Refiner’s Fire: Science Fiction Films: A Cast of Metaphysical Characters

The recurring biblical motifs are Creation, tasting of the forbidden fruit, and the Apocalypse.

One of the most durable cinema genres is the science fiction film, which is now in the midst of a great renaissance. This film category demands the attention of evangelicals because, like the related mystery thriller and the Gothic horror film, it delves into questions of an ultimate, frequently theological, nature.

The science fiction film has been a staple ever since the early days of motion pictures, beginning with such notable efforts as George Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902). Since then, the sci-fi film has been a cinematic constant, existing throughout the history of the motion picture. Yet it has clearly flourished more in some periods than in others. The reasons for this have to do with the sci-fi film’s role as a cultural barometer, reflecting our changing view of ourselves and our varying perceptions of the cosmic order of things.

Sci-fi film is currently booming. Beginning with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there has been a rush on sci-fi themes in the cinema, and on TV as well. Most recently we have been given Buck Rogers, Battleship Galactica, Alien, Star Trek, The Black Hole, and more are on the way. To assess the current importance of sci-fi film, we need to look at it as an important film category in its own right, with a special set of dominant themes.

Science fiction film, as opposed perhaps to science fiction literature, has usually been only peripherally interested in science per se. The sci-fi film has often been the province of mysticism and fantasy, more metaphysical than physical, and has drawn heavily on the traditions of nineteenth-century romanticism, which were distinctly antiscientific in tone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wife, Mary, was the author of Frankenstein, a work that has been far more influential in film than in literature. The story is a caveat for scientific investigation: there are realms belonging only to God that humans enter only at their peril. This plot has been stock-in-trade for scores of sci-fi films with “mad” scientists daring to “go beyond the bounds of what man is permitted to know.” Such a view is far more theological and metaphysical than it is scientific.

The value of the sci-fi film for the Christian lies more in its metaphysical character than in what it reveals of science. The sci-fi tradition thus poses metaphysical—and theological—questions to the ever-expanding domain of scientific knowledge. One might view these questions in terms of at least two biblical motifs: Creation and the Fall, and the Apocalypse.

Science fiction films can open up dialogue between the Christian and the secularist who recognizes the pervasive power of film images. It is possible to discern a two-fold image of the Fall running throughout sci-fi films. Humans frequently go beyond the limits set in creation, thereby partaking of forbidden fruit which, while it brings new knowledge, also brings terrible consequences. The sci-fi film asks whether the knowledge gained in science is worth the risk of misfortune that may follow. The brilliant English director of the early thirties, James Whale, developed this theme of man pursuing the forbidden fruit of secret knowledge in three superior sci-fi films: Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1935), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In all three of these works, a scientist goes beyond the bounds of creation in order to gain greater knowledge and power. In all three cases he is met with destructive forces of his own making.

This “Frankenstein formula” has been used with great frequency, always in the form of monsters unleashed upon humanity by a science gone too far. One might recall the great mad scientists of the thirties and forties: Lionel Atwill (Man Made Monster), George Zucco (The Mad Ghoul), Bela Lugosi (Devil Bat), and of course, Boris Karloff in a minor classic like The Invisible Ray. To these could be added the giant ants, grasshoppers, and other creatures of the nuclear age of the 1950s in such films as Them!, Tarantula, and The Preying Mantis. The assumption of such films, despite their occasional crudity, ought not to be missed. The world is not a neutral phenomenon, to be investigated and explored freely by human beings at will: rather, there is a moral purpose to life. That purpose must be discovered and followed if men and women are to keep from destroying themselves.

A second aspect of the Fall in sci-fi films is the recurring theme of the loss of identity. The great threat is the loss of one’s own self (or one’s soul). We find echoes of the warning, “In the day you eat thereof, ye shall surely die.” In addressing the problem of science transgressing divine limits the sci-fi film gives us a picture of the corporate effects of the Fall. For example, Grant Williams in Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is the victim of radioactive dust while on a sea cruise. His loss of identity occurs as he shrinks down to an infinitesimal size. But his plight is not completely hopeless. As he contemplates shrinking entirely from view, he reflects that he is still part of the created order of things, though now “known only to God himself.”

The loss of identity theme informs a multitude of sci-fi movies from Flash Gordon (1936) to Dawn of the Dead (1979). It is nowhere more effectively treated, however, than in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The story involves the conquest of a whole community by strange seed pods that grow to imitate specific individuals and then take over their personalities while they sleep. Siegel’s film is a vivid image of soulless conformity, a warning to those who take their own human development lightly, a close parallel to those who would ignore the image of God found within them. Nowhere is the feeling of expulsion from the divine presence more forcefully presented on film. Siegel’s original ending was considered so strong that the studio insisted he add a happier conclusion. The recent remake, a much more expensive reworking of the theme, has none of the force and sensitivity of the original. Where the original version ends with a warning that gives it genuine prophetic force, the new version concludes only with despair.

The second important biblical motif in these films is the Apocalypse, the final judgment on this world. Creation not only has a moral purpose: it has a definite end, which often involves a judgment on the present. One of the early views of the future on film is found in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). The film’s story is trite and easily forgotten, but the power of its images is not. The world of Metropolis is a vast technological civilization where the rich frolic in bizarre pleasure gardens and workers are sacrificed to monstrous machines (as the Old Testament pagan god, Moloch) and where scientists have become engineers experimenting on human beings. This all culminates in a nightmarish image of watery destruction in subterranean tunnels where most of the city’s population lie trapped. Metropolis’s apocalyptic destruction influences a number of later, classic sci-fi works such as War of the Worlds (1953) and The War Game (1965).

Nor need the apocalypse come from outside the present earthly realm of time and space. In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) enlightened aliens warn earth of impending destruction assured by the continuing warfare of earthly nations. Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 2001 (1968) shows destruction brought about by human dependence on machines which, made in man’s image, take on their calculating, self-serving purposes. The thrust of such films allows for discussion of Scripture’s own apocalyptic vision as found in Daniel and Revelation.

All of this brings us to the present revival of sci-fi films. Unfortunately, many of these films do not measure up to past accomplishments. The mystical side of George Lukas’s Star Wars—his much-acclaimed “force”—is really too vague to serve as a meaningful symbol. The gratuitous blood and gore of Alien, a remake of a little-known film of 1958, It! The Terror from Beyond Space, amounts to little more than massive mayhem for its own sake.

On the bright side is Superman, the film that fantasy and sci-fi buffs picked as the best science fiction film of 1978. The imagery of Superman is unabashedly Christian down to the incarnational form of “mild-mannered reporter, Clark Kent.” Some have seen the Superman image as a substitute, pop image messiah. Yet the value of Superman is that he is a messianic symbol, as valid for our time as Charlemagne or Sir Galahad were in the medieval period. The symbol doesn’t substitute as an alternate reality, but points to a greater reality, albeit one it never fully expresses. Of no small value is the fact that Superman reintroduces the concept of the hero into our popular vocabulary.

The science fiction film will certainly not be on the wane in the 1980s. We should hope that the metaphysical and theological concerns underlying this film category find serious response from those of us who find both identity and hope for the future in Jesus Christ.

Paul Leggett is currently on a study leave from the faculty of the Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano in San José, Costa Rica.

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