Pretty brash of me here, I’ll admit, to open a post about a movie I haven’t yet seen; and maybe won’t see for a while. But since I just listened to a long Holy Post podcast about it, complete with spoilers, I feel like I at least have a few handles to grab on to; and maybe some here who have seen it can weigh in then.
Skye Jethani and Esau McCaulley both had an hour long discussion about how the movie theme interacts with religion. I won’t give any specific spoilers here, but if you don’t even want any broad strokes for what the movie ends up being, then be warned that this does involve discussion of the overall theme the movie pushes.
Here is one thought from their discussion that struck me as an interesting insight. These can be the opening teasers for this thread (these are paraphrases from memory, so they aren’t exact quotes). Skye gives context, mentioning that depictions of aliens in our stories tend to fall into one of two categories: they are either colonizing tormentors here to enslave or destroy us and take our planet; or else they are saviors here to enlighten and rescue us. Those are the only two categories we seem to have for such things.
From Esau McCaulley: I thought this movie was more a critique of a “Greco-Roman” kind of religion - a religion of cultural power - than it was any kind of critique of real Christian religion. Religion (as portrayed in this movie) is a cultural force (hopefully used for good) rather than any real kind of truth. In other words - the kind of power we chase after (and that old Roman religions purport to deliver) is exactly what savior aliens could come and deliver to you for real!
I like novels I’ve read where aliens stop by to acquire something then move on, or come to set up trade, or other peaceful activities – especially when humanity learns that the aliens have been coming by every few thousand years.
Perhaps my favorite batch of aliens in fiction is one that was both savior and nemesis: they brought technology to solve energy and water and health problems, but they set up human-style companies to produce and sell the necessary items (or licensed the production when there were suitable human companies) – nothing that made massive leaps forward, like a century ahead of us, but things that we expected to figure out for ourselves in a decade or two. So they integrated well into human society, no great upheavals happened, but in about two generations they effectively owned the planet. Global warming had been averted, cancer was curable, clean water and energy were abundant, people were living on Mars and on some larger asteroids, and war was a thing of the past (they built a global anti-missile system “to protect our investments”), but their quarter-million population owned two-thirds of the planet’s value – though in doing so they’d led humanity forward at three to four times the pace we would have managed on our own.
Just got out of the movie, was a good experience. It was pretty intense, and I found it interesting at the end when they went to credits, with a fairly good sized audience, no one stood and moved towards the door, but stayed sitting in silence for several minutes.
Not to give any spoilers, but one interesting line in the movie had one one characters say that what made us different from other animals as a species was having empathy. Perhaps a bit of a political statement given the way Musk characterized empathy as a weakness and a societal flaw, an idea that seems to be a working idea behind much of our current events.
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