Unthinkable, Legion, and The Book of Eli

In June these three religious movies became available to rent. We watched them separately, but found that it was interesting to think about the three of them together. We should preface this with the fact that (being Christians) we thought about these movies from a Christian perspective.

All of them keep Jesus out of it, even though two of them think biblically. In Unthinkable the government confronts radical Islam but thanks to its secular mindset, it is unable to successfully understand its opponent. Both Legion and The Book of Eli are capable of imagining angels and prophets as the proper subject of movies, provided these holy beings operate as if the son of God did not and will not be present on the earth. The movies are entertaining and worth thinking about, although The Book of Eli is decidedly better.

Legion proposes the preposterous notion that God has changed his mind: In lieu of sending Christ down to bring an end to the age and usher in a far better one, he is sending his angels to destroy mankind. The field general of angels, Michael, thinks God has erred and rebels. He does his darnedest to keep a specific, single, expectant mother alive because her child can supposedly lead mankind back into God's good graces.

We are reminded of Moses' efforts to bargain with God to keep him from destroying all of the Hebrews wandering the desert. Moses argues that keeping the woebegone Hebrews alive and getting them to the promised land is far better public relations than choosing yet another people to be His. God 'relents'. Of course, it is not clear whether God is only zooming Moses when he threatens the eradication of the Hebrews. If that were the case, than the threat of extermination would have been a test to see whether Moses truly loved his thoroughly lost people.

If God is testing Michael in Legion, it is rather a more expensive test in lives than the test of Job. And it would seem that after such a long time God would already know what he had in Michael... But it is a good tale, so long as you forget about Jesus - which does seem to be the basic agenda of this century.

In the Book of Eli the apocalyptic scenario does not seem to be anything out of Revelations either. A man who has no business finding the last remaining copy of the Bible protects it against all odds in a decades long trek across the country teaching people to pray and look out for one another while dispensing God's judgment on evildoers. Take Elijah and set him in a samurai movie and you will have the idea. It is spellbinding and captures the spirit of the old Testament well (particularly with its twist at the end).

Both Legion and The Book of Eli work out the implications of the New Testament. Both Michael and Eli, each in their own way, emulate Christ, which is the task of all Christians. But acting like a Christ in an apocalyptic future is one thing, how about emulating Christ now?

Nobody in Unthinkable is capable of such emulation. The radical Islamist is capable of sacrificing himself for his holy cause (to bring US troops out of the Middle East), but he is also content with the destruction of millions of his former citizens, i.e., Americans. As one would guess, agents of the government are willing to do the 'unthinkable' in order to thwart his plans (but he outwits them in the end).

When the most humane of his captors reminds him of freedom, our terrorist, a former special forces man, tells her that freedom is a false god. No one has a response for this. And it is an assertion that should give us pause. It is Islamist to find the advocacy of freedom to be a form of idolatry, a violation of the first commandment. This is not the case for Christians. Jesus, is often asking people who they think he is, and makes it clear that their deciding that he is the son of God is pivotal to their salvation. They have to be free to make such a decision. Indeed, in Christian doctrine our being cast from the Garden insures us of the freedom we demonstrated when we ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But in the face of radical Islam how should Christians be emulating Christ? By doing the unthinkable or by being willing to ask the pivotal question Christ asked..."And who do you think I am?"

A Few Days in September ****

Unlike so many of them out there, this is a good political drama. Lately we have been staying away from this genre because much of what has been produced in the last few years has been done so with an agenda so obvious that you feel as if you made the mistake of inviting Sean Penn over for dinner and now you are sorely regretting it as he launches into his third tirade during the second course and blows cigarette smoke in your face (think “Lions for Lambs”). But lately we have been on a Juliette Binoche kick so when this film popped up on our Watch Instantly radar with the additional carrot of John Turturro, we bit.

Aside from it being an entertaining, well-acted film, what you can deeply appreciate about “A Few Days in September” is its treatment of our political world with the complexity that the subject matter deserves. The world has grown simply too big for there to be just two sides to anything. It’s naïve to think that a government as big as the United States can be simply “for” something and also not be ambivalent towards or against it. Have you ever tried getting even a four-person family to decide unanimously on where to go to dinner Friday night? Good. Now imagine a huge bureaucracy trying to come to a consensus on anything. Instinctively we know this and yet we continuously attempt to turn every issue into a black and white picture that is easy on our eyes and requires nothing more from us than to pick a side. So what is the answer? Oddly, “A Few Days in September” seems to be suggesting – poetry.

The first clue we receive is that the principle adversaries in the movie are named Pound and Elliot. The hit man, Mr. Pound has learned an appreciation of poetry from the master spy, Mr. Elliot. Pound recites Blake while watching the blood drain from one of his victims. Meanwhile Elliot’s stepson, David, loves poetry as much as his father much to the vexation of Elliot’s estranged daughter. But perhaps the most poetic character is Irene who functions alternately as master spy and “mother” to the two charges that her friend, Elliot, has asked her to chaperone to a meeting with him.

The movie culminates in poetic justice. The attack on the twin towers has inadvertently spawned a love between two young (and technically incestuous) hopefuls.