10 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Christ Allegory Movies, Ranked from Most to Least Obvious

We’ll have to wait a few months to find out how Christ-coded Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will be, but there’s no doubting who C.S. Lewis had in mind when he started to sketch out the story of Aslan — a wise, kind and morally unflappable figure, albeit one with a golden mane and a mighty roar.

In the 2005 movie adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — the events of which take place after Gerwig’s upcoming movie, chronologically — we even get to witness this son of the “emperor beyond the sea” sacrifice himself before returning in glorious sunlight and looking good as new. For bonus Christian content, Lewis even included Father Christmas in his stories (played by James Cosmo in that movie), but we wouldn’t exactly call that canon.

Frank Herbert’s Dune is an interesting addition to the cinema of Christ allegories, as it acts as both an homage and a cautionary tale — more Last Temptation, perhaps, than Gibson’s Passion. The character of Paul Atreidis is not low-born or surprisingly conceived, but the prince and heir of an entire planet. He does, however, manage to fall and rise in a great big desert on his way to becoming a messianic leader. 

Herbert’s book isn’t like some of the others on this list, however, as Paul is a flawed saviour — a man with very human imperfections whose newfound power and influence at times seem likely to drive him insane. Expect to see more of this unfold in Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming (and pretty awesome-looking) Dune Part 3. 

The One? The Oracle? Allusions to heaven, hell, and Adam and Eve? Heck, the fourth instalment of The Matrix is literally called Resurrections. The Wachowskis’ endlessly influential franchise wasn’t short on original ideas — both in terms of narrative and filmmaking techniques — but they’d likely be the first to admit to leaning on at least one or two Christ-like tropes when they sat down to immaculately conceive it.

Consider, for instance, the sequence near the end of Revolutions, when Neo allows his body to be subsumed by the machines to save the people of Zion — an image as Eastery as a painted egg.

One of the first genuinely mainstream sci-fi movies to inspire the most annoying guys at parties to explain its allusions to the divine was RoboCop — a story about a policeman who dies and is brought back to life to sacrifice himself for the good of humanity.

After moving from the Netherlands to Hollywood in the late 1980s, director Paul Verhoeven immediately started Trojan-horsing these kinds of ideas into some of the most provocative entertainments of that era. Starship Troopers is a comment on the glossy sheen of fascist propaganda. Showgirls is a satire on the idea that sex sells. And RoboCop, a movie that makes a joke of a man getting shot in his genitals, is, in fact, about Jesus.

With The Shawshank Redemption, director Frank Darabont made a film about a man who crawls through a tunnel of shit before emerging reborn — a moment that the director had filmed with a god’s-eye-view shot from above as the heavens rained down on Andy Dufresne to wash all those remaining sins away.

For his next film, The Green Mile, Darabont went one better by making a movie about a gentle, innocent man doomed to die for other people’s sins — and not just the perpetrators of the crime he is wrongly accused of. Whether Michael Clarke Duncan’s John Coffey is a Christlike figure or an example of what would later become known as the ‘magical Black man’ trope is, however, another question.

Children of Men is a movie about a world in which children have stopped being born, so when our hero steps into a barn near the end of the first act and is met with the sight of a woman very much with child, we share the wonder in his eyes. We also laugh when she jokes that the baby was immaculately conceived, but given all the other references to the birth of Jesus in this film (there are whole corners of the Internet dedicated to seeking them out), it wouldn’t have been a stretch if director Alfonso Cuarón had decided to go there.

This one might not be quite as Easter-specific as the other movies on this list, but the Jesus vibes are certainly just as strong. 

It’s less a question of whether there are Christlike figures in The Lord of the Rings than a question of which Christlike figure you want to talk about. Aragorn, the eponymous King in Return of the King, falls and rises and returns as a saviour, just as Frodo (the film’s most virtuous innocent, and the one who suffers most for the sins of Middle-earth) does at various points in the trilogy.

In terms of imagery, however, it doesn’t get more Christlike than Gandalf’s fall and rise between the first and second movie — at which point he reemerges in an even more shimmering light than Aslan did in the first Narnia movie. 

We have managed to get to the eighth film on this list without mentioning Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is basically the urtext when it comes to Christlike allegories. The biggie that’s always mentioned is Star Wars — a story about an orphaned child with miraculous abilities who goes on to lead a revolution.

For Bible-specific stuff, however, the essence of the Skywalker Saga is probably closer to something like Paradise Lost, with Anakin the fallen angel who is cast out of heaven only to return as a demon bent on exposing its self-righteous hypocrisies — or something like that.

Similar to LOTR and George Lucas’ long-running franchise, the Christ-like allusions in Harry Potter are obvious and subtle in different ways. Snakes are, of course, seen as untrustworthy throughout — even from the opening moments of the first book, when Harry (another saintly and gifted orphan) is put in the first of many uncertain reptilian situations.

This all remained fairly symbolic up until the finale, Deathly Hallows: Part 2, when Harry chooses to die in order to save his friends and the wider world. We then get a scene set in a London underground station, where a very godlike Dumbledore shows up to thank him for his sacrifice before allowing him to be reborn.

We’ll end our Easter list with Steven Spielberg’s E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial, a movie about a morally decent visitor from the skies who ends up being persecuted by prejudiced humans before dying, coming back to life, forgiving them (and us) and saying goodbye.

It might not be very Christlike to kick back and drink a few beers, getting a minor intoxicated in the process, but at least he does it while watching John Ford’s The Quiet Man — a Catholic-friendly film if ever there was one.