Who, you ask? A TV and movie writer whose name is probably known only to true die-hard sci fi fans, Jerome Bixby wrote the 1950's B-movie "It! The Terror from Beyond Space," about an alien creature that stalks the crew of a spaceship. Sound familiar? It was the inspiration for a later film, called Alien written by Dan O'Bannon and directed by Ridley Scott whose new film Prometheus has just scored big at movie theaters around the world.
In Prometheus we are learning about the backstory of Alien, including that the fearsome xenomorph was the result of genetic engineering by an unknown race of beings on a faraway planet. These so-called Engineers, it turns out, also had a hand in our own creation. While we don't yet know all of the story that Ridley Scott and his co-writers have in mind, we are learning that the Engineers not only create life, they also destroy it.
What are their motivations, you may ask? In an interview, Scott revealed that it has something to do with Jesus himself. Here is an excerpt:
"... if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him."
So here we have a very interesting thing. A meeting between SciFi and Religion. Not the first time that has happened. In fact, there is a long and hallowed tradition of such meet-ups going way back through Ray Bradbury, to Arthur C. Clarke, to Isaac Asimov and even H.G. Wells. Look at such great sci fi films as The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original, not the remake), 2001, and Contact.
For science fiction writers and their audiences, sci fi is a great mental playground, a way to explore the meaning of life. To ask "What if" questions and let the imagination go. To take a mystery ride and see where you end up. Even in topic areas that one might call sacrosanct...such as religion.
This is what Jerome Bixby did in the story that became the independent scifi film The Man from Earth (2007) directed by Richard Schenkman, starring a terrific ensemble cast featuring Tony Todd, William Katt, Richard Riehle, John Billingsly, David Lee Smith, and Annika Peterson.
At the risk of spoiling a really good story, Prof. John Oldman reveals an incredible secret to some of his dearest friends and colleagues from the college where he teaches. He tells them that he is over 14,000 years old and has never aged past the age of 35. He has had many identities, learned many languages, and had many lifetimes worth of experiences, including one that changed the course of history. This one identity, approximately 2000 years ago, shatters the group's fragile grasp of faith in Oldman...and in much of what they had been taught to believe in by standard understandings of history and religion.
This small and mostly unknown movie is a gem worth seeking out, especially if you like the Twilight Zone/Star Trek kinds of stories that ask some deep "What if...?" questions, yet do not give you any easy answers.
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