Still image from Ad Astra | Property of 20th Century Fox
Are we alone in the universe? Is their such a thing as “intelligent life” out there? Why did Alf want to eat cats?
These are some of the most important questions we can ask. I guess.
Frankly, I’m more concerned with how a show like Alf lasted on TV for so long. I’m not criticizing the show, I found it funny, too, but seriously? A hand puppet was prime time television in the 80s? Now that’s worth investigating.
And yet, here we are, spending a few million dollars a year on organizations like SETI to search for aliens in outer space.
My personal opinions on aliens are much like my opinions on conspiracy theories in general: I love the stories and I think they’re fascinating, but I don’t really believe any of them. I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t, but I will openly say that I’m not convinced of the existence of aliens.
The only aliens I care about are the ones in Hollywood films.
Aliens and space movies tend to come about in waves. They’re not really a persistent, everlasting trend, but they also don’t stay gone for long. The late 70s brought us Star Wars, Close Encounters, and Alien. And, of course, E.T. The mid-90s alien boom bestowed upon us the Will Smith era with Independence Day and Men in Black. The remake and sequel boom of the last 10 years has given us new entries in the Star Trek franchise as well as the Star Wars franchise, and there have also been some incredible new alien movies like Arrival, which I would consider a modern classic.
I’m not talking about any of those today. Sorry.
As much as I love the wide variety of alien and general sci-fi movies out there, I’m wanting to focus on one really strange trend I’ve noticed and how three movies in particular embody that trend.
“It’s just an extended metaphor for how the love of Jesus should burst forth from your heart and influence everyone around you. Although I’m still not sure how Bill Paxton fits in there.” (Photo property of 20th Century Fox)
In some instances, sci-fi writers have used the search for aliens as a metaphor for the search for God.
I realize that this concept sounds like your classic “literary fiction overreach,” but hear me out. The three examples I’ve noticed most prominently actually make the comparison quite obvious. It’s so obvious, in fact, that it pops out and hits you like the little alien baby that exits from Ash’s chest in Alien.
The first movie I remember seeing that married the struggle for faith in God with the faith in intelligent life was Contact, Jodie Foster’s realistic sci-fi entry of the late 90s. The very first scene of the movie shows a young girl lose her father because she couldn’t reach his medicine in time. To paraphrase how one stellar episode of Lost put it, all the best space cowgirls have daddy issues.
The loss of her father at a young age propels so much of the action in Foster’s character’s life. That one experience taints everything she does. Well this young girl grows up to be an astronaut-in-training who is at the forefront of a wild discovery: a signal sent back to Earth from space. It turns out something was out there, and it was communicating with us.
If you’ve never seen Contact, then you should know that one of the underlying themes of the movie is the conflict between faith and doubt. Matthew McConnaughey even plays a preacher who is one of Foster’s close friends. I realize that many of you can probably accept the reality of aliens before accepting the Shirtless Wonder as a preacher, but he pulls it off. And I don’t mean his cloak.
To make a long story short, Foster’s character is sent through a wormhole in this giant machine that the space aliens detailed how to build in their signal and she ultimately arrives somewhere like Heaven. Her faith is restored and she believes again, because aliens told her to. Oh, and she sees her long-dead father and it’s a touching reunion with an alien that looks like her father and it doesn’t actually make a ton of sense, but oh well.
When she returns from her interstellar (oh yeah, that one, too) journey, she finds that she fell right through the space device and was never actually gone. So everyone doubts her and her experience so much that she has to resolve herself to faith. See? It all works out.
Follow Contact up with Signs, the M. Night Shyamalan movie that paired Mel Gibson with Joaquin Phoenix and amazingly that wasn’t the craziest part of the whole thing. As blunt as Contact could be with its journey of faith and outer space, Signs is far more obvious. Mel Gibson plays a “retired” preacher who spends the whole movie verbally denouncing his former faith because of the car accident that took his wife’s life.
In the midst of his crisis of faith, these tall, skinny aliens with excellent physical fitness have the nerve to drop out of the sky and carve up Gibson’s fields with crazy crop circles. Almost like signs of their presence.
Oh! I get the title now!
Through the run of the movie, Gibson’s disillusioned reverend vacillates between angry and vindictive in light of the arrival of these aliens and an encounter with the man who accidentally killed his wife. In the end, the former reverend realizes that God had been preparing his family for this exact moment, with everything from his daughter’s insistence on not finishing a glass of water to his wife’s fateful last words.
It’s almost as if…it’s almost as if the aliens themselves were the signs from God.
“Is it really a good idea to put a giant sign in this dude’s yard telling him that we’re coming? I mean…it is literally pointing to his house. Also…if you kinda squint, it looks a little bit like a giant version of a significant religious symbol. You think he’ll get the wrong idea?” (Image property of Touchstone Pictures)
Oh! I think I REALLY get the title now!
Look. I’m mercilessly mocking this movie, but the truth is that I love it. Signs has been one of my favorite movies for a very, very long time and nothing, not even my own mocking, will ruin that.
What Signs and Contact share in common, despite their otherwise very many differences, is that both movies use the alien concept to share a story about someone who has faltered in their faith. Similarly, both movies have the aliens reaching out to Earth. While one of the aliens wants to embrace humanity as an “interesting species,” and the other wants to take over a planet that is 75% water, despite being deathly allergic to water, both sets of aliens make first contact.
Oh! I think I get THAT title now, too!
And in both of those instances, the end result of that contact is an encounter with aliens that increases someone’s faith.
The third movie I want to talk about, though, does the exact opposite. In fact, I would call it the anti-Contact.
In the last few months, we’ve been bombarded by advertisements for the Brad Pitt sci-fi movie Ad Astra. There was precious little actually explained in the advertising except that it was a movie where Brad Pitt and half the cast of Space Cowboys must confront the fact that an old man is lost in space and…something…else…is happening.
There is merit to going in blind with a movie like this. If nothing else, that lack of foreknowledge makes you pay extra attention to every little detail you get in the movie itself. There were some unique aspects to this movie. It attempted to be an ultra-realistic examination of the near future, with a massive guyed-wire space telescope/space elevator on Earth. There was a strange space battle on the Moon with pirates on lunar rovers and laser guns. There was commercial space travel that was somewhat reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but was also likely much more accurate since we actually are in an era where companies are spending money on preparing for commercial space travel.
What you find when you get past the realism is that all the astronauts are excessively religious. Tommy Lee Jones’ character, the estranged and presumably lost-in-space father of Pitt’s character, talks about feeling the presence of God when he goes to space and being close to God. Several of the astronauts have medallions for Catholic saints, and they perform last rites and a religious burial, of sorts, when one of the astronauts dies in space.
This ultra-religious space force struck me as odd for a few reasons, but especially because it was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers. What exactly were they trying to do?
Now I didn’t mind spoiling the endings for Contact or Signs because, well, those are old movies. Ad Astra is not. So I apologize for doing this to y’all, but read no further if you want to stay blissfully unaware of Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, and the saga of Starbucks in space.
After a prolonged journey with some odd plot choices, Brad Pitt’s character finally reaches his father’s outpost in deep space, near the very edge of our solar system. When he gets there, his deepest fear has been confirmed. His father has killed everyone else on his mission because they lost faith when no evidence of intelligent life could be found in the universe. This man had lost his mind because his belief system was destroyed.
T.L. Jones’ character had gone to the stars to seek God. Pitt’s character had gone to the stars to seek God and to seek his father, alienating his own wife, portrayed by Liv Tyler in a “Wow. Why hasn’t she done more?” moment. His father had run off and left his mother and him because he wanted to go to the stars. Earth had been looking to the stars to solve all of its problems. And, in the end, Pitt’s character realizes that there is nobody out there in the stars and they should stop looking to the stars and should start looking at what they have. Rather than looking to the stars.
OH! Wait…no. I still don’t think I get this title.
Where Contact receives a sign from the aliens and sends a young woman to find her lost father, Ad Astra features a world that is already obsessed with and predisposed with the cosmos and is desperate for a sign that will never come. While sending a man to find his lost father. NASA is reticent to believe Foster’s character and her report of life out there, but NASA in Ad Astra is yearning for proof that doesn’t exist.
“Okay. So picture this. We’re going to have a high-speed car chase on the Moon. But to make it even cooler, we’re going to have the scene slowed down to simulate the Moon’s reduced gravity. And we’re going to use laser guns that look like real guns, except for a little flash of light. And all throughout this we’re going to let Brad Pitt just tell people what’s going on in case they don’t understand.” (Photo by Austin Ditsel on Unsplash)
In Contact and Signs, the people are changed for the better because of their contact with something greater. Something other than. In Ad Astra, the main character changes for the better when he stops seeking something out there. When he learns to embrace the world around him as fact and truth.
I’m going to ignore the cinematic reasons I didn’t care for Ad Astra. Some of the attempts at ultra-realism were a disservice to the plot, and the constant voiceover of Brad Pitt explaining his emotions and his thoughts, especially in some really obvious situations, was pretty grating. No, the thing that bothers me most about this movie is the message that there is no God and that we would all be better off if we stopped looking for Him.
I know people have that belief. I’m not “bothered” in the sense that I think people shouldn’t be allowed to think that. I’m bothered by it because that’s a very sad belief. It’s a somewhat sad and empty state of mind.
It intrigues me that, in two of these movies, the aliens contact us first. We don’t have to go looking real hard for them. In Ad Astra, though, it’s all about seeking something and finding nothing. That is how a lot of people approach faith. For many, they are in the stage of life that mirrors Brad Pitt’s character at the end of the movie. He’s searched the universe for a sign of something, he’s found nothing, and so his sole focus is on the world around him with nary a glance cast towards the empty universe.
So many people approach life this way, as if they’ve found the answers lacking and have decided to just give up the search. All that matters is what they can see and touch and experience on Terra Firma.
The beautiful truth that these people miss is that Contact got it right. Signs got it right. We do not have to embark on the search ourselves because God has given us all the signs we need. He has been actively reaching out to us since the day we were first created.
What’s more, He promises that He will reveal Himself to us if we are earnestly seeking after Him.
“And so I tell you, keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.”
Luke 11:9 NLT
If we want God, He will let us find Him. Beyond that, it isn’t like God wants us to just go on an empty search and seek out the bread crumbs. He gave us Jesus. And He gave us His Word. God has been practically shouting at us for millennia, telling us that He loves us and that He wants us to follow Him.
We have these massive satellites in the desert that are scanning the universe for signals that could only come from an intelligence off somewhere in the far reaches of space. Perhaps we will find it, I don’t know. But I know that we can spend our whole lives looking to the stars for an answer and never once appreciate the Creator who provided the stars with their light.
For many people, the main issue isn’t that they don’t find God. It’s that they find the God of the Bible and realize that they don’t like Him. They don’t actually want anything to do with that God, so they pretend as if they haven’t found Him. Or perhaps they pretend to find a watered-down version of that God, one that they are more comfortable with.
One lesson I think we can take away from Ad Astra is the fact that we have to accept the Truth that we find. With Tommy Lee Jones’ character, he lost his mind when the facts came back without supporting his belief. He looked into eternity and didn’t like what he saw.
We cannot afford to treat God the same way.
“You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!”
John 5:39 NLT
The Scripture points to God and to Jesus Christ. The Old Testament and the New Testament, from the first little speck of ink that forms the word “In” to the period behind “Amen". All of it points to God.
As does nature.
“The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.”
Psalms 19:1 NLT
“For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.”
Romans 1:20 NLT
Our Father in Heaven does not want us wandering around aimlessly in the dark. He wants us to see Him for who He is: God. And our God wants us to know that He loves us, He created us, and that He is calling out to us day and night. When we look to the stars, we are looking at a glimpse of God’s power and His divine beauty.
Sure, it isn’t the place of Hollywood sci-fi movies to get out the notion that God has reached down to Earth. It isn’t on them to let the world know that there is a God in Heaven who loves them.
It’s on us. It is our responsibility to share with the world what we have seen and believed.
“What is truth? Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wash my hands in this bowl of frog water.” (Image property of Lucasfilm…which I guess is Disney now?)
In order to finish up with the film criticism train of thought that brought all of this about, I also want to be totally clear that not every movie involving space travel or alien life is using it as a metaphor for the search for God. Chewbacca isn’t a Christ figure. Klatu isn’t a criticism of papal politics. The ongoing debate between Kirk and Picard is not set to mirror the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism. Jabba the Hutt threatening Luke Skywalker is not an allegory of Jesus before Pontius Pilate.
On second thought, I like it better if that last one is true. Let’s just go with that.