Last Christmas, my mom bought me DVDs of the classic sci-fi B-Movie The Day the Earth Stood Still and the made-for-TV movie The Conflict, starring Martin Sheen and based on Brian Moore's novel Catholics. They were kind of random stocking stuffers, but the parallels between the two of them are uncanny...especially when one watches them back to back to kill time over a weekend because one's girlfriend is at the shore with her family. Anyway, the former is about a spaceman who comes to Earth to warn us that if we take our atomic weapons into space and threaten people with them, we will be wiped out by robot policemen built by our intergalactic neighbors. The latter is more of a Renaissance dialogue tract than a movie, being about a future in which a heretical modernist somehow has himself elected pope and sends an envoy to an Irish monastery that has caused an international stir by televising Masses...in Latin. Ultimately, the bigger problem is not just the Latin Mass, but the way these Irish monks keep insisting on the Real Presence and Transubstantiation and reality every other Sacrament. The new "Father General" has changed not just the form and matter, but even the belief in all the Sacraments optional as a way to make the Church more relevant (it's not just a movie about Latin vs. the vernacular). Both films are a bit too didactic to be great movies, but they are both provocative in their way...(con't)
Essentially, the major dramatic conflict emerges when men from the future descend on "backwards" thinking human communities (Klaatu in his spaceship; Sheen in a helicopter, which several of the less worldly monks keep referring to as a "flying machine"). Both future-men also wield terrible power of destruction. Klaatu commands Gort, an unstoppable atomic robot that can vaporize tanks or soldiers with his cycloptic stare. Sheen functions as a progressive papal nuncio, and can evidently excommunicate or relocate the abbot on a whim. Both deliver speeches about how they want men to comply with their wishes willingly, and both lament that they would be sorry to resort to threats or force. Both also deliver unflinching speeches on the necessity of unquestioning obedience to higher powers. Klaatu reveals (SPOILER) that his civilization has realized the only way to have peace and unity is through submission to an invincible repressive state apparatus. Sheen appeals to the priest's vow of obedience to try to persuade them that this vow compels them to accept even things that were once considered heretical...obedience to the pope cannot be questioned (I won't spoil how the priests respond to this).
What makes both of these films watchable is that they don't provide tidy answers. We never find out precisely how humanity will respond to Klaatu (although I would love to write a sequel in which we try to liberate the galaxy from the robot police...that's just the kind of thing a rag-tag band of rebel Earthmen would do). We are left with images of some humans who get what Klaatu is about, and many who just want to kill shoot anything that isn't American. But once Klaatu tells us that true freedom resides in complete submission to killer robots, you start to wonder how sane his ideology really is.
Likewise, in The Conflict, some of the priests defend the Latin Mass on shaky grounds; some are too emotional; some might have ulterior motives; and Sheen isn't out to destroy faith, but promote social justice and ecumenism (I bet you didn't see that coming).
In other words, both stories are complex enough that neither comes off as moralizing, even if both are heavy-handed in portraying the various sides of the arguments.
Also worthy of note, although not necessarily direct parallels between the films...
Sam Jaffe, the supergenius scientist who rather absent-mindedly leaves top secret atomic formulae on a blackboard clearly visible from the street, actually says to Klaatu, "What you have to say is too important to leave only in the hands of scientists! We must have the greatest minds of all fields!" Or something like that. You'd expect a science fiction movie to make science the king of all reason. Instead, the greatest scientist realizes that science itself has moral limits and is an incomplete form of human understanding. Indeed, Klaatu later explains that his culture is even monotheistic -- not merely a secular athiest technocracy.
Likewise, Sheen and a priest debate whether or not the Church should have any involvement in helping the oppressed in South America or whether she should keep her nose out of political revolution and only save souls: "If I wanted to be a political rebel, I could have joined the IRA" the monk retorts more or less. On the other hand, Sheen sympathetically refers to a heroic teacher and priest who was tortured by South American dictators for speaking against tyranny. Or more complicated, Sheen has to navigate between advocating openness to non-Christian religions while simultaneously trying to suppress diversity within the Church explaining how the "Father General" thinks it is necessary for the Church to speak with a single voice and express a single vision. The quest for diversity threatens diversity itself. The priest who advocates revolution in South America must crush reactionaries in his own Church, who are doing nothing more than saying Mass.
But I don't want to go into many more details, lest I spoil the debate for anyone who plans on raiding a dollar store in search of the movie.
Still, probably the coolest thing about The Conflict is the repeated explanation of the Real Presence. An Irish priest says "But the bread and wine really are changed into his Body and Blood!" at least three times in the movie. It's probably the only movie I've ever seen where priests actually say that it's the reason they do what they do. The other coolest line is when one monk says something like: "What? You want us to bring in guitar groups with their silly music?" and "Your English Mass has driven out every man and boy. Sure, some women still come, but their husbands wait outside for them smoking." (These are all paraphrases, by the way.)
Now we just need someone to make a movie about robot police who enforce liturgical orthodoxy...
Klaatu Barada Nikto!
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