Complex messiahs: The 12 greatest sci-fi saviors from film and TV

The transcendental aspects of River Tam’s (Summer Glau) destiny weren’t explicit in the original Firefly TV series, but her importance to the fate of humankind is a much bigger deal in the feature film Serenity. River’s true path is laid out before the series starts, from child prodigy to lab experiment to wanted fugitive to big damn hero. From the moment she read the minds of the government scientists trying to turn her into an assassin she knew what her true calling was. It’s just buried somewhere in her chaotic, broken mind. But when that knowledge is unlocked by a subliminal message hidden in a broadcast, she overcomes her conditioning and leads the crew to the planet Miranda, where they learn the truth of a conspiracy to control human populations and the origins of the Reavers.

There were a lot of potential chosen ones on Battlestar Galactica, many of them self-appointed. Gaius Baltar (James Callis) is told he is one by the Number Six (Tricia Helfer) in his head, but is later revealed to be an actual angel. Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) also has visions which she interprets as a sign that she’s fated to lead the colonists to Earth. Number Three (Lucy Lawless) also has a messiah complex, which leads to her model being boxed. The true chosen one, it would seem, is Starbuck. Fans are still speculating about what her actual ending means, whether she’s an angel or a “harbinger of death.” All we know for sure is that it’s Kara Thrace, or some incarnation of her, who leads humanity back to a new “Earth.”

It’s a classic story, as in it literally comes from Greek myth: A seer reveals to a ruler exactly how they’ll die, and the ruler does everything in their power to prevent it, which ultimately brings that ending about. The backstory of the main character in The Chronicles Of Riddick mirrors that old tale, but with a sci-fi twist. As a newborn, Riddick (Vin Diesel) survives strangulation by his own umbilical cord during a massacre of his home planet Furya. Eventually, he grows up to overthrow Lord Marshal Zhylaw (Colm Feore), exactly as predicted. Because fate always has a way of catching up to you.

James Cameron’s Avatar takes inspiration from a lot of other media, including Dune. Like Paul Atreides, Jake Sully is an outsider from another world who allies himself with the indigenous people of Pandora, known as the Na’vi. He also learns their ways, falls in love, and comes to be accepted as one of their own. The difference is that Jake joins them in the form of an “avatar,” a hybrid clone body that he pilots remotely. Ultimately, he unites the Na’vi clans and helps them fend off an invasion by his own people, becoming the savior he was always meant to be.

The second of three films on this list from the Wachowskis (plus Tom Tykwer, in this case) Cloud Atlas spans multiple plots over six different time periods, but the one most relevant here involves an android “fabricant” in the year 2144. Sonmi-451 (Bae Doona) is different from others of her kind in that she has emotions and can think for herself. Those thoughts begin to turn to rebellion when she is exposed to new ideas through the works created earlier in the film. Essentially, she becomes a freedom fighter for the enslaved fabricants, and even composes a bill of rights. That’s a dangerous thing to be when you’re living in a dystopia, but before her death, she makes a recording that will later become the text for a new religion, with her as the central deity.

The Wachowskis do love their chosen one stories. In Jupiter Ascending an ordinary woman (Mila Kunis) discovers that she’s actually the second coming, technically a “genetic recurrence,” of an alien queen called Seraphi Abrasax, of the House of Abrasax. Against her will, she becomes entangled in a game of royal galactic politics, but all she really wants is to go back home to Earth and cuddle up with her loyal dog-like protector, Caine Wise (Channing Tatum). It’s one case where the initial rejection of the call to adventure actually sticks.

Before he made the Dune films director Denis Villeneuve played around with the chosen one trope in the sci-fi sequel Blade Runner 2049. While the film technically doesn’t have a prophecy like many of these others, it does begin with the main character, K (Ryan Gosling), discovering a box that serves the same purpose. The rest of the film deals with the revelation that there is a miracle baby somewhere out there, the first child to be born to a replicant. While in pursuit of the child, K (and the audience) begins to believe it could be him. The film subverts the concept, though, by eventually revealing that it’s someone else’s destiny after all.