Spielberg has walked this road before, creating
beauty out of hell itself, in his studies of the horrors of war in Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Privtae Ryan (1998).
The other possibility, the evocation
of the transcendent good — grace,
beauty, God — through the hard temporal realities
of individuals in action is much harder to carry off, as evidenced in Greene's The Power and the Glory, Charles Williams» Descent into
Hell, C. S. Lewis»
Out of the Silent Planet, Tolstoy's Resurrection, and perhaps most poignantly in the dismal failure
of most literary attempts to portray the central mystery, the life
of Jesus — Kazantzakis» The Greek Passion, Faulkner's A Fable, or — most dismal
of all, historical novels about Jesus (what could be less hidden?)
Cage is Milton, a literal bat -
out -
of -
hell intent on stopping his granddaughter from being the human sacrifice in cult leader Jonah King's (Billy Burke) ceremony to bring Hades to Louisiana, a quest aided by feisty
beauty Piper (Amber Heard) and her ’69 Dodge Charger, and frustrated by the efforts
of Satan's Accountant (William Fichtner) to bring Milton back down below.