The Sermonizing at the Heart of ‘A Beautiful Planet’

Last updated on: May 1, 2016 at 9:53 pm by Kate O'Hare

The Sermonizing at the Heart of ‘A Beautiful Planet’ 2016-05-01T21:53:44-08:00 Kate O'Hare

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Not long ago, I read a comment — can’t remember where, sorry — that the modern spate of Christian movies, of the “God’s Not Dead” ilk, are a product of the “desacralized Protestant imagination.” Which is to say, rather than working through a language of symbol and metaphor, these films rely on the Word, and in the end, they all contain a sermon of sorts. You don’t intuit the larger meaning of the film; it’s told to you.

Now, this isn’t a value judgement, as many people find these movies very inspiring and moving. But the Catholic imagination, steeped in images and music, incense and bells, saints and Sacraments, tends toward a more subtle, oblique way of storytelling.

While this method doesn’t necessarily engage the higher intellect in the same way as a bracing verbal argument, it can worm its way into the heart and the soul. For decades, secular filmmakers have made use of the signs and symbols of Catholicism in a way that they use no other religious symbols, save classic Greek mythology. They know the power of flickering candles, Latin chants, the light seen through stained-glass windows, the soft hush of a nun’s habit across a stone floor, and the slow swinging of a friar’s rosary.

There are moments that all the sermonizing in the world hasn’t the power of a single haunting sound or image. But it’s a delicate balance, and it requires a restraint of which all aren’t capable.

Last weekend, I went to see the new 3-D IMAX film “A Beautiful Planet” — currently showing in selected theaters across the country — at the IMAX theater at the California Science Center (home of the space shuttle Endeavour).

Here’s how it’s described at the CSC Website:

Made in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the film features stunning footage of our magnificent blue planet captured by the astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Narrated by Jennifer Lawrence and from IMAX Entertainment and Toni Myers — the acclaimed filmmaker behind celebrated IMAX® documentaries Blue Planet, Hubble 3D, and Space Station 3D — A Beautiful Planet 3D presents an awe-inspiring glimpse of Earth and a hopeful look into the future of humanity.

Interspersed with scenes of the astronauts’ daily lives are glorious vistas of the Earth seen from orbit. There are blue oceans, brown and green land masses, the black-and-white vista of a frozen landscape, swaths of clouds, the northern lights and immense storms.

The Earth is so staggeringly gorgeous that it beggars description. Our beloved Mother, she inspires wonder at her resilience and fear for her fragility — this tiny blue-and-white jewel in the black, star-sprinkled vastness of space.

But then, just as I was caught up in the wonder, came the sermon, and I felt the joy drain from my body. It’s the same old environmental gospel of “climate change,” carbon, deforestation — the evils of humanity (the very same humanity, by the way, that built the ISS the film was shot from, created the cameras it was shot with, and burned up a whole lot of carbon credits to pay Lawrence and distribute the movie, which they could just put on TV for free, but then they wouldn’t make much money from it, and hey, showbiz isn’t charity).

Yes, there is pollution and deforestation, but the climate-change crowd can never pass up an opportunity to ladle on the guilt and fear. They haven’t the faith in the audience required to just show them the scars on Earth’s beauty and leave it at at that. It’s why I shy away now from a lot of nature documentaries, because they’re never content to just show nature, there always has to be the dreary drumbeat of extinction, habitat loss, poaching and so on (though I really like documentaries that show ivory and other poachers getting their well-deserved legal comeuppance).

When you love something, you want to protect it. The only way you make killing a beautiful thing acceptable is to strip it of its sacredness and intrinsic value. For example, witness the way that unborn children must be rhetorically reduced to mere blobs of tissue, with their humanity erased, so that they can be killed with impunity; while shelter dogs and cats regularly get called “boys” and “girls,” in order to anthropomorphize them to increase their adoptability.

I’m the first to say that the Industrial Revolution disconnected many people from their instinctual connection to the land. Mother Earth became an “it” instead of a “she,” just a resource to be exploited. And over the last century-and-a-half, we have reaped the whirlwind of that, in all the things the environmental activists talk about — extinction, pollution, habitat loss, deforestation. These things are real, but none of them is inevitable or unstoppable.

The key to altering the trajectory of all of this is human ingenuity. Much of what happens on Earth is beyond our power to affect, but there is much we can do, and are doing, to make things better for all, including ourselves.

The environmental movement began with a push to learn how to love Mother Earth again, and then, out of that love, to wish to protect her. But hot on the heels of the love came the fearmongering, and after that came the blaming and loathing of humanity. We took our greater scientific knowledge of man and used it to tear humans down, to make us no more worthwhile than ladybugs or whales, to portray us as a plague upon the Earth.

And so it continues in many scientific documentaries to this day, to the point where they’ve become little more than vehicles to push a secular faith that’s trumpeted in every school and university, where Christianity is anathema.

As I watched “A Beautiful Planet,” which is indeed a beautiful film, I wished that they’d resisted the impulse to lecture and preach (although it’s much milder than in a lot of films). Just show us the joy of the astronauts, the loveliness of the world, and then scenes of ugliness or devastation will hit at the heart. Just once, I’d like to appreciate what God has given us without having my hand slapped at the same time.

You don’t save the Earth by making people hate themselves and their own existence. You save it by making them love her and want to protect her, because she is their Mother. She is a gift from God, and if we love Him, we will find a way to put humans first while still doing right by the planet that gives us life.

Image: Courtesy IMAX Entertainment/NASA

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