pankakesparx456
Diamond Sparx
Gems: 7795
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#1073 Posted: 14:05:35 02/04/2016
I absolutely hated the first God's Not Dead, and it's one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
Now let me make a couple things clear before I go into why: I am a dedicated Christian at heart. I believe in God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and I do read my Bible every now and then. So this opinion is coming from someone who is, while laid back about it for the most part, very serious and dedicated about Christianity. If anything, it should really say something about this movie if someone who's Christian like me hated this movie. Also, this may not come off as an unpopular opinion to most considering the negative critical reception God's Not Dead got, but I've noticed that a LOT of Christians put this movie in high regard and say it's an excellent movie. Even at my own Church and student ministry I seem to be the only Christian who hated this movie.
As for why I hate it, where do I even begin...
The primary problem that the entire movie has as a whole is that it's too biased. This movie victimizes Christians and puts Atheists and Muslims in a seriously negative light. The Christians in this movie are portrayed as the only good people, and have no real character flaws to them at all. The Atheist teacher in this movie is portrayed as the most spiteful, hateful human being. He constantly refutes the Christian student in this movie, treats him generally like garbage, and abuses his girlfriend on a mental scale because she's a Christian. Never mind the fact that this kind of stuff would make you a terrible person no matter what religion you are, but just about every atheist in this movie is like this. the teacher's friends, who are also atheists, basically treat Christians like a laughing stock, and it's honestly the most disrespectful thing I've ever seen in any movie thus far. Some of my closest friends are atheists, and none of them would ever treat me this way in the same way I wouldn't treat them this way because it's just being a bad person regardless of religion.
And it doesn't help that the only character who's a Muslim in this movie beats his daughter because he's too "traditional." Yeah, because we DEFINITELY needed to do that to a religion that already faces more oppression than any other religion in today's world, right? The movie is incredibly biased because of how horribly it treats the other side, and the movie would've been a HELL OF A LOT better if they focused on making all the characters good characters instead of constantly victimizing Christians and saying they've done nothing wrong, while basically treating every non-Christian character like garbage.
Even without this problem the movie itself is just a jumbled, unfocused mess that covers WAY too many subplots. Along with the whole Christian student vs Atheist teacher plot, we have a subplot with the Christian student breaking up with his girlfriend, a subplot with the Atheist teacher mentally abusing his girlfriend, a subplot with said girlfriend's brother not visiting their mother at all even though she has dementia(oh yeah, and the brother is an atheist and the mother is a Christian. guess where that goes?), a subplot with THAT brother's girlfriend who writes a Duck Dynasty blog(including a random Duck Dynasty cameo in this movie), gets cancer, and has the brother dump her because she has cancer(I wish I was making this stuff up, but I can't. the brother actually dumps her because she has cancer and calls her the selfish one. And it's not done in a whole "the brother is just really hurt" kind of way. The brother dumps her with absolutely no sympathy), and later converts to Christianity after she meets the Christian band Newsboys, a subplot with a Muslim girl who converts to Christianity only to have her father beat her and kick her out of the house, and be left to a couple of pastors to take care of her because she has nowhere to go, and a subplot with the same two pastors trying to get their car to start working, only to finally get it working and come across the atheist teacher dying because he got hit by a car, and they help him convert to Christianity(Oh yeah, did I mention that they kill off the atheist teacher at the end, have the pastors here convert him to Christianity before he dies, and they essentially mock him at the Newsboys concert at the end of the movie?).
Did you manage to follow ANY of that? Yeah, that's how incredibly unfocused this movie is. The movie should've just been left at the student and the teacher debating about whether or not God is real(and it should've been done more unbiased, I should add again). But instead they throw all these other plots at us for no reason other than to essentially extend the runtime of the film. The writing is absolutely atrocious because of this, since the script is trying to balance out all these plots with no real flow to them whatsoever. It also makes the characters even less interesting. It's already bad enough that these characters are stereotyped and incredibly one-dimensional(and with actors doing really bad performances, no less), but now, since there's so many characters, you can't care about them at all because the movie is going all over the place with them.
Ultimately this comes down the the biggest problem that most Christian movies have nowadays: The focus more on the message than the actual movie. Instead of trying to make a good movie, with good characters and good writing, they constantly put God at the center and try to hammer his message into the audience, and no audience other than Christians are going to like that.
There's a difference between putting God at the center on a human scale and putting him at the center on an entertainment scale. There can be a good message behind these Christian movies. but the message has to flow with the movie itself, not the message has to carry the entire film. Some of the better Christian movies, like The Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments, succeeded because the message they held was supported by a good story, good characters, and good writing. The message didn't dictate the story or characters, the characters and story of those movies dictated the message. And that's the core problem with God's Not Dead and a lot of Christian movies. The message of the movie comes first, and making a good movie comes second.
I could go on and on about other problems about the movie, such as how unrealistic it really is(THAT's an understatement), about how converting the characters to Christianity is handled very poorly in the film(especially with the atheist teacher), and about some of the pointless things that happen in the movie such as the random Duck Dynasty cameo, but then I'd be ranting way longer than I should be.
I really wanted to like this movie. I honestly did. With such an interesting concept, it should've been great. But it has so many problems with stereotyping, disrespecting other religions, subplots, writing, and characters that it's honestly a close third to Foodfight and The Last Airbender to being the worst movie I have ever seen. And I'm not even going to bother seeing the second one(at least in theaters) because it seems like their rehashing the exact same movie but on a courtroom scale(which is just going to cause even bigger problems than the first film).
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