Brother John may be the closest Sidney Poitier ever came to science fiction. In this film, he plays a mysterious figure who has been roaming the Earth since his teens, and who has returned to the American town of his birth on only a few occasions β always when one of his relatives was just about to die. For most of its running time, the film leads you to think that there may be something simply supernatural about this character, but in its final moments, the film hints that there is something else going on β something that reminded me of some of Arthur C.
At one point Poitier tells a woman that people might not end up answering for their sins as individuals but collectively, as a species β and he says that, when the time comes, they might not answer for what they did in the past but for what they might become in the future.
Learning that the Poitier character was actually not a Christ-figure β i. Along the way, the film shows us many of the reasons why the Earth might merit judgment: racism, political protests, wars, pollution, industrialism, people shooting rodents for sport in garbage dumps, etc. Brother John is not a great film by any stretch, but I have to say that I appreciated how it shines a different light than we might have expected on the moon-landing era which lasted just three years, And for Christians like me who are used to thinking of the Incarnation as an example of how God empathizes with his people the one mediator between God and humans is the man Jesus Christ, Jesus is our brother who makes it possible for us to call God our Father, Jesus understands our temptations because he has faced them himself, etc.
Which is also an interesting downer twist on a generally positive premise. Or with facial hair of any kind? The Biafran War came to an end in , just one year before this movie came out.
Poitier was born in That would be at least two decades before the beginning of the Space Age in , and over three decades before the moon landing. If our movement towards the stars is what prompted the aliens to send Poitier, then they can apparently see into the future β which makes sense, given that Poitier can anticipate when certain people will die.
