Kara and I walked over to our favorite local theatre last night to catch the Invasion. Thanks to Rusty for the heads up on this film several weeks ago. The Invasion was an interesting thriller playing in the schoolyard somewhere between zombie movies and twilight zone episodes about space aliens. This alien invasion/zombie/virus outbreak thriller doesn’t wait long to let the cat out of the bag, you know exactly what’s going on within the first part of the film but that only serves to unnerve you all the more for the duration of the film. (spoiler alert) The crux of the problem are these microscopic alien spores that attach themselves to your cells, effectively hijacking your DNA and therefore you, without changing anything about your appearance or memory. This process happens during REM sleep after you have come in contact with one of the spores (through a kiss, a handshake, or you know… getting pinned down and having your face puked on!). What becomes one of the creepiest elements of the film is the nonchalant way in which the ever increasing number of aliens calmly “hunt” down people, infect them and then let them loose, knowing that all it will take to bring the prey to “their side” is a little bit of sleep. The infected show no emotion and act like automatons, it feels at times like a massive case of group-think a la 1984, and as we learn later (spoiler alert) that’s exactly what’s happening. The infected are still human, although mentally in some kind of sleep like state, and the aliens have a very real kind of mental connectedness to one another. As one of them says towards the end describing his own existence,

“I am still Ben, but I am also so much more. I am connected to everyone else. There is no more “other.”

What gave depth to this otherwise great zombie/sci-fi thriller flick was the commentary on human nature and it’s relationship to theodicy (the problem of evil). As we begin to see in the film, rather than the infection causing worldwide chaos and war to break out it actually leads to worldwide peace. At one point we see George W. Bush and Hugo Chávez shaking hands as they sign a treaty together. However, the cost of this kind of peace and eradication of poverty is something like joining the Borg. The cost of being truly human – the presence of evil in the world. A doctor at the end of the film is asked if the infection was eradicated and he replies with the last lines of the film,

“Just take a look at a newspaper. For better or worse, we’re human again.”

This understanding of human nature, that evil is essential to our nature, is common in our culture. We often hear the phrase “I’m only human,” used to justify terrible wrongs we commit against one another. But what does our understanding of Christ’s incarnation tell us about human nature? It seems as though in Christ we can begin to understand that our bent towards evil is less-than human, it is indeed a betrayal of our humanity, and the way in which Jesus lived is what it looks like to be truly human.

So I’ll end with some questions for us to discuss. How might that understanding (re)narrate the underlying assumptions of the Invasion? How does this understanding still resist the automaton alternative of a complete loss of individuality as the way towards living in peace?