Film Comment: The Next One

Adrienne Barbeau portrays a widow who, along with her son, rescues a man named Glenn (Kier Dullea) who washes up on a beach in Greece.  The man does not remember who he is but seems to have extraordinary mystical powers.  He slowly begins to remember his identity.

Glenn is a time travelling alien from a future when everyone is a clone.  In Glenn’s time, everyone is equal and all are perfect, there is no sin or evil.  Glenn’s brother arrived on Earth two thousand years before!  In the original version of this 1984 film, the final reveal comes when Glenn recognizes his brother, Jesus, hanging on the cross in a church’s stained glass window.

Down through the centuries, people have tried repeatedly to make Jesus into someone, anyone, other than who He was.  To some he was an ethical genius, or a prophet, a deranged man, a man possessed by the Cosmic Christ Spirit, a fraud, the leader of a homosexual group, a revolutionary, a rabbi, an Ascended Master, or even a total fiction who never existed.

Adrienne Barbeau has said that the only reason she appeared in The Next One (1984) was to get a free trip to Greece. 

Why Don't We Understand?

"I went to church and sat on the velvet pew.  I watched as the sun came shining through the stained glass windows.  The minister dressed in a velvet robe opened the golden gilded Bible, marked it with a silk bookmark, and said, "If any man will be my disciple, said Jesus, let him deny himself, take up his cross, sell what he has, give it to the poor, and follow me."  Soren Kierkegaard