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Most fans of science fiction and fantasy love envisioning other planets and distant forgotten lands, encountering aliens and monsters, imagining combat with Excalibur or lightsabers, and thrilling to action and suspense. But these significance of these overlapping genres runs deeper. Imaginative storytellers have mapped out countless imaginary environments in which we can ponder lasting dilemmas of the spirit and the intellect. In recent years, filmmakers have seized upon this context with renewed vigor, more interested in the human experience than in extra-terrestrial adventure.

Signs turns a typical alien-invasion premise into a surprisingly intense story of one man's argument with God. Minority Report makes a futuristic cop thriller into a contemplation of freewill, predestination, and the ethics of "pre-emptive military action." The latest Star Wars episode raises questions about how love and duty can conflict, and the way that hate can lead to violence and self-destruction. In Tolkien's saga of the One Ring, The Fellowship of the Ring offers parables about humility, friendship, courage, greed, the value of the environment, the corrupting nature of power. Harry Potter's adventures examine how we use the talents we have been given, and the difference between ability and choice.

This week, we can add two more to that list: Solaris and Treasure Planet. Like Signs, Steven Soderbergh's Solaris is about a man who has lost his wife, and it takes an unexpected confrontation with an alien intelligence in order to bring him peace and resolution. Like Fellowship and Potter, Treasure Planet gives us a small hero caught up in a big quest where he learns courage and virtue.

These films are playing an important role in a year when more realistic films both are preoccupied with characters who have lost their moral compass in a chaotic and threatening world. Just look at the plots now playing: 8 Mile's rebellious hero lacks a firm foundation at home, at work, or in the neighborhood, so he learns to rely solely on himself. Far From Heaven's heroine is betrayed by her husband and her friends, abandoned to a lonely yearning for honesty and virtue. El Crimen Del Padre Amaro deals with disillusioned youth struggling with corruption in the Catholic church. Frida's artistic heroes wallow in debauchery until the wages of sin teach them hard lessons.

Next month introduces a host of angst-plagued protagonists. The upcoming Gangs of New York looks back on a man sticking up for the oppressed as bigotry and violence rock the streets of early America. The shadow of September 11 darkens the days of The Guys. King Lear agonizes again in the context of a gangster film called My Kingdom (starring the late great Richard Harris.) And About Schmidt casts Jack Nicholson as a depressed retiree who finds only emptiness as he looks back on his life. Morvern Callar is about a woman failing to cope with her boyfriend's suicide. The Hours looks at Virginia Woolf drowning in depression and despair. Max gives us young Hitler torn between his mediocrity as an artist and his promise as a political leader. In the Cannes-award-winning film from Roman Polanski, The Pianist, a musician escapes from the Holocaust into music. And Adaptation, perhaps the darkest of them all, introduces us to a screenwriter trying to write a script about passion, while he is drawn into the black hole of his own life's emptiness.

To name a few.

Why are we looking more and more to fantasy? Is life on Earth so bleak that our best hope is for a benevolent extra-terrestrial intelligence? It may seem so to some. But I would argue that what makes some science fiction and fantasy appealing is the way that in alien environments, we can recognize those truths that will follow us everywhere, into any situation. We take comfort in locating the familiar in an unfamiliar context, and that helps us return home and see the same order in apparent chaos. In metaphors like alien intervention and magic, we catch glimpses of a Higher Power, a Divine Benevolence, an invisible Design (or Designer) causing all things to work together for good.

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November (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46