Last summer, I walked into Washington's Union Station on my way to catching a train to New York. It was sunny and clear outside; inside, my visibility was greatly reduced. For a moment, I thought the station was on fire. But it turned out I had walked into the middle of a movie set. The film being made was Hannibal, the much-talked-about sequel to the 1991 Academy-Award winning Silence of The Lambs.

I remember thinking "that soon?" After all, it had been less than a year since the eponymous book by Thomas Harris came out. I also remember doubting that the film would be anywhere near as successful with moviegoers as its predecessor. Well, I was wrong. Eight months later, Hannibal arrived in American theaters to the kind of financial reception that makes mixed reviews almost beside the point. It the first three weeks since its release in February, Hannibal made $128 million at the box office.

It's clear that fans weren't turned off by the talk about Hannibal's graphic violence or grim subject matter. But Hannibal is about a lot more than the story of a shrink turned cannibalistic serial killer. In Hannibal, we see our own attitudes towards good and evil staring us back in the face — just before he ... never mind.

A discussion of Hannibal needs to start with its predecessor, Silence of The Lambs. In both the film and Harris' novel by the same name, a serial killer, nicknamed "Buffalo Bill," has made a senator's daughter his latest victim. If he holds true to form — which is the point if you're a serial killer — he will kill her and dispose of her body within a matter of days. The FBI, in its attempt to solve the case, takes the unusual step of enlisting an FBI Academy trainee, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in its efforts.

Starling's assignment is to interview a notorious serial killer named Hannibal "the cannibal" Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). Starling is warned not to let Lecter get "into your head." When we meet Lecter we understand why. He's no ordinary monster. Besides his intelligence, there's his urbanity, his refinement and, odd as this may sound in association with a serial killer, his manners. In one of the most harrowing cinematic vignettes I've ever seen, Lecter kills two guards to the accompaniment of Bach's "Goldberg Variations," and escapes confinement. At the end of Silence, he tells Clarice that he's "having an old friend for dinner."

Silence worked well enough with Academy voters to become only the second film to sweep the "big four" Oscars: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Film. Its characters and story line, especially the story of an urbane psychiatrist who ate a census taker's liver with fava beans and washed it down with a fine Chianti, resonated with readers and moviegoers enough to warrant a sequel. A decade later, Harris and Hollywood have complied. In Hannibal, seven years have passed since Starling and Lecter entered each other's lives. Lecter has indulged his refined aesthetic sense by working in a museum in the art capital of the world: Florence. Life is good, except that his only surviving victim, a wealthy pedophile named Mason Verger, refuses to let bygones be bygones and is devoting his considerable resources to capturing Lecter and exacting a rather gruesome revenge.

For her part, Starling's life hasn't gone quite as she expected, especially when you recall the auspicious start of her FBI career. A botched drug raid, for which she was unjustly blamed, and office politics have brought her career to a halt. Then, you-know-who comes a-calling. Lecter's motives are clear: it's a love of sorts. But Starling's thought process is less clear. She's both repelled by Hannibal the monster and intrigued by — not to mention attracted to — Lecter the man. And, in that sense, she's a stand-in for the audience. Silence and Hannibal wouldn't have succeeded, at least commercially, if audiences were only repelled by Harris' creation.

Sure, there's no denying Hannibal's monster credentials. But calling Lecter a "monster" and leaving it at that would be to miss a large part of what Hannibal is. He's more than a sophisticated bogeyman. He's a statement about good and evil. In Hannibal, the audience is invited to ask itself whether terms like "good" and "evil" mean anything anymore. Viewers are invited to consider the possibility that good doesn't inevitably triumph over evil, and that the opposite may be true. We're asked to contemplate embracing monsters like Hannibal because there may not be a credible alternative to what they represent.

Hannibal Lecter is what Boston College philosophy professor Thomas Hibbs has called a "demonic anti-hero." Your regular anti-hero, like your traditional hero, is a protagonist whom the audience is expected to identify with. The anti-hero usually did the right thing — often despite himself. But nothing in his conduct or demeanor could be accurately described as "noble" or" heroic." My favorite examples include Jack Nicholson's two most memorable characters, Jake Gittes, the cynical private eye in Chinatown, and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the con man-turned-revolutionary in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. A more recent and controversial example might be Tony Soprano, the angst-ridden protagonist of The Sopranos who, despite his legion of faults, isn't a moral relativist.

Unlike the garden-variety anti-hero, demonic anti-heroes, like Hannibal, are unfettered from any moral system. That's what makes them monstrous. Not only are they free from moral codes of any kind, they bid the audience to celebrate this freedom. As Hibbs writes of Silence, the audience sees the world "from the devil's perspective and [is invited to] share his comic take on the bankruptcy of all moral codes." If this was true of Silence, it goes double for Hannibal.

This anti-hero isn't only the product of a worldview that denies the viability of any moral code, but also of despair. The moral universe increasingly portrayed in movies is one where, as Hibbs writes, "... ultimate justice is elusive, where we are tempted to see the underlying force as malevolent and punitive ... [This worldview sees] violence and ineradicable guilt as the underlying truth about the human condition ..." In other words, evil is real, and what's more, there's no one around who can do anything about it; there is no God and we are truly on our own. Humanity has to make due without the guidance and direction we came to expect from God, specifically, the biblical God. And we can longer expect that God to protect us from what theologian Paul Tillich called the "malevolent will to undo [creation]." Stated differently, there's no one left to "deliver us from evil."

As dark as this worldview may seem, we (if the box office is any indication) still find it — or at least the characters it creates — compelling. That's because characters like Hannibal strip away our sentimental pretense. In our fallen state, we want to believe that we can treat each other well, and that good can triumph over evil without the benefit of a God who cares about us and who, sorry to say, has given us standards to live by. In its stark depiction of unrestrained evil, Hannibal reveals those hopes to be unwarranted nonsense. Hannibal tells us that in a world where evil is real, and good is what we're uncertain about, the best we can hope for is that our monsters are as charismatic and appealing as possible. If there's no real answer to evil, evil might as well be worth watching — at least for a while.

I don't believe that to be the case. Then again, I explicitly reject Hannibal's underlying premise. Not all moral codes are bankrupt, not by a long shot. And there is someone who can and has done something about evil. I'm referring of course to the biblical God, and the moral law He has given us. Sadly, talk of such a God, and especially a moral law, goes against our cultural grain. We'd all rather be "spiritual."

But as we learn from Lecter, those kinds of vague sentiments fare poorly when confronted with evil. If good and evil are merely personal choices and there's no God to say otherwise, the strongest and least sentimental will win every time — precisely because, unlike our exquisitely "spiritual" culture, they're not trying to have it both ways. And those who do insist on having it both ways will be left with embracing the un-embraceable.