David Dunn’s “super” powers are rather tame by comic book standards. He can bench press just a few hundred pounds, and he has a sixth-sense that enables him to tell if someone he touches is involved in criminal activity. Unbreakable is about David’s gradual admission that he has these abilities, and his decision to use them to help others.

This superhero wears no tights, has no cult following, and by the film’s end has gained no real notoriety in the press. He leaves no smashed buildings or wrecked trains in his wake, and forges no band of superheroes to back him up. In fact, he only just admits to even having his powers. What he does ultimately do is seek out those in need and put himself at risk helping them, showing a selfless determination far more “amazing” than the inconspicuous powers he exhibits.

In doing so, this unostentatious little movie delivers a rather outrageous question to those of us willing to reflect seriously on the ideas voiced by good fantasy: “are normal people like ourselves likewise called to be heroes?” Does the potential for greatness—for true acts of heroism and self-sacrifice—lie within broken people who thus far have lived seemingly mundane, imperfect lives?

I say “seemingly” because the other wonderful achievement of this movie is its suggestion that we do not, or need not, live mundane lives. What is truly bold about this movie, what will outrage some viewers and highly amuse others, is not how far it stretches our credulity, but how very close it brings the world of fantasy to the familiar, quotidian world in which we all live and breathe.

Most people tend to handle fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero films with thick gloves, treating such genre fare as either facile and fun or irrelevant and inconsequential.

Some, that is, evaluate a fantasy flick’s entertainment value independent of its believability. Such an approach accepts up front that a given story’s events take place in a world removed from our own, and seeks no fidelity to physical, genetic, or astronomical principles. As long as a movie’s dialogue is strong, its premise intriguing, its action surprising, and any special effects seamless, the product has earned the price of admission.

Another outlook tends to balk at such films’ ridiculous farfetchedness. Such a view refuses to suspend disbelief for the sake of what is already a fictional plot, and scoffs at attempts to lure us into believing that a man can fly, that a woman can walk through walls, or that a child can move objects with her mind.

There is a third approach, one willing to discover the real in the implausible, one that hopes to locate something more than temporary titillation in the spacefarer’s quest or the dragon fighter’s epic battle.

This kind of perspective finds in the otherwordly adventure both a surprisingly faithful dramatization of what is already common, internal human experience, and a call to tackle life and its troubles in more dramatic and decisive fashion.

The common relational struggles of friends and family that—unaccompanied by bullets or big bosoms—never make it onto the news, and the relatively invisible spiritual, emotional, and psychological battles which only the individual can ever fully understand, find themselves painted in bright and broad strokes on the cinema’s allegorical canvas. Somehow, the limitless boundaries of space, the grand heroism of the superhero, and the mental gymnastics of the telepath provide ample room in which to dramatize what never seems to assume in the material world the same proportions they assume in our minds and hearts, providing a kind of tangibility to experiences and aspirations that might otherwise remain under the radar.

In other words, we might just enjoy fantasy not only because it provides an imaginative escape from our lives, but because it expresses the struggles of those lives in effective, truthful metaphors.

And, as I suggested earlier, such movies can inspire us to approach our own lives as serious enterprises. Some will dismiss such a suggestion out of hand, preferring to relegate “adventure” completely to the realms of fiction. They will be uncomfortable with the notion that great things might be expected from them, that their actions might just have repercussions far beyond the immediate and personal, that the smallest of decisions they make can dramatically shape the lives of others. It’s far easier to dismiss as ridiculous anything that reminds us that our own lives might also be filled with grand stakes, unknowable mysteries, and life-changing skirmishes.

Kids are less likely to make this mistake. A child’s active imagination blurs the adult-imposed boundaries between “fantasy” and “reality.” She delights in unicorns and fairies, and is horrified by super-powered villains and monsters. She reacts in this way not because convinced such entities exist, but because something within her instinctively resonates with such possibilities. She knows her outstretched arms will not lift her heavenwards, yet still thrills in the wind which rushes over her body as if her legs had successfully boosted her into the sky.

Perhaps another reason we are called to be like children . . .