I know, Balthasar starts with beauty, but I wanted to talk about a very gory, underrated movie that hits the truth without knowing it.
The movie is called Infini, and it is hardcore science fiction. There is a lot of profanity, a lot of blood and gore, a lot of violence, even an abortion. Through the whole movie, an unknown infection is spreading, and much like the movie Alien, you don’t see the actual enemy until the end, only enemies by proxy.
If you have the stomach for it, I highly recommend it, but only mature adults who are willing to see gore to try and understand deeper concepts. 
The protagonist is Whit Carmichael. He’s just trying to make a better life for his wife and preborn child. He’s a coder, but to earn money he joined the military and volunteered for an elite Search and Rescue unit. His wife doesn’t want him to go because they both know the danger, and she tells him to do whatever it takes to get home.
Boom, there is the theme, the lifeline of the whole movie. Family. Home. Love.
Whit encounters uhm, some stuff, and a separate SAR unit is sent out, and there we see those who can’t fight infection succumb to something… Really terrible, actually. That is when the abortion happens, and the mother, who is dying from blood loss, confronts the dying father in a terrible scene, where she bares her soul and reveals a very real despair! I can’t describe it to give it enough credit, but as horrible as it is, I think that might be the heart of the issue.
Whit actually ties the humanity of all the people together. He realizes, that they, like him, are fathers, sons, brothers, mothers, and at every step tries to connect to them. Yes, he gets infected too, but his ability to fight off the symptoms ties in to the whole truth.
Spoiler here. The infection is an alien who takes over organisms and tries to find an alpha to learn from and control.
All through the movie, Whit just wants to go home. To find the nucleus of all community, the family. And the alien doesn’t understand that, and only uses the anger, dominance, and violence of the humans. Whit, in his anchor to true humanity, shows us, the viewer, the Truth that Jesus laid out for us, a true leader, alpha, greatest among you, serves others, loves them even to death. A true alpha loves and cares, and doesn’t wield power for power’s sake. And it is rooted in the nucleus of community, the family. Self-giving love, in Greek, agape.
Near the very end, in a secular way, Whit has a soliloquy with the alien. He expresses this concept as he’s dying, to make sure the alien doesn’t make it to earth. It’s very moving, and I will quote some of it.
Whatever you were trying to do here… you’ve failed. I know you’re listening. You could’ve chosen any part of any one of us. But you chose the worst parts of human behavior…to use as your voice. You choose hatred. You chose violence. You chose conflict. You had an inability to see the bigger picture. You had a down-right ******* refusal… to see beyond the present. You couldn’t get past your own selfish, ignorant need to dominate. If you had had time to… grow… time to evolve… things could’ve been different. If we could’ve… worked together…
…. That’s what I wanted to do, play games. I wanted to grow up and play games with my son. Why don’t I hate you for that? My name is Whit Carmichael.
Oh man. Reader-land, doesn’t that sound familiar? It sounds like society today. I want something now. I want to have no consequences. I will kill a baby in the womb because of selfish reasons, that goes for father or mother or anyone pressuring for an abortion. The movie captures the WORST part of humanity, our fallen nature! And the movie in a secular way shows salvation, Love, who is Salvation. The very real emotions that Whit goes through in the movie keep us tied in to real humanity and how much we need that salvation.
I quickly found this to be a movie I could watch over and over. Not with my kids or youths, but just to remind me that even in a sci-fi Godless society, God writes on the nature of all humanity the Truth, allowing a path to access the fullness of Truth. It’s beautiful, in a way of storytelling. Even in gory movies! Balthasar was right!
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