| A hero with the initials J.C., who sacrifices his life to redeem the world . . . a devil who laughs at all the sophisticated weaponry the action hero can throw at him . . . baddies who turn out to be goodies trying to do the right thing but getting it terribly, horribly wrong – Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest movie is a good deal different from your average bang-'n'-blast blockbuster, even though there's bangs and blasts aplenty. It's a film that will offend many, because of its gratuitous bad language and occasional nudity, and its basic premise – the ludicrous suggestion that 999 is the beast 666 of Revelation 13:18 upside down, and that therefore the thousand-year binding of the devil (Rev. 20:3) is due to end just before midnight on December 31, 1999, when he has sexual congress with a young woman born specifically to be his victim – has no theological justification whatsoever. |
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But it is interesting, when there are many signs that the end of days is indeed imminent, that Hollywood has chosen to examine the implications of the Millennium, and that at a time when the significance of the two-thousandth anniversary of Christ's birth is being down-played, even by some who call themselves Christians.
I like Arnie, I must confess. I think he is a much cleverer actor than many give him credit for, and he has shown a talent for sending himself up denied to other muscle-bound heroes. But I fully expected this movie to be rubbish, in the sort of sub-Exorcist genre of movies like The Omen, which have so little to say about the real battle between goodand evil in our world. I was agreeably surprised.
At one level, End of Days can be seen as a sort of Terminator 3, with elements of Predator thrown in. Before he takes up residence in a human body, Satan (or The Man, as the movie calls him) has the same sort of shimmering translucence as the monster in Predator. And in his indestructibility, the devil is a lot like the invincible antagonist in Terminator 2.
But the Schwarzenegger character, Jericho Cane by name (J.C. – get it?), is more flawed than any previous action hero. In the opening scene he is planning suicide, and subsequently we learn that he is an unrecovered alcoholic. There is a nice dialogue between him and Rod Steiger's Catholic priest, who boasts of “14 years clean and sober” which suggests there may have been a weightier alcoholic sub-text originally in the script, which was probably written out of it in one of those Hollywood fits of panic that such unheroic weaknesses might hurt the film's box-office appeal.
He has also turned against God, because of the death of his wife and child in a Mafia attack.
The scenes between him and Gabriel Byrne – whose Satan is suave and urbane, with not a trace of horns or forked tail about him, exactly the sort of tempters we meet every day in real life – are an interesting debate about the nature of good and evil, demolishing expectations that when bad things happen it is always God's fault. OK, Satan gets all the best lines, and there is no one to speak for God's side, but the plot of the film undermines the glib assurance of Satan that he is bound to win in the end.
Because, when all his guns and rockets and grenades have failed him, Schwarzenegger has only one place left to turn: “God give me strength,” he cries, when he realises he cannot do it on his own.
The end of the film, when Jericho sacrifices his life so that all the world might be freed from the devil's domination, moves into pure allegory. As such, I feel it fails, because of course we have had plenty of human martyrs who have sacrificed themselves for good causes, from John Ball to Martin Luther King, but while we honour their names, no human sacrifice could ever redeem the whole of humanity.
At least this movie poses the right questions, and in a very popular guise, even though it fails to provide the true answer in the end. But it's a pity that the nudity and bad language may dissuade many Christians from seeing the film. Because if our friends and workmates have seen it, we could take the opportunity to provide the answers where it fails to do so.
