Sunday, June 8, 2014

Review: God's Not Dead

2/4-------understand that I AM a Christian

This movie is not the crap that I heard it was. It is much more apologetic than most Christian movies I've seen; I would say it is probably half defense and half spiritual encouragement.
The Christian arguments are fairly solid. Sometimes one can see around the dramatic moment to a missing point, but in general there are good apologetic ideas portrayed. And the other side is not entirely ignored or belittled. It does make out atheists as bad people but they have a good stand in the debate and the unrealisticness of their badness isn't as extreme as what I had heard.
One flaw is that it seems to think it has proven the existence of God by the end. Or at least, I expect most viewers to come away from it thinking that God is proven, which would be a flaw of the movie. As a Christian, I believe pretty firmly that neither side can be proven, but that the evidence is subjective. The writers seem to think that too, but brush over that idea in the path to making people Christian.
Also as a Christian, I did not feel very inspired by this film. Some ideas or phrases spoken I thought were good and solid, but the drama was very mild. Everything was a little too cheesy and cheap for me to be inspired, I was distracted by the cheapness, but still it was a better experience to put myself through than most movies.
I'm pretty sure that I believe in the importance of being aware of the goals of a film before analyzing it. I recognize the goals of this movie, and I think it does not do awful in achieving them, although these goals are sometimes judgmental (atheists are closed-minded meanheads).
I'm going to sleep, I apologize for the poorly-written review.

Additions:
Okay, so the big apologetic moment at the end (How can you hate something that doesn't exist) is bad. It does NOT prove God but proves the flaw in one statement by the philosophy professor. It's an attack on the professor, and not atheism. And further, it is a flaw in the writing that the professor said the flawed statement; it wasn't true to character. He wouldn't say that. So the major apologetic climax is lame. But it feels great! to most. Not to me though, and I'm sure many viewers will see through it too.

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