In only its third week in theaters, Paramount’s animated film “Rango” has rounded up just under $100 million.
If your $10 to $15 is a part of that whopping sum, you may have noticed something unique about this adventure story: it wears a controversial message on its sleeves.
To be honest, I want to love “Rango.” I want to love its bizarre nature, its gorgeous cinematography, its witty one-liners and its memorable characters. I want to love that little bowl-bellied chameleon with the Hawaiian tee.
But it’s hard to come to that point when I have to swim through an ocean of counter-ideologies to do so.
The basic storyline of the film (without giving much away) involves a “spoiled” lizard who is thrust abruptly into an arid desert.
Though lacking any marketable abilities, he tricks a rugged town into believing that he’s a hardened gunslinger and hero. Having won the people’s adoration, they make him their sheriff and expect him to find water and save their parched town.
The plot twists a few times, but when I watched it I was more focused on the message the movie overtly conveyed: you must make your own meaning in life, religion is no more than the opiate of the masses and God is as confused about everything as you are.
The people Rango encounters are mesmerized and deceived by a false form of religion a power-hungry turtle imposes on them.
Rango becomes desperate and seeks out the “Spirit of the West” (i.e. God), but this spirit is occupied with some seeking of his own and tells Rango that the lizard must fulfill his own story, apparently without the spirit’s help or intervention.
I must interject here to say that I sympathize greatly with the writers in their aversion to religious tyranny.
History shows that religion has been one of the most powerful and dangerous weapons when domineered by money – or power-hungry leaders – and the same happens incessantly today.
But the writers of “Rango” wrongly suppose that such unchecked abuses must imply that God is uninvolved and that man must make his own meaning in this life.
Movies, like any artistic production, will always reflect the beliefs and core values of their artists.
So, if one adhering to a humanistic, quasi-fatalistic belief system makes a movie, I would expect that movie to be, at some underlying level, humanistic and quasi-fatalistic.
But Rango holds nothing back for entertainment’s sake.
A Christian and an atheist can both enjoy movies like, say, “The Chronicles of Narnia” series, despite their clear Christian symbolism.
They present a particular worldview, but they don’t attack what the atheist holds sacred.
“Rango” affronts all that Christians hold sacred — namely, God.
After all, if the atheist is right about God, then it is not inherently wrong for anti-atheist movies to present anti-atheist themes.
But if the Christian is right about God, then for the anti-Christian movie to present anti-Christian themes is not only ethically wrong, but also eternally lethal.
