SeventhSign

Seventh Sign

    The Seventh Sign (1988) is a movie that handles the character of Jesus unlike any other film that I have looked at. Rather than deal with Jesus as the man of Nazareth, this film creates an interesting account of his second coming. There is a flashback to Jesus being beaten up by a Roman centurion, but other than this, the Jesus of the film is the Jesus of the second coming.
     Carl Schultz, who made a number of films that all seem to deal with family dynamics of some sort, directed the movie. None of his films are very well known. Playing the part of Jesus is Jurgen Prochnow. Prochnow is an experienced German actor who had recently started to act in American movies. He has an accent in the film, but for the first time a Jesus with an accent seems fitting because there is supposed to be a distinction between him and everyone around him.
     When we first come across Jesus in the film, he is walking the streets of Haiti. As he makes his way through the crowd, people are silenced by his presence and seem to stare at him in awe. This could simply be because he is a stranger who is very different from them, but one gets the impression that there is something more to it than that. This stranger, who has not yet been identified as Jesus, then causes all the fish in the ocean to die, which is the first sign of the apocalypse.
     We next come across Jesus when he is attempting to rent an apartment from Russell and Abby Quinn in Venice, California. When he meets them, Jesus introduces himself as David Banner. When the Quinns question David's profession he says that he is a teacher and then adds "of ancient languages" almost as a second thought. They also notice that this stranger has an unusual connection with animals insofar as they seem to like him and listen to him.
     At another point in the movie, David comes across Abby who is watching the news. She is visibly upset about all the violence and war that is happening in the world. David gets even more upset about all the violence in the world and comments that the world has not changed since he first came. He claims he thought it would but it has not because the people of the world have no faith. David then hints that it will all be over soon. Abby argues that she does not think "We are going to blow each other up." David says that is not what he means and leaves it at that.
     Abby starts to get suspicious about David's true identity and she snoops around his room looking for clues. Eventually, Abby comes to the conclusion that he is a religious fanatic who thinks he is bringing about the end of the world and the final thing he needs to do is kill the child she is pregnant with. She fears for her life and the life of her child and when David confronts her she tries to kill him. When this happens, David reveals his true identity as Jesus and that he really is bringing about the end of the world. He tells her, "I came as the lamb, and I return as the lion." He then explains to her that it is possible to stop the apocalypse by stopping one of the signs (the world is up to its fourth sign by now). Luckily for the world, Abby is able to stop the seventh sign, namely the birth of a soulless child, by sacrificing her own life. Jesus is in this scene and as he leaves* he stops to talk to a Jewish man who had befriended Abby. Jesus tells him to remember everything that happened and write it down to let people know about the second chance that they have been granted.
     Jesus is presented to us in this movie as an empathetic messenger of God's wrath. He is bringing judgment upon the world, but he feels for the people. Jesus is very discomforted by all the violence in the world. He seems to take on some prophetic qualities because the signs that he is presenting seem to be calls of repentance rather than signs of the end; Jesus admits that the end is not inevitable. Nevertheless, Jesus does seem pretty sure that this is the real thing. This Jesus seems to be consistent with the prophetic picture of God that is given in the Hebrew Scriptures: a God who weeps for Israel's lack of faith and plans to destroy them, but then can be moved to change his mind by the people's repentance. This is a very interesting, although somewhat confusing, portrayal of Jesus.** Its dealing with Jesus is unique in the Jesus movie tradition, but this film's legacy seems to be a poorly done rip-off of Rosemary's Baby (1968) (IMDB).

*I do not know where he is going, perhaps heaven for another couple millennia until its time for the real apocalypse.
**One critic explains the confusion is there because "the film's theology is even more opaque than Revelation's revelations" (Kinnard and Davis 206).