Plot
Signs of the apocalypse are appearing, along with a mysterious wanderer. Father Lucci (Peter Friedman) is the Vatican official investigating them. He dismisses the occurrences as natural, but Abby Quinn (Demi Moore) believes that they are real.
In the film, Jürgen Prochnow portrays Jesus' return to Earth in the year 1988 to judge humanity.
In Jewish mysticism the Chamber of Guf (also Guph or even Gup) Hebrew for "body", also called the Otzar (Hebrew for "treasury"), is the Hall of Souls, located in the Seventh Heaven. Every human soul is held to emanate from the Guf. A possible (though not a literal) reading of the Talmud, Yevamot 62a, is that the Messiah will not come until the Guf is emptied of all its souls.
The final judgment is averted by an act of faith that prevents the final sign of the apocalypse from occurring. In the film, through a flashback, Prochnow also portrays the original Jesus on the eve of his crucifixion. Father Lucci is revealed to be Cartaphilus, a Roman Centurion and Pilate's porter who struck Jesus before his death and was sentenced to wander the Earth until Christ returned to judge mankind. The Lucci-Cartaphilus character is a combination of the Longinus and the Wandering Jew legends. In the movie, Abby- who is soon to give birth- discovers that she is actually the reborn woman some identify as Seraphia, the woman who offered Christ water during the Crucifixion but was turned away by Cartaphilus. She learns that the prophecies lead up to the birth of her child, who may not survive because there will be no more souls left for the newborns unless someone offers their own.
Read more about this topic: The Seventh Sign
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)