrek has to win Fiona’s true love kiss again in order to change the world. Only this time, she doesn’t need him. She’s been liberated and doesn’t need a man to rescue her.

This is a tale of traditional values that seems to reinforce the need for strong male leadership in a love relationship. Yes, Shrek and Fiona go on a journey together, so it’s not patriarchal abuse, but rather a need for Shrek to take the lead and even responsibility in his life and love. And Fiona is not fulfilled as a lone warrior leader until she discovers love with Shrek. When Shrek gets back to his real world, he has a renewed appreciation and treasure of his family that rejects the juvenile freedom of his single past. It’s a classic tale of It’s a Wonderful Life, in embracing maturity and responsibility over the carefree selfishness of youth, as well as traditional role models for male and female relationships in love and marriage. In Shrek Forever After, A man needs to lead with a woman who admires him, and a woman needs a man to admire.

Skyline

Posted on by admin

Low budget Sci-fi action rip off of Independence Day meets Cloverfield. A group of friends and acquaintances seek to stay alive when Los Angeles is invaded by alien space ships who seek out all humans to suck their brains out for energy. This movie seems to illustrate the emptiness and lack of meaning that many young filmmakers have. They come up with a “cool” idea about aliens invading and a “cool” visual chase film about survival, only to fall apart narratively at the end, which seems to reflect their own lack of depth or meaning to draw from in their own worldview. If they are taught there is no real transcendent meaning, then they have nothing to really say in their stories.

In this case, the hero and heroine, after spending an hour and a half trying with futility to stay free from the invaders, are finally sucked up into a big space ship, only to discover that the aliens are using human brains to feed on and in some cases inhabit their dying bodies. So, the hero’s brain becomes a part of some alien who then recognizes the heroine about to be eaten alive, and he then saves her from being chomped — for the moment. And that’s how it ends. What the…? In the trailers to the movie, they showed TV news clips (not in the movie that I remember) that editorialized that this invasion must be how the Indians felt when the bad evil Europeans invaded their land and took it over. A movie that starts out with a politically correct theme of anti-colonialism, ends up fizzling like a kid who started out real excited making up a story and then ran out of steam near the end when he realized he hadn’t thought it through to the end.

Inception

Posted on by admin

Boy, where does one begin? This is another philosophical opus by Christopher Nolan that pretty much confirms his rein as the king of intelligent philosophical mainstream filmmaking. The success of his films prove that people DO like deep mythological, ethical, and philosophical foundations to their stories.

The life of the mind and the question of what constitutes reality is a common theme in Nolan’s films, and Inception takes this to the limit. It’s main purpose appears to be exploring the nature of how ideas take hold in our minds, and how our cherished presuppositions are held by faith and “locked away” in our minds to such an extent that they determine what we think of reality. Those “unproven” subjective presuppositions about reality then guide and determine our behavior regardless of objective reality.

DiCaprio’s Cobb character leads a team of people who use sophisticated technology to be able to enter into people’s dreams in order to steal their secrets for competing corporations of what have you. The metaphor here is incarnated in each person having some kind of locked safe deep in their consciousness where they hide away their secrets they don’t want discovered. The dramatic challenge of the movie is when a client hires them to do the reverse, to plant an idea into a person’s consciousness, in order to get them to do something the client wants. This is what is called “Inception.” So they seek to find the “safe” in a target’s dreams where they can deceive him and place the notion that he should “break up his father’s corporate empire upon his father’s death.”

Nolan employs a lot of concepts about dreams that we are familiar with. He uses the notion of falling or death as what wakes us up from a dream. He applies the notion that time in a dream goes by much slower than in our real world, so if they go deeper into his consciousness to a deeper level dream, the time slows down even more.

But the hero’s journey of Cobb is his own guilt over the suicide of his wife, Mal. His guilt over her death is manifested by her showing up in all his dreams as a killer of the dream that makes him and others wake up. In short, she is the reality waker. But when we discover why, it makes it quite a powerful postmodern tale of the questioning of our notions of reality. It turns out that they both indulged in this dream world escape by creating dreams where they could experience their fantasies together. When Mal wanted to stay longer and longer in their dreams, Cobb tried to snap her out of it by placing an inception in her mind that this wasn’t reality, so she needed to wake up. And how does one wake up in a dream? By killing one’s self. The only problem is that this planted presupposition stayed with her into the real world and she thought that it too was a dream, so she killed herself to “wake up.”

Wow, our presuppositions (faith commitments) have real world consequences on our behavior, and it is not always for the good. But also, this is raising the question “How do we know our notions of reality are true?” We act upon certain unproven notions that find their way into our minds through the narratives that we live or observe or construct. In a way, the movie is a metaphor for how those beliefs enter into our mental lockboxes. Through storytelling. The team of dream thieves are storytellers (like filmmakers) who craft entire worlds and pretend to be characters in a story that embodies a certain belief about reality. It implants themes about reality and how to behave into our consciousness, that we then hold onto and use as our basis for acting in our own world.

I entered the movie thinking, “This is about dreams. If he concludes, “it was all a dream,” I am going to be ticked off.” So I was happy when he ended on the note that left it ambiguous whether or not it was a dream for the hero. I think the point was that the movie is self-consciously NOT real, but a dream of reality that tries to engage in an inception in our minds. Therefore in the movie he can never conclude with an absolute statement about the “reality” of the film. I believe that is his point as a postmodern filmmaker: He wants us to question reality, and he is not going to conclude whether the “reality” in the movie is reality, precisely because of his epistemic commitment to questioning reality with the nature of stories. This explains why he mixes dream elements with reality elements. For example, the fact that he wears a wedding ring in the dream world, but not in the real world, and the kids are a couple years older at the last shot, BUT there are dream world indicators in the real world, such as the walls closing in on Cobb as he runs from the bad guys, and the fact that the kids are in the same exact position at the end “reality” scene as they are in the dream scenes. He wants us to question reality, but he is not going to give us an answer.

Quite clever. A story about how the power of stories accomplish their goal of affecting our consciousness and constructs of reality.

Clash of the Titans

Posted on by admin

The worldview here is subversive Humanism: Mankind is the measure of all things, and human life is more worthy to experience than heaven or the supernatural. Demigod Perseus, (half man, half god) goes on a journey to save mankind from the destruction of the gods giving up on man. Zeus creates men in order to give the gods strength through their prayers, but men turn from the gods for their own glory, so Zeus lets out the wrath of Hades and the underworld to cause them to turn back to the gods and pray in their suffering.

The worldview of this movie is that this world holds more value than the afterlife. Perseus prefers his humanity and living in this world than in taking the offer to live with the gods. Deity is as petty and capricious as humanity, so why bother with them? One recurring phrase that emphasizes the theme is “One day, somebody’s got to take a stand. One day, somebody’s got to say enough.” I guess that means enough of the gods meddling in our lives because that’s pretty much what everyone complains about throughout the film. Another statement by Andromeda: “The gods need US! They need our prayers! What do WE need the gods for?”

The protagonist, Perseus, being the man of both worlds is the one struggling between which world is a better one, and he chooses the world of humanity over the gods, which is the message of the storytellers. I am reminded of the movie Troy, that made the same point that the gods have no power, they are merely religious beliefs, only humans actually accomplish anything by their own choices and this life is all that matters. Only in this movie, deity is real but it is STILL not worthy of the human experience.

When faced by Zeus, Perseus tells him about his men, “We live, we fight, we die for each other, not you.” When asked if he wants to go live with the gods in a safe heaven, Perseus replies, “I’ve got everything I need right here.” In this mythology, the gods feed off of men’s prayers. They need men or their powers fade. Hades even says, “It’s mankind who holds the keys to Hades’ rise. Only men can stop it.” Gods in this system are more like exalted humanity than transcendent deity. In fact, I think they are anthropomorphisms of social construction. In other words, they are real in the story, but the story is about showing how they are impotent or without ultimate authority in this life. In the beginning of the movie, someone shouts, “This is the age of man!” in defiance of the gods. I think this movie is a humanistic subversion of religion as reliant upon man, as the measure of all things. Man is “growing up” into his own by freeing himself from the capriciousness of deity in control of his life.

In an interesting apparently deliberate contrast with Christianity, Zeus says “I wanted men to worship me. But I didn’t want it to cost me a son.”

Alice in Wonderland

Posted on by admin

This is a feminist tale of liberation from patriarchy. Alice is in a Victorian oppressive environment where women should just accept whatever man they can get and not have dreams of achievements, because otherwise they will end up as unhappy delusionary spinsters. That is what happens to Alice’s aunt, who held out for true love and is still waiting for her Prince Charming, that never came (And the aunt is delusionary because of it). Meanwhile, Alice is being pressured into marrying an obnoxious selfish idiot of a rich boy who sees her only as an accouterment to his life and who proposes to her right before she falls into the rabbit hole. What else does a young woman without means do in such an unfair world?

So Alice goes on this journey in a wild world where she becomes the prophesied one to kill the dragon of the wicked queen in order to save the land. She doesn’t see herself as a warrior of course, but ultimately embraces her fate and kills the dragon and saves the day. When she comes back into the real world, she now has the courage to say no to the marriage proposal and convinces her dead dad’s ex-business partner to employ her with the company because she is a dreamer like her dad and has big dreams about where to take the business.

This movie is a parable meant to encourage young women that they have the same mythology as men, that they can slay dragons just like a man, that there is no difference between the narrative of male and female being, and that ultimately, a woman does not need a man to be fulfilled, but she can find her meaning and purpose in a career or job, just like men do.

Repo Men

Posted on by admin

Remy and Jake are repo men of the near future who repossess artificial bodily organs from those who can’t make their payments – thus killing them under the protection of the law of course. They are of course heartless and without concern for their victims, who are usually irresponsible in not making their payments, but mostly portrayed as victims of the cold heartless corporation who manipulates people into buying their organs purely for profit and don’t care at all about the humanity of those to whom they sell. When Remy has an accident, and has to get an artificial heart, and falls back on his payments then his friend Jake has to repo his heart so the chase is on.

Well, this story deals with the moral theme of the corporation and profit seeking vs. the human being. The recurring statement that the repo men use to rationalize their taking of human lives is, “A job is just a job.” This is of course, the rationale that many people use to avoid being accountable for what they do to make money in life, so it’s all very relevant to our world. But it is a very very bloody movie, especially the ending, which I think ties in with the morality of the tale being about money versus humanity, and blood is very human and is the price paid for the dehumanizing of life.

Jake even makes the argument that society is based on rules. If we don’t enforce the rules, then we have anarchy which is worse. But Remy concludes after he experiences the other side of the gun that “In the end, a job is not just a job. And if you want to change who you are, you have to change what you do.” So in this story, who we are is not separate from our behavior. We are what we do. We cannot divorce our private moral values from our public actions. I was just following orders simply will not do as an excuse for anyone. The movie is a tragic tale of warning as it ends with a very Brazil ending of the hero being taken over by technology and put in a dream state of control by the corporation, the ultimate end of our humanity if we let ourselves be driven by technology over our humanity, by artificiality over reality, by the pursuit of pleasure over accepting suffering.

Legion

Posted on by admin

A supernatural thriller about a renegade angel and a handful of patrons at a rural diner who battle a legion of angels to protect the birth of a new messiah. Or at least I think that’s what it kind of was. This movie has a confusing worldview that I am not sure the filmmakers even understand. It utilizes traditional Judeo-Christian concepts of angels, God’s judgment and spiritual warfare and weds it to a capricious God more like fickle pagan Mesopotamian deities than like Yahweh of the Bible.

Michael, evidently “falls” from heaven and cuts off his own wings because he is rebelling against God. Why? Because God is sending his legions of angels to judge mankind just like he did with the Great Flood, but Michael is portrayed as having more love for mankind and faith in their goodness than God himself. As Michael says, “God lost faith in man. I didn’t.” In fact this phrase or something like it is spoken multiple times throughout the film. The word faith becomes a key phrase used over and over. Someone says, “I lost faith in God,” and Michael responds, “And God’s lost faith in you.” “The last time God lost faith in man, he sent a flood.” It’s as if God is on the level of humans having faith in something beyond himself.

So, Somehow a new messiah is going to be born to a little waitress in a podunk town (just like Jesus), but God has changed his mind and wants to kill the human race instead of saving them, and start over. And he has to start with killing the new messiah, so he sends his angels to kill the Anointed One to be born (like Herod slaughtering the innocents to kill Jesus). This confusing contradictory mess of a worldview is compounded by the expressly stated theme that bookends the beginning and end of the movie: “Why is God so mad at his children? I don’t know I think he just got tired of all the bullshit.” In this story, God appears to be a tiresome, angry, vengeful bully as opposed to a righteous judge and king.

When Michael fights the angel Gabriel (who has remained faithful to God’s commands) Michael is killed, but then somehow is resurrected with his wings (what the…?) to fight Gabriel again, and decides to let Gabriel live, something Gabriel admits he would not have done (being a vengeful unforgiving angel that he is). Then Michael tells Gabriel that Gabriel was wrong to obey God: “You gave him what he asked for. I gave him what he needed” [in protecting the new messiah and forgiving wicked humanity]. So again, Michael is more “compassionate” more “wise” than God or Gabriel, his faithful angel — as if there is some higher goodness than God.

So, a mere angel, Michael, loves mankind more than God does; God is impetuous, impatient and impertinent; the good angels act like demons (they possess people and turn them into demonic killers with black eyes and fangs). Legion is a story that subverts the Judeo-Christian narrative and makes God and his angels the villains, and the rebel angel the hero (remember the other rebel angel, Lucifer?). The worldview of Legion is essentially Humanism that believes mankind is good and God is a violent destructive concept to society.

The Book of Eli

Posted on by admin

A post apocalyptic tale about a man on a mission from God. A nuclear war has occurred in the past, believed to be because of religion, and most people were killed when a hole was burned in the sky and the sun burned everything. Most books have been burned, and many are now cannibals and lawlessness reigns. However, God spoke to Eli and guided him to where the last Bible was and told him to carry it out West, where the book will be safe and a help for others. So Eli travels across country, killing marauders who try to rob him and kill him. He’s a crack shot and an expert swordsman, so this is an action movie with a spiritual theme.

When Eli arrives at the town owned by bad guy Carnegie, who is one of the few people who reads and is therefore the kingly ruler of the city. Knowledge is power. But so is religion. Carnegie has his minions of evil biker dudes drive all around trying to find a Bible because he believes “it is a weapon, aimed at the hearts and minds of the weak and desperate. They’ll do exactly what I tell them if I tell them the words are from the book.” And we see Carnegie reading through a book on Mussolini, which indicates Carnegie as the fascist mentality that believes religion is a force to use to control people. But Eli and the people to whom he seeks believe it is a book of freedom that brings civilized meaning to existence. So two different views of the sacred text illustrate how people can use it for good or evil depending on their religious beliefs.

Solara, the love interest, is sent in to Eli by Carnegie in order to persuade Eli to join his gang and give him the Bible. Eli refuses to fornicate with her and even teaches her how to pray – something that is alien to her because the knowledge of God has been lost in this depraved uncivilized post-apocalyptic world. When Carnegie seeks to take the book from Eli, Eli is miraculously unharmed as the minions shoot at him walking away. Eli then turns and takes them all out with his pistol. You see, the voice had told him he would be protected and would accomplish this mission from God, and Eli has faith, because as he explains to chick sidekick, Solara, “I walk by faith, not by sight.” If Eli has the time before killing some bad guys, he’ll quote the Bible like, “Cursed is the ground for our sake, both thorns and thistles it shall yield. For from the dust we were taken and to the dust we shall return.” He also quotes Psalm 23, the Lord is My Shepherd to Solara when she asks him to read some to her. She says, “that’s beautiful, did you write it?” illustrating how illiterate the culture has become.

So this movie is unusually Christian in its theme. That is, it tells a story of God keeping the Bible as his word alive by miraculously protecting one man to bring it to the hands of those who will print it and distribute it to mankind — along with other classics of civilization.

But when the Bible gets captured by the bad guy and all seems lost with Eli sure to die from a bullet wound, God still manages to keep Eli alive to finish his journey to the community that happens to be holed up on Alcatraz. At this point Eli acknowledges to Solara that “I was so caught up with keeping the book safe that I forgot to live my life according to it. To do more for others than I do for myself.” Though this is an inaccurate quote of the golden rule, it still points up the fact that this is an analogy for the claim that faithful Christians too often spend their energy and passion in defending or fighting for “the book” instead of focusing on living out the love of others that Jesus has told them to engage in.

In the end, Eli gets the Bible to the small community anyway and they end up getting the King James version of the Bible to print and publish for the world. This is essentially the Christian doctrine of Inspiration, that God used human beings to communicate his message and bring it to the human race despite the evil in the world and the frailty of human beings. This belief is not one of divine dictation, but of human incarnation.

BUT…, and that’s a big BUT… a couple shots at the end seemed to be an intentional multicultural nod to Islam that seemed to work against the Christian exclusivism of the Bible: When Eli is transferring the text of the Bible to the good guys, he shaves all his hair off and dresses in what appears to be a Muslim garb. And then, the Bible that is printed is placed on a bookshelf right between a Tanakh and a Quran with other religious books, as if to say the Bible is one among other religious documents needed for civilization, including the Quran. A journalist in Slate online notes, “Al-Bukhari, a ninth-century Muslim scholar who spent years collecting hadith, quotes the prophet as saying “May Allah bless those who shaved” during the Hajj (pilgrimage); and the Quran states that “ye shall enter the Sacred Mosque, if Allah wills, with minds secure, heads shaved, hair cut short, and without fear.” This is why Islamic suicide terrorists shave their body hair before engaging in their terrorism because they believe they are doing a holy deed and will end up in Paradise. So as Eli lay dying, he has shaved Islam-style in holy preparation for death as well as holy presentation of God’s Word. Of course, this is all an ironic contradiction since Muslims do not believe the Bible is the Word of God, they believe it is the corrupted word of men.

17 Again

Posted on by admin

A romantic family comedy about a 37-year old guy who gets another chance at his unachieved goals in life when he is magically transformed into a 17 year old again. Mike O’Donnel was a 17 year old in 1989 when he had a promising basketball scholarship riding on a game at his high school. The only problem is that he discovers his girlfriend is pregnant, and he decides to walk away from it all and marry her to do the responsible thing. But now in 2009, he has two kids and has never been happy because he’s blamed his wife for 20 years for his inability to accomplish his dreams. So she is divorcing him, and he is staying with his juvenile man-child friend and dork turned software millionaire Ned.

Mike has his magical brush with a “threshold guardian” who turns him into a 17-year old – again — and he considers this his opportunity to relive his dream. Until he goes to school and sees his own son and daughter as he’s never seen them before. He realizes he has been so out of touch with who they are and concludes that he is supposed to save them. He embarks on his salvific journey to build his son’s lost confidence, and to rescue his daughter from a jerk boyfriend who only wants to use her for his sexual gratification.

This movie makes a number of thematic points for the viewer. First, it addresses the universal regrets of unachieved dreams and displeased middle age lives. It shows the journey of a man who has to learn that he should not regret the choice he made for love over personal dreams. This is very unusual for Hollywood movies that tend to prioritize personal dream fulfillment over duty. When Mike gets to the end of his story as a 17 year old again, and he again has the opportunity to get noticed by talent scouts at a game, he is presented with the same exact opportunity. But when he sees his wife, who is at the game, is about to leave, just as she was about to back in 1989, he leaves the game again, this time, not for duty to responsibility, but for love. And it is in his choice that he finally realizes he did not make a mistake when he gave it all up for her.

This was a clever twist on the genre formula, that usually sets up an opportunity in the beginning for the hero, who makes a wrong choice, but at the end, he is usually set up with a very similar opportunity that, because of his journey, he will now make the right choice to find redemption. But in this film, the twist is that the choice he has to make is that he made the right choice to begin with! It is a film that questions his values, but reaffirms them at the end.

Second, it is a pro-life film in that it depicts in positive terms a teenage couple (Mike and Scarlett) choosing to marry over a pregnancy instead of having an abortion, which is the standard advice to pregnant teens. A major argument by pro-choice advocates is that marrying to take care of a child instead of aborting it results in wasted lives and potential for both men and women. But this movie makes the argument that it is not only the right thing to do to accept the responsibility and marry for the sake of the child, but can easily produce the happiness in intimacy that we are all looking for. When Mike chooses to give it all up a second time, he is saying it is the right choice to do so, it is the right choice to place duty over personal dreams.

Thirdly, it is a film that is pro-abstinence. Mike, as a 17 year old again, follows his daughter around to protect her. In a sex ed class, he makes the argument that kids should not have sex before they are adults and in love, and preferably when they are married. As he describes the beauty and responsibility of an infant daughter and how that baby should be protected by a father, he looks right as his daughter, who doesn’t realize who he really is. After his mini-lecture, all the girls are moved and give back their condoms handed out by the teacher, because they obviously want that kind of true love. When Mike is accosted by three girls at a party who literally offer their bodies to him, he holds them at arm’s length and tells them that they won’t get respect if they don’t respect themselves by such offerings. But they don’t listen, and they say, “You don’t have to respect me,” which illustrates modern teen girl’s complete lack of self-respect.

And also, the film addresses the generation gap. But not merely in the sense of Mike learning about his own selfishness through the eyes of being a teen again. But it also shows that the generation gap is also the fault of teens. When Mike gives all his advice to the other students, he is of course, a 37 year old in a 17 year old body. His is the wisdom of age from the mouth of a youth. Of course, kids don’t listen to these arguments from adults, because they just think adults don’t want them to have fun. But through the mouth of a 17-year old, they listen. Which only goes to show that teens are missing out on wisdom because of their own prejudices and ignorance against their parents.

Mike’s journey is to learn how to be a better husband and father by giving up his selfish dreams for the love of his family.