Supernatural / Religious

I, Frankenstein: The Monster Accepts Jesus as His Personal Lord and Savior

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Sci-Fi Fantasy sequel to the original Frankenstein by Shelley. Okay, do not put a high expectation upon this one. It’s sci-fi fantasy for God’s sake. Have some fun. I did. It’s the story of Frankenstein’s monster 200 years after the novel takes place. He is still alive in the present day because he is a creature in between the worlds of the living and the dead. He is alive but he has no soul. The unique and surprising and delightful twist is that it is ensconced within a Christian worldview of spiritual warfare between demons and angels for the future of mankind.

The story’s set up is an expansive alteration of the War in Heaven motif of the Bible. There is an order of angels between the archangels and earth who fight against the 666 legions of demon hordes who want to start a war to destroy all of mankind. Okay, pretty standard boring sameness. But the storytellers add an original twist that the angels are the Order of the Gargoyles. So they look frightening even though they are the good guys. This is actually based on the medieval notion that gargoyles were put on cathedrals not as demons but to scare away the demons. Not bad. To add to that, their symbol that makes their weapons “sacramental” and able to send demons to hell is what looks like a triple cross, a symbol, no doubt of the Trinity.

Now it is an incorrect tradition that we call the monster created by the doctor, “Frankenstein.” Frankenstein was the doctor’s name, not the monster’s. But a clever angle brought in is that, as the demon villain says, “We are all sons of our fathers. So denying who we are means we are lost.” Thus at the end of the film, we understand the meaning of the title, “I, Frankenstein.”

Frankenstein considers himself rejected by God and man because of his lack of a soul and that he was created by man instead of God. This is a thematic idea that returns in the story. Frankenstein wanders the earth with existential angst. This is a journey of identity, as the monster seeks to find out who he is while killing demons who are after him. And why are they after him? Because he holds the key to the ability of the villain to create an army of Frankenstein monsters to rule the world.

In the mean time, the Gargoyle order discovers him and also rejects him because they too consider him without a soul and rejected by his maker. But the awesome Queen of the order suspects not. She thinks that God has kept him alive for a higher purpose, and that “it is not for you or I to deny God’s purpose.” She also says that “all life is sacred,” so it would be wrong for the angels to kill him. Wow. A return to the Victorian theme that wrestles with the Christian God and the value of human life. (Whoops, they just slipped in a pagan twist by saying “all life” is sacred, not the Biblical version that “human life” is sacred. Of course, this is the premise of the idolatrous animal rights fascists and enviro-fascist crowd who deny human exceptionalism. Since “all life is sacred,” then we must allow human life to suffer by prohibiting economic activity in areas that contain “endangered” rodents, insects, and other examples of “all life.” Which means, when people say “all life is sacred” what they REALLY mean is that human life is dispensable because they will let humans die to save rodents and insects. The true haters. But I digress.)

Because the monster was never named by Frankenstein, the Queen gives him a new name: Adam, an obvious nod to the Biblical first man created by God. But again, they believe that he is not a human, angel, or demon, and therefore an uneasy tenuous relationship between Adam and the Angels.

Okay, I want to applaud this movie for using a Christian mythology as its worldview. That has become so rare in Hollywood these days that I am shocked whenever I see it attempted in a positive way. I believe the writer is a Christian, and I also know how much pressure there is on Christians to keep Jesus out of their Hollywood blockbusters. After all, we wouldn’t want to offend the small 20% of people who don’t like Jesus just for the 80% majority who basically do. Better to offend 80% by keeping him out of it (Hollywood logic).

About the best you can get is the Cross symbol and the fact that you are fighting on the side of the angels of heaven (Notably connected to the Biblical angels Michael and Gabriel). Unfortunately, as in I, Frankenstein, this all too often distorts the meaning of redemption into “being a good person.” As the love interest in the movie says, “You’re only a monster if you behave like one.”

In reality, we are all monster children of our father, the first and fallen Adam, and only by becoming children of the second Adam through faith, can we be redeemed of our badness. One of the few sci-fi fantasy movies that actually did a good job of embodying faith as the essence of redemption was “End of Days” with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But on the other hand, I can certainly see that this story could be seen as a Christ story using Frankenstein as the “Second Adam,” who was a unique being between two worlds (like Christ’s dual nature of God and man), resurrected, and in whom is the redemption of mankind. In that sense I embrace this mythos. It ain’t perfect but neither am I and neither are my stories. I like that.

On the down side, the entire premise of the movie falls apart because of some of the choices made in the logic of the story. Or should I say, “illogic.”

SPOILER TERRITORY: So, the whole scheme of the villain demon, Naberius is to use the scientific technology that Frankenstein discovered to create an army of undead to take over the world. The premise is that 1) Reanimated corpses like Frankenstein have no soul, 2) the demons sent to hell need bodies to be able to come back to inhabit so they can take over the world, 3) Demons cannot inhabit a body with a soul, so 4) they can inhabit the reanimated corpses because they have no soul.

Oh boy, what a mess. The problem is that Frankenstein ends up surprising the villain by having a soul, so he cannot be possessed! Frankenstein has discovered that God has given him a purpose of fighting these demons. Okay, fair enough. But then that means that the entire scene of demons entering the army of corpses at the end could not possibly work, even though it is shown as happening. Whoops. Unless I missed something about Frankenstein being special. I might very well have.

Secondly, the entire premise of a reanimated human life not having a soul is completely poor theology and dangerous. In the Bible, a “soul” is actually the Hebrew word for “breath.” The idea is that human life is spiritual or soulish. It was a gnostic Greek notion that the soul was the real essence of our identity that inhabits the body like a ghost in a machine. To the ancient Hebrew the body was as much our identity as our life or soulishness. They were inseparable. It is after all the body that God says he will resurrect! Secondly, the Bible is clear that demons possessed humans who clearly had souls. Not good.

But the most dangerous is this notion that created human life is without a soul is the very abominable justification for the social engineering of human life without rights. It was the basis of slavery and it is the basis of current debates about cloning. To own human life because man is in some way its “creator” (not actually true, if man starts with living organisms or DNA as he does in all genetics research). This is of course the justification for atrocities of all kinds, from slavery to holocaust. And it is the very issue undergirding modern genetic experimentation on human life.

But I have to say, I don’t damn this story for its silly illogical and unscientific premise about human souls. After all, sci-fi fantasy is not about reality, it is a metaphor for spiritual meaning. This movie tries to affirm Christian spiritual meaning by subverting the Frankenstein tradition with a spiritual warfare motif taken from the Bible and unfortunately diluted of the real essence of the Christian worldview: Faith and that other unique hybrid being considered the most vile monster of all in our secular world: Jesus Christ.

The Mortal Instruments: A Dualistic Story of the Supernatural Without God

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Action horror. Hot girl realizes she’s both Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker in a Twilight World of battling werewolves and vampires. (In this movie, zombies “don’t exist,” so right off the bat you know it is an inferior horror film)

The movie starts out rather well with a very cool sequence of Clary, a young artist high schooler I think, learning that she has a secret identity she is not aware of. Her mom is hiding her true identity to her, she can see demonic and angelic things others cannot, and demons in the form of earthly creatures are after her.

As soon as the mythical background starts to be explained, everything becomes very jumbled and hard to follow. She eventually learns she is a “child of the Nephilim.” Though this is never really explained except I think it occurs when someone drank from a chalice cup that an angel Raziel offered at the Crusades. Didn’t make much sense to me.

So this is why she can see the spirit world, because she is half-human, half-angel. It’s a Nephilim story! And all the demons, vampires and other monsters want to find that magic cup that Clary’s mother has hidden, while Clary has the location embedded in her memory somewhere. Although I couldn’t remember why drinking from the cup was so wanted by the villains. I think it was because that would make them half-angel? Oh, I don’t remember, it was just kinda dumb.

So, normal humans are called “Mundanes” because they can’t see the spirit world (The American word for “Muggles” – Give her a break, you gotta call them something and it’s gotta reflect the fact that they are blind to one half of reality). Vampires and werewolves are called “downworlders” because they inhabit the world down here. And the good guys are “Shadow Hunters,” which are Nephilim who kill demons. If you know anything about the Biblical Nephilim, none of this makes any sense. But if you want to follow a cool Biblical fantasy tale about the Nephilim, check out this cool series. Meanwhile, Clary realizes she has the ability to tattoo runes on herself that bring powerful enchantments to stop demons and other stuff.

So the worldview in this story seems to downplay angels to almost non-existent. Sure, the evil arch-villain Raziel was an angel, but the heroine’s helper ally, the shadow hunter Jace, a scrawny effeminate kid who is somehow able to topple big bad bulky muscular guys, explains that “he’s never seen an angel.” So, I’m sure they are there in the series, but not in this movie. But when they retrieve weapons from a church, Clary asks about the religious reality behind their battle. Jace explains that they “know no religion,” and they could just as well hide their weapons in a mosque or a buddhist temple or Hindu temple. He then says he doesn’t believe in religion, he “believes in himself.” Then when Clary learns about the history of the evil angel Raziel, she is told by a master shadow hunter that they are engaged in a battle of good and evil, “a war that can never be won.” In other words, the world is a Dualistic eternal battle between opposing good and evil that are pretty much equal and always in conflict – hey, just like Star Wars! Just like Eastern Dualism! And then she realizes whose daughter she is and you go, “Hey, just like Star Wars!” Okay, sorry I spoiled it for you. You won’t miss anything cause it’s all rather vapid.

No reference whatsoever to God occurs in this story of supernatural demons and AWOL angels. It’s another riduculous attempt to hijack the mythos of Judeo-Christianity and to exorcise the most essential element, God, while keeping the corpse of the imagery and trying to resurrect it with occultic spells and magic. BTW, I have no problem with having occultic elements in the story per se, but the context determines their meaning and in this world, there is some abstract impersonal force that is actually quite boring because it has no personality and no metaphysical sense to it.

Okay, there is one tiny waaaaay ambiguous cool reference to God when we discover that the musical genius Bach was a shadow hunter and playing his music uncovers demons because it makes them go mad and they reveal themselves. Bach was a Christian who wrote music to God’s glory, so that could have been meaningful in its proper context.

One cool statement at the ending sums up the reality of spiritual awareness. Clary is sad and scared that “I don’t see the world the same. I see demons and angels.” To which Jace responds, “The world is the same. You’re just different.” That does sum up the reality of spiritual enlightenment, even if it comes in the context of a contradictory dualistic worldview.

R.I.P.D.: Evil Must be Punished or There is No Justice

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Men in Black with evil souls instead of aliens. Or Ghostbusters 2013. Ryan Reynolds plays Nick, a cop who finds himself killed in the line of duty and winds up on R.I.P.D. the Rest in Peace Department of “heaven” or whatever it is. They need his skills to help catch renegade evil souls called, Deados, who have escaped the big sucking wind tunnel to the afterworld, in order to hide out on earth in disguise among the living. What Nick, and his veteran partner, Roy, played by Jeff Bridges as a rascally western style sheriff, soon discover is that the evil souls have their own planned apocalypse, and can I say, it ain’t bringing heaven to earth.

Nick discovers he has about a hundred years to help the RIPD, or “take his chances with judgment,” of which he is not too sure he will do well. So he jumps at the chance. The partners have to hunt down the dark souls, whose presence is revealed by their decaying effect on their living quarters. Electricity flutters, and homes fall apart or are covered with grossness and slime. Their own spiritual decay is manifested in them looking ugly and monstrous, but they are able to disguise themselves as normal humans. Their true natures come out when offered Asian or Indian spicy food (I don’t get that one, but you gotta have some rules for the world you create).

Unfortunately, Nick, himself is not a clean soul, as he was involved in taking a little from the coffers of captured criminal gold when he was alive. But he does it only to be able to bless his wonderful loving wife, who means the world to him. Living on a cop’s salary is a temptation to skim.

So, if they can capture the souls and bring them back into a purgatory like holding cell in the sky, then they will eventually be brought to judgment.

Nick’s journey is one of being able to let go of his wife, and redeeming himself since he was taken at too young an age and would be unable to clear his name to her because he wants to right his wrong. But as his partner reminds him, no one dies at a good time, it’s always an inconvenience for our plans.

The bad guys’ plan is based in something called the “Staff of Jericho,” which has ancient roots in the Old Testament times, but it is not really explained so it becomes a mere plot device similar to Ghostbusters. But the point is that it is an ancient pagan religious device that does evil through the spiritual world. In this sense, the picture painted by this movie is a kind of Christian worldview against paganism.

But it’s really more of a Christian worldview subverted by cosmic humanism.

This movie was a mixture of good laughs, warm romance, humanist redemption and SFX. I love the premise. It’s very clever. Because it is an unavoidably spiritual premise, there is unyielding talk of hell and eternal punishment for “bad people.” This is one of those narrative and ethical “proofs for the existence of God.” You cannot tell satisfying stories and you cannot have a moral or ethical universe that does not include real punishment and reward. C.S. Lewis argued that the notion of punishment, far from being the “unfair behavior of a cruel god,” who “casts people into hell,” the notion of punishment is what actually gives meaning and dignity to the human on both a societal level and by extension a spiritual one. If you do not punish a being, then you are denying them the essential dignity to choose good or evil. You are saying that they cannot but do what they do, whether through psychological or internal chemical manipulation or whatever. To punish is not to be cruel at all (if done justly of course), but to affirm that the being could have done otherwise and had the inherent dignity and capability to do so. To freely choose to do good or evil is the thing that dignifies humanity. If we are but victims of our social groups or scientific natural causes, then we are mere puppets to be socially engineered by the elites. And guess who those elites would be? You got it. The privileged ones who believe in those views: The scientific materialists, naturalists, socialists and other totalitarian utopian left wing radicals (to whom the only “evil” is a God who judges – and his followers).

But if there is a God who punishes or judges, then that means he made us with the inherent dignity and power to do right. Our choice not to do right does not make us diseased or sick, but evil. A God who does not punish or judge evil is the most cruel and unjust being possible because billions of innocent victims are denied justice and recompense in favor of the criminal evildoers getting away with it.

Thus the saying, “Compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” In justice, if you do not punish evildoers, you are punishing the victims (which includes the family and loved ones of those victims). No, worse, you are torturing them by allowing the evildoer to escape justice which intensifies and magnifies the loss of the loved ones for the rest of their lives. It’s like torturing the victims.

Ah, if there was only a way in which our spiritual crimes could be paid for AND we are forgiven, only then can justice and peace embrace. Now, who could be that perfect mediator to fulfill both justice and grace? Who can save us from this body of death? Thanks be to…

Do I digress?

And that is where this movie falls apart. Since the only taboo in some studio movies is GOD, the filmmakers ditch the only logical and reasonable reality of a personal God who judges and replace him with a “universe that judges in its ultimate wisdom.” The universe in this movie is a godless one. It is a pantheistic view that makes the entire universe as if it is the supreme being. Which is ultimately unsatisfying from a story perspective, because now you have a personal story of personal beings who are interacting not with an ultimate person, but with an impersonal abstract force or accumulation of natural laws. BORING. They could have easily used the generic term “God” which would still mean whatever most people wanted it to mean anyway, but it would have been a more satisfying story with a personal connection. Depersonalizing the deity is suicide for storytelling and theology. Impersonal forces do not “judge,” only personal beings do, because “judgment” is an ethical notion between personal beings.

Another half and half movie. Half good stuff about judgment for our deeds on earth, half terrible stuff about a godless pantheistic universe.

And another thing in this movie: What happens when a bad soul doesn’t want to go back in supernatural handcuffs to the “holding cell” to await his judgment? Well, then the RIPD has guns with special bullets that annihilate the soul, destroy them forever. Do not go to Hell, do not collect one hundred dollars, just straight into oblivion of non-existence.

So I got to thinking. The souls who have escaped are all obviously evil, as evidenced by their manifestation. So, if they are going to go to judgment anyway, what would you rather want (as an evil soul), eternal torment or non-existence? And it seemed to me that I would rather cease to exist than suffer forever under punishment. So from the perspective of a spiritual criminal, getting blown away by the RIPD might actually be preferable to judgment.

But from “the universe in its ultimate wisdom” perspective (Ahem, God’s perspective), it seems to me that annihilation would be the ultimate devaluation of human worth because the lack of existence makes the human worth nothing, while continuity of existence, even in judgment, maintains that the human is in the image of God and therefore has eternal value. Kind of an extension of what I was saying about punishment above.

OR would the devaluation of the human into nothing be the ultimate judgment? I can see why some might see it that way. But then again, would God devalue his own image in a human being? I kinda doubt it.

But whatever the case, we do have the promise from God that “He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury” (Romans 2:6–8).

And if you want to see if anyone can actually attain this “righteousness,” go here.

The Conjuring: Got Demons? A Little of Jesus Goes a Long Way

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Demon horror. Supposedly true story based on an incident in the 1970s about the most horrifying experience of two paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Perron family with five girls enter their new farmhouse out in the rural area (of course) only to discover it is haunted by evil entities. They hire the famous Warrens to figure it out and so the confrontation occurs. That’s pretty much it. Pretty much the usual haunted house story with creaking boards, slamming doors, birds flying into windows, dogs seeing spirits, cold areas, rotten smells, and the usual exorcism scene. But I’m not being negative. These things must all be there and the filmmakers do very well in telling this rich “true” story. It’s a good solid horror film with good creepy moments and good character development, with solid performances by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, as well as Lili Taylor.

It’s a kind of origin story for all those Ghosthunters we have nowadays with their fancy electronic equipment and pseudo-scientific means of detecting ghosts and whatnot. But in the 70s, they were just starting out, so we see them setting up an analog reel to reel recorders and flash still cameras with thermostats to catch any change in temperature. And of course, a super 8mm camera. It was a clever homage to today’s more developed scene.

I went to this film with high hopes because I had read it was written by Christians who seemed to express in an interview how much Jesus was the answer to addressing demonic entities, unlike 90% of these supernatural horror movies that only have religion to show how powerless it is against supernatural evil. Okay, maybe 80%.

Well, I can’t say I was entirely satisfied, but kind of pleased. I’m conflicted. This is a mixture of good and bad elements.

The Warrens are depicted not so much as Christian believers as pragmatic users of religion. They believe demons are real, and they have connections with Roman Catholic church for exorcisms and blessings, but they appear to fight evil entities, they do not seem to call upon God in faith. They don’t pray or exhibit anything that illustrates they are true believers. This is a fine distinction, but stay with me.

Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert in fighting demonic spirits and don’t want to be. But it seems to me that as I read in the Bible, demons are mostly cast out in the name/power of Jesus Christ by his faithful followers (Acts 16:16-18), but sometimes even unbelievers can do so by appealing to Jesus (Matt 7:21-23). It’s usually pretty simple, and usually a verbal casting out, as opposed to exorcism, except for more difficult cases that may require prayer and fasting (Mark 9:14-29). But those who are not followers of Messiah can be possessed or even beat up when they try to exorcise demons (Acts 19:13-20).

In the movies, I realize religious relics like crosses and religious rites like exorcisms are much more filmic and visual, but I have always had a problem with the Roman Catholic rite as presented in these films. And it’s used in The Conjuring as well.

Here’s my beef: It seems to create a picture of sympathetic magic, whereby a demon’s power is subdued by proper ritual engagement. You’ve all seen it, and its in The Conjuring as well: They read off a bunch of Latin ritual texts as if saying magic words are where the power lies, rather than the actual appeal to the living God over that spiritual being. It makes it appear that the victory is in some ritual action than in the faith of the believer. That would be magic.

In this movie, the mother is possessed by a demon that wants to get her to kill her daughter. When they start reading off the magical words in Latin, and sprinkle holy water on the mother, it brings out the demonic presence and we see all the typical (not bad, and not stupid, but definitely typical) demonic special effects that take you out of the story and make it only a movie. You know, the special demonic pupils, the face that looks like Linda Blair possessed, and the ability to do levitation and move everything in the house. Unfortunately, the moment that happens, I no longer believe the story and just know I am watching a movie with special effects.

But in this story, they overcome the demon ultimately by saying something like “I command you to go back to hell” and then speaking to the mom underneath by saying, “Don’t let it take you over, remember your love for your children.” In other words, no appeal to Jesus Christ.

So the picture it paints is more one of self-salvation than faith.

Nowhere is anyone depicted as being in relation to God. Religion is a weapon, but not a relational reality. God seems to be more of a tool. We can fight demons and win if we use the right magical weapons. It is good that they show the religious means of battling this demon and they do make reference in the movie to suggesting the girls be baptized in order to protect them, and these are all technically allusions to faith, but without any content. The problem I had was that these were all in context, rituals of sympathetic magic, rather than pictures of faith in context. God is a tool more than a person.

But then again, since it is coming from Hollywood, it’s better than the usual, which is to ignore God altogether.

I should probably be more positive about this positive portrayal of the Christian religion here, but I think the reason I am not all gaga about it is because not once in the entire story did I ever hear the name Jesus Christ appealed to. If you know me, you know I don’t like most Christian movies, so I am not calling for that kind of artificial tripe. What I mean is that in truth, the only way to battle demonic entities is going to be by faith and the power of Jesus Christ, specifically, not in “God” generically. In real life spiritual warfare like this, from what I understand, it is the blood of Jesus Christ that is appealed to that overcomes demons (Heck, even Arnold got it right in The End of Days when he won through faith over human strength).

In this movie, they do say, “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” at the beginning of the exorcism, and that weakens my argument somewhat, but I would argue back that it is spoken like magical words. I don’t know what is being said in Latin, (so that is meaningless to us if we do not understand what is being said.) The Warrens use crucifixes around the house, but only because it pisses the demons off to have religious icons. Again, magical tools, not spiritual faith.

At the end of the film they have a super that says, “The devil exists. God exists. Our destiny hinges on which one we follow.” Not bad. Kudos.

But I still got the sense from this film that it was more about magic than faith.

Okay, here’s another strike against my negativity: The story depicts one of the original evils as being rooted in a witch from the Salem trial! Of course, in the Hollywood delusionary universe, witches don’t exist except as lies created by Christians in order to persecute. Well, here, we see that is a lie itself. Witchery is real and it is evil. Sorry, all you pagans. I know you’ll be the next in line to sue me for discrimination — And call me evil.

So, in many ways, the Christian religion is portrayed positively and I applaud them for that. But it is certainly ironic that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Hollywood is not Voldemort, but Jesus Christ (except as a cuss word). You just can’t use those two little words positively. Even when you make a movie that takes demonic spirits as real, God forbid you ever mention the one most relevant name to that reality. It’s the one name that actually has the power to crush evil spirits and therefore is the one name that must not be uttered by Hollywood, Government, Education, Science, Leftism, the Democratic Party (unless they are likening their candidate to him) and demons.

Hmmm, those ladies doth protest too much methinks.

Here I go, violating the Separation of Church and Hollywood: Evil spirits, I cast you out in the name and power of JESUS CHRIST and his blood shed on the cross for the atonement of sins.

Beautiful Creatures: Ugly Monsters, Anti-Christian Hate Speech

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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?”

Get Chronicles of the Nephilim on Audiobook!

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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.

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Darren Aronofsky’s Noah: Environmentalist Wacko

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

The Tree of Life

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Arthouse family drama. Terrence Malik’s new cinematic exploration of the meaning of life and suffering through the experience of family and the universe. This is another poetically pondering, visually strong, story weak, humanly cold film in Malick’s portfolio of increasingly distant filmmaking. I must say, his films usually bore me with their self-absorbed pretention and lack of storytelling. But I have to say, with all its weaknesses, this one also had some strengths that made the overly long 2 hours and 15 minutes more bearable. It is the emotional journey of a family in the 1950s struggling with the death of their eldest of three sons, the youngest of which grows up (Sean Penn) and ponders it on the anniversary of his death many years later.

The movie begins with a legend of Job 38:4-7 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Eventually, the movie enters into a 15 minute or so cinematic evolutionary panorama of the universe that illustrates this Biblical concept of creation. We are introduced to a myriad of supernovas and condensing star galaxies all the way down to microbial ocean life on earth, up the chain to fish and amphibian, through dinosaurs, including the meteoric crash on earth and ultimately to the birth of a human baby. All of this is accompanied by an at times haunting ambience and at times operatic angelic chorus. It is all really quite spiritual, stunning, and grand, though an awkward tangent in terms of drama.

The theme of the movie is telegraphed through the interior thoughts of the mother of the family played as a silent longsuffering housewife by Jessica Chastain, as she ponders ponderingly, “There are two ways in life, the way of nature and the way of grace. You have two choices which to follow.” She then describes nature in Christian terms of selflessness and sacrifice, while the way of nature is selfish and concerned with its own survival. She and her husband, played by Brad Pitt become the symbolic living versions of these worldviews. The father [incarnating nature] raises his three boys by being firm to the point of harsh, making rules and punishing with a distantness that nevertheless also requires the affection of his sons to kiss him goodnight as one of the rules. He teaches them how to fight, and he teaches them how to become strong in life, in a survival of the fittest mentality. He says, “The wrong people go hungry, the wrong people get loved. The world succeeds by trickery. You can’t be too good.” To the eldest, “Your brothers are naïve. If you’re too good, you’ll be taken advantage of.” “You make yourself what you are. You make your own destiny.” At one point he gets angry with the mom [incarnating grace] for her comforting nurturing refusal to engage in the father’s discipline, “You undermine everything I do. You turn my own kids against me.” And this is inevitable, for grace undermines nature in this Thomistic dichotomy of reality.

Yet, all along, the movie is accented with multiple interior dialogues as voiceovers expressing the inner emotional questions that haunt them, even the father, “What I want to do, I can’t do. I do what I hate,” “Always you were calling me.” The mother, asks in her pain, “Lord, where were you? Why? Did you know? Who are we to you?” “Life by life, I search for you. My hope.” The eldest son, “Why did you let a boy die? Why should I be good if you aren’t?” This is certainly the authentic struggle that everyone of us has who has faith in God yet honestly tries to face the hard realities of the world’s suffering and pain. And in some ways, the pondering voiceovers are exactly what those of us do experience in our quiet moments that correspond to the long drawn out beautiful cinematic scenes of this film. It just doesn’t work well as drama.

We see the eldest’s son’s coming of age as he teases a girl he is attracted to, sneaks into the neighbor’s house to examine a woman’s lingerie with characteristic male curiosity, and becomes ashamed before his mother in an analogy of the loss of innocence. And then his gang of young boys who walk around with destructive tendencies, breaking windows, tying a frog to a bottle rocket, and finally defying mother, “NO! I don’t want to do what you say. I want to do what I want to do. You let him [father] run over you.” In today’s extreme storytelling of gang rapes, gunfights, and teen sex, this is a refreshingly sensitive portrayal of the essential truth of the loss of innocence and coming of age that youth experiences.

The father, though he is a sort of 50s cliché of the hard working chauvinistic male who has no intimacy with wife or kids, he has redemption in the end as we hear his own inner journey of repentance after his son dies and he loses his job. “I wanted to be loved because I was great. I’m nothing. I dishonored the glory. I am a foolish man.” The mother ponders, “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by. Do good, wonder, hope.” And in her prayers we hear “Keep us, guide us till the end of time.” “I give him to you. I give you my son.”

This is a deep exploration of a biblical spiritual journey with faith in God and suffering that resonates deeply at times. The biggest criticism I would make is that in the end it is so interior and isolated in it’s visual reality and lacking real intimacy of human drama that it tends to leave one sadly dissatisfied. One examines an intellectual spirituality that addresses the human and divine connection aesthetically, while lacking the human to human connection that is equally necessary to redemption of the human condition. It is not enough to experience a Gnostic monastic idea of God, we understand his fullness through humanity as well, human connection, community. It is the point of the Incarnation, God and man. After all, it was God who said, “It is not good for man to be alone” with God himself. We need community. Terrence Malik needs some community.