We’re planning on seeing it tomorrow - three friends, all Catholic dads, all sci-fi fans.
The guideline I like to use to explore whether something is a sin is whether it causes or could realistically cause you to fall away from God. A movie that is so utterly convincing in its portrayal that you doubt Scripture or think that Christ never existed, that would certainly be sin to watch (or at least, to watch without leaving once you figured out what was going on).
As the sci-fi genre goes I take it as thought exercises - gedenken, so to speak, so that whenever I read or watch sci-fi, I know that it’s not going to reflect authentic spiritual realities. My expectation is that if there’s a morality present, I don’t expect it to be my own, and so I take the story for whatever entertainment value it has but leave it otherwise.
Reading the review, there’s lots of offensive material in Prometheus, but I’m not surprised. The franchise is bleak and nihilistic, and much of the story is meant to illustrate man’s insignificance. It’s quite a step from our belief that we are created in the Image and Likeness of God. If that’s a challenge for you, don’t see it. It personally doesn’t bother me, but my faith in Christ is solid here, and I believe our origin and our end is in Him. I don’t entertain seriously any notion that some alien race created us and abandoned us.
/**** SPOILER ALERT /
I don’t recall the Catholic movie rating for “Mission to Mars” (1994?) which featured a benevolent and transcendent alien creator race, but major differences include the darkness of the later movie and the level of violence - I’m a little sorry I read about surgically removing an alien in Prometheus, but in the older film one character commits suicide by taking his space helmet off, boiling his blood instantly, while another is ripped in two by a Martian tornado.
/***** END SPOILERS ***********/
I think the review focused more on the violence and on the creation story arc than on looking on the morality in the film itself. In Scott’s Alien franchise, the protagonists are ALWAYS thrown into desperate defense against an overwhelming foe, and the virtue of self-sacrifice - whether to save one’s friends or all of humanity - is a central plot point in each film. Significant also is the nature of greed, and the intrinsic downfall brought by hubris. The Weyland-Yutani Corp plays God by colonizing and redeveloping planets, but the attempt invariably ends in destruction, whether upon themselves or upon people who are otherwise innocent (poor families escaping what we assume is a fairly inhospitable earth). In the Alien/Predator franchise, the bad guys don’t win, and while the aliens play by their own rules theirs is understood to be mindless, animalistic and destructive, in other words not a morality to be praised.
If I have problems with the movie, I"ll walk out, but I’m otherwise lookign forward to enjoying a movie that really needs to be seen on the big screen.
