“Through a Child’s Eyes” SCI-FI can open our minds to TRUTH in a remarkable way — because it enables us to see a World full of Possibilities, where Everything is New, with No Limits to our Imagination.
It’s the ideal way to be — if we want to experience enlightenment — about Who we are as Human Beings … and our Place in the Universe. Hollywood has opened the door for us through great SCI-FI storytelling — from a Child’s Point of View.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — (1982)
One night, as small Alien visitors secretly gather plants in a California forest, one of them is separated from the group, fascinated by city lights. Government vehicles arrive, a chase ensues, and the other Aliens are forced into a hasty departure, leaving him behind. In a nearby San Fernando Valley neighborhood, lonely ten-year-old Elliott (Henry Thomas) pitches a baseball into a tool shed, and is astonished when the ball rolls back. Later he returns with a flashlight and discovers the Alien hiding among cornstalks. It shrieks and flees the scene.
Despite his family’s disbelief, (his brother Michael jokes that it must be a “goblin”) Elliott leaves a trail of candy to lure the Alien into his house. Before bed, he realizes the Alien is imitating his movements. The next morning, Elliott feigns sickness to stay home from school. He can “feel” the Alien’s thoughts and emotions, shown when the Alien accidentally opens an umbrella, startling him and simultaneously Elliott several rooms away.
Later, Elliott introduces his older brother Michael and seven-year-old sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) to the Alien (saying, “remember the goblin?”), deciding to keep him hidden from their mother, Mary (Dee Wallace). When the children ask about his origins, the Alien shows them, levitating balls to represent his planetary system, and shows his ability to revive dead chrysanthemums. Through his glowing fingertip, he also heals a minor cut on Elliott’s finger.
At school the next day, Elliott experiences a much stronger empathic connection with the Alien, exhibiting signs of intoxication (because the Alien is at Elliott’s home, drinking beer) and freeing the frogs about to be dissected in biology class. As the Alien watches John Wayne kiss Maureen O’Hara on TV, Elliott kisses a girl he likes and is sent to the principal’s office.
The Alien dubs himself “E.T.”, reading a comic strip where Buck Rogers, stranded, calls for help by building a makeshift communication device, and is inspired to try it himself. E.T. gets Elliott’s help to build a device to “phone home” by using parts from a Speak & Spell, a record player, circular-saw blade, wooden coat-hanger, foil-lined umbrella, and other items from Elliott’s house. Michael notes that E.T.’s health is declining and that Elliott is referring to himself as “we”. The children are unaware that E.T. is being tracked by government agents and they are being spied on.
On Halloween night, Michael and Elliott dress E.T. as a ghost to sneak him out. Elliott and E.T. head through the forest, where E.T. attempts to “phone home” with his device. The next day, Elliott wakes up in the field, finding E.T. gone. Elliott returns home to his worried family. Michael discovers E.T. dying next to a culvert and takes him home to an also-dying Elliott. Mary is horrified upon discovery of her son’s illness and the dying Alien, just as a group of government agents dressed in biohazard suits led by Keys (Peter Coyote) invades the house.
Elliott: “He needs to go home; he’s calling his people. And I
don’t know where they are, but he needs to go home.”
Keys: “I don’t think he was left here intentionally, but his being
here is a miracle, Elliott. It’s a miracle and you did the best
that anybody could do. I’m glad he met you first.”
While scientists attempt to treat E.T. in a lab set up inside their house, the mental connection between him and Elliott is lost. E.T. appears to die while Elliott recovers. As he is carried away, Elliott screams that doctors are killing E.T. as they try to revive him. When they pronounce E.T. dead, Michael discovers that the chrysanthemums that E.T. previously revived are dying again. As Elliott recovers, the scientists first return him to his family, but then Keys leaves him alone with E.T. Elliott says a tearful goodbye, telling E.T. that he loves him before closing the case. E.T.’s heart light begins to glow, Elliott sees the chrysanthemum coming back to life, and opens the case. E.T. awakes and says that his people are returning.
Elliott and Michael steal the van that E.T. had been loaded into and flee the scene, with Michael’s friends joining them on bicycles, evading authorities. Suddenly facing a police roadblock, E.T. helps them escape by using his telekinesis to lift them into the air just in time and towards the forest like he had done for Elliott before.
Standing near the spaceship, E.T.’s heart glows as he prepares to return home, while Mary, Gertie, and Keys show up. E.T. says goodbye to Michael and Gertie, as she presents him with the flower he had revived. Before boarding the spaceship, he embraces Elliott and tells him “I’ll be right here”, pointing his glowing finger to Elliott’s forehead. He picks up the chrysanthemum and boards the spaceship. As the others watch it take off, the spaceship leaves a rainbow in the sky.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial successfully merges Science Fiction with childlike wonder. E.T. wants to return to his world rather than conquer ours. It’s easy for children he encounters on Earth to understand his peaceful intentions. This movie remains a beloved favorite among children and adults for its powerful themes of love, friendship, and the universality of the human experience.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence — (2001)
In the future, polar ice caps have melted and submerged coastal cities. When one company creates the first Mecha child, an employee brings home a prototype, David (Haley Joel Osment) to his wife, Monica (Frances O’Connor), hoping to ease her grief over their comatose son in cryo-stasis. His love is real. But he is not. At first, David lives happily as part of the family.
But when their natural child suddenly recovers, David is abandoned and sets out to become “a real boy” worthy of his mother’s affection. Like Pinocchio, he goes on a long journey hoping to find his “Blue Fairy,” who can make his dreams come true.
Along the way, David is mentored by a pleasure-providing Mecha named Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) and a talking “super toy” bear named Teddy. His adventures take him to the Roman Circus-style “Flesh Fair,” where Mechas are destroyed for human amusement; Rouge City, where Gigolo Joe narrowly avoids capture by police; and finally a submerged New York City, where David’s creator, Professor Hobby (William Hurt) reveals secrets of the boy’s creation.
David finds copies of himself, is disheartened by his lost sense of individuality, and attempts suicide by falling from a skyscraper into the ocean. While underwater, David notices a figure resembling the Blue Fairy. Joe rescues him in an amphibious aircraft before being captured by authorities with an electromagnet. David and Teddy take control of the aircraft to see the Blue Fairy, which turns out to be a statue from an attraction on Coney Island. Trapped by a fallen Wonder Wheel, David repeatedly asks the statue to turn him into a real boy until his power source is depleted.
Two thousand years later, humanity is extinct and Manhattan is buried under glacial ice. Aliens, interested in humanity, find and resurrect David and Teddy. They reconstruct the Swinton family home from David’s memories before explaining, via an interactive version of the Blue Fairy, that he cannot become human. However, they recreate Monica through genetic material from the strand of hair that Teddy kept. This version of Monica can live for only one day and cannot be revived. David spends his happiest day with Monica, and as she falls asleep in the evening, Monica tells David that she has always loved him. David lies down next to her and closes his eyes.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence had been in the works for decades under the stewardship of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who kept his friend Steven Spielberg in the loop about the project’s development and creative evolution, then turned it over to Spielberg before his death in 1999.
The Last Mimzy — (2007)
In the distant future, a scientist sets out to avert catastrophic ecological disaster, sending a small number of high tech devices that resemble toys back in time to modern day Seattle. Discovered by two children: Noah Wilder (Chris O’Neil) and his younger sister, Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn). The “toys” are initially incomprehensible to them, other than one which appears to be a stuffed rabbit. The children keep their discovery secret from their parents
Emma becomes telepathically connected to the rabbit, namedt “Mimzy”, which imparts knowledge to her. The children gain genius-level intellects and psionic powers: Noah can teleport objects using a card-sized rectangle of green lines of light and a conch shell to control spiders. Thanks to her link, Emma develops more advanced abilities, becoming the only one who can use the “spinners”, stones which can float and produce a force field. Emma describes herself as “the chosen one” but names Noah as “the engineer” without which she cannot “build the bridge to the future”.
The children’s parents and Larry White (Rainn Wilson), Noah’s science teacher, discover the devices and the children’s powers. By mistake, Noah causes a power black-out over half the state of Washington, alerting the FBI to their activities. The family is held for questioning by Special Agent Broadman. Mimzy is revealed as artificial life form, utilizing nanotechnology created by Intel.
Emma relates a dire message from Mimzy: many others were sent into the past before her, but none of the others were able to return to their home time, because they lacked an “engineer” like Noah. Now Mimzy, the last one the scientist was able to send back, is beginning to disintegrate. To save the future, Mimzy must acquire a sample of uncorrupted human DNA to correct the damage done to DNA by ecological catastrophes.
The FBI do not believe them, so Noah and Emma use their powers to escape. Mimzy absorbs a tear from Emma, which contains her DNA. Via the time portal which Noah constructs using the toys, Mimzy returns to her point of origin. There, Mimzy provides the genetic information required to restore humanity, both physically and mentally, with Emma dubbed “Our Mother” by the people of the future.
The Last Mimzy was loosely based upon the 1943 Science Fiction short story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym of husband-and-wife team Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore). The film’s creators take a very personal story about one family and a box of toys from the future … and turn it into an epic story in which childlike innocence saves the human race.
Tomorrowland — (2015)
In 1964, young inventor Frank Walker attends the New York World’s Fair to sell his prototype jet pack, but is rejected because it does not work. Frank is approached by a young girl, Athena (Raffey Cassidy), who hands him an orange lapel pin with a blue “T” embossed on it, telling him to follow her onto Walt Disney’s “It’s a Small World” attraction. Frank obeys and sneaks onto the ride, where the pin is scanned by a laser, and he is transported to Tomorrowland, a futuristic cityscape, where advanced robots fix his jetpack, allowing him to fly and join the secretive world.
In present day, optimistic teenager Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) repeatedly sabotages the planned demolition of a NASA launch site in Florida. Her father, Eddie (Tim McGraw), is a NASA engineer, but faces losing his job. Casey is eventually caught and arrested. At the police station, she finds a pin in her belongings. While touching it, the pin transports her to Tomorrowland. Her adventure is cut short when the pin’s battery runs out, leaving Casey stranded in a lake.
With help from her younger brother Nate, Casey finds a Houston memorabilia store related to the pin. The owners attack her when she is unable to divulge where she got the pin, insisting that Casey knows about a “little girl”. Athena bursts in and defeats the owners, (actually Audio-Animatronics), who self-destruct, blowing apart the shop. After Casey and Athena steal a car, Athena reveals she is also an animatronic, purposed to find and recruit people who fit the ideals of Tomorrowland. Athena drops Casey off outside an adult Frank’s house in Pittsfield, New York.
The now reclusive, cynical Frank (George Clooney) declines Casey’s request to take her to Tomorrowland, having been banished from it years ago. Inside Frank’s house, Casey finds a probability counter marking the end of the world. Frank warns her that the future is doomed, but she disagrees, thus lowering the counter’s probability. Animatronic assassins arrive to kill Casey, but she and Frank escape, meeting Athena in the woods outside Frank’s house. Frank resents Athena for lying to him about her true nature, but reluctantly agrees to help them get to Tomorrowland.
Using a teleportation device, the trio travel to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Frank explains that Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison co-founded Plus Ultra, a secret society of futurists, creating Tomorrowland in another dimension, free to make scientific breakthroughs without obstruction. The trio use an antique rocket, called the Spectacle, hidden beneath the Eiffel Tower to travel to Tomorrowland.
They find Tomorrowland in a state of decay. David Nix (Hugh Laurie), its governor, greets them. They travel to a tachyon machine, invented by Frank, which accurately predicted the worldwide catastrophe. Casey refuses to accept the world will end, causing the future to temporarily alter. While Frank attempts to convince David to listen, he refuses and intends to make them leave Tomorrowland.
Casey realizes the tachyon machine is telling humanity that the world will end, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They confront David, who admits he tried to prevent the future by projecting such images to humanity as a warning. Instead, they embraced the apocalypse, refusing to act to make a better future for their world. Believing that humanity simply gave up, David has also given up and intends to allow the apocalypse to happen so that he can rebuild the world to his liking. Casey, Frank, and Athena attempt to use a bomb to destroy the machine, leading to a fight with David. The bomb is accidentally thrown through a portal to an uninhabited island on Earth, the explosion pinning David’s leg. Athena sees a vision of the future where Frank is shot by David, and she jumps in the way of his attack, mortally wounding herself beyond repair. Making peace with Frank, Athena activates her self-destruct sequence, destroying the machine, which falls on David, killing him.
In the present, Casey and Frank lead Tomorrowland, recruit Eddie and Nate, and create a new group of recruitment animatronics like Athena, whom they were addressing at the beginning of the film. Given pins, the animatronic children set out to recruit new Dreamers.
Tomorrowland offers positive messages that we should all take to heart: Dreamers have to stick together, ideas are worth fighting for, knowing how things work is important, and inventors must never give up on their innovations — because they can literally change the future.
Midnight Special — (2016)
In a motel, Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon) and his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) watch an AMBER Alert for 8-year-old Alton Meyer (Jaedon Martell) and his reported abductor, Roy, while the boy reads comic books on the floor.
At “The Ranch”, a religious cult in rural Texas, Pastor Calvin Meyer (Sam Shephard) dispatches two parishioners to retrieve Alton. He then faces his congregation as the FBI storms their church. NSA communications analyst Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) asks Calvin how numbers sent via encoded satellite transmissions made their way into his sermons. Calvin explains that Alton speaks in tongues and gave the numbers to Calvin. As Alton’s powers grew, his mother Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) abandoned him, and members of the Ranch have been raising him, with Pastor Meyer as his adoptive father. Roy, the boy’s biological father, is protective of Alton, doing everything in his power to avert danger.
After a violent confrontation with a state trooper, Roy and Lucas seek cover at the home of Elden, a former Ranch member. During the night, an earthquake seems to wake Roy and Lucas. When they break down the door to Alton’s room, they find him linked to Elden by blinding beams of light directly from his eyes into Elden’s. Roy knocks out Elden and covers up Alton, who is extremely photosensitive. They take Elden’s van and continue on toward a location that Alton specified. Members of the Ranch seem to know this location, but the FBI is desperately trying to figure out where the trio are headed.
When they stop at a gas station, Alton seems to destroy a satellite, creating a rain of debris crashing down on them. They drive to Sarah Tomlin’s house, and she is overjoyed to be reunited with her son. After they watch the news together, Alton explains that he caused the satellite to crash because the police were using it to track him.
As the fugitives (now including Sarah) continue on their trek, Alton appears to be growing sick and weak. He convinces Roy to let him see the daylight, while Lucas and Sarah go ahead to a motel. After witnessing his first ever sunrise, Alton’s eyes begin to glow, and an enormous dome of light surrounds the duo. They reunite with Lucas and Sarah, and Alton is healthy. He explains that seeing the sun helped him realize his true identity. There is a world “built on top of” this one, and he belongs to it. Roy confirms that he briefly saw this hidden world inside the dome of light.
When they exit the hotel room, they are ambushed by Calvin’s trackers from the ranch, who abduct Alton but are soon captured by the police. The boy is taken to a government facility where, although he had no normal way of knowing who the man was, he insists that he will talk only to Paul Sevier. After Sevier experiences Alton’s powers, he helps reunite him with his parents. Having deduced their destination from Calvin’s sermons, Sevier warns the fugitives that there is a 5-mile security perimeter around the location on the Florida panhandle.
Roy barrels through a roadblock, driving inside the perimeter as the Army scrambles to give chase. As they speed away, Alton lets them know just where to stop. Alton and Sarah speedily exit the car and run into the woods. Roy and Lucas lead the Army on a wild goose chase while Alton and Sarah reach the edge of a swamp. There, a great dome of light appears, engulfing much of Florida and surrounding states. Everyone inside the dome of light can see the futuristic structures of a parallel world. Eventually, other beings of this world gather around Alton, and the entire dome disappears, taking Alton with it.
Roy and Lucas are arrested. Lucas is interviewed by the FBI. He tells them the story, but they are dissatisfied. Sevier then enters to interview him, with Lucas the only one aware of Sevier’s previous involvement. Sarah, apparently walking away from her past life forever, cuts off her cult-traditionalist hair braid in a local gas station. Roy is incarcerated, but can watch the sunrise, his eyes briefly and faintly glowing in a similar manner to Alton’s.
Midnight Special has been praised by reviewers as a “Spielberg-esque” SCI-FI chase film with an “engrossing sense of mystery”. Its story points to a parallel reality overlapping the world as we know it, hidden from us — until a child’s need to crossover reveals its otherworldly inhabitants.
“Through a Child’s Eyes” SCI-FI can help us realize that childlike innocence is the key to understanding great Mysteries — like Who we are and our Place in the Universe.
It may open a World of Possibilities … for YOU.
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