"God's Not Dead". Quality Filmmaking May Not Be So Lucky

So, I posted a few days ago with a review of Darren Aronofsky's Noah, and said that it would be the first in a series of three posts. This post is the second of that series, in which I will review the surprising box office hit, Christian movie God's Not Dead.

Now, as you may have surmised from the title, I'm going to be pretty harsh on this movie, because it was terrible. Now, I am sure that many people who worked on this movie are good Christians, and I'm sure that many of the people who have enjoyed it and made it such a surprise hit are committed believers. That does not, however, make it a good movie.

The Review

So, I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated it. It actually made me angry the more I thought about it. I knew I was probably going to hate it, but I went anyway (these are the sacrifices I make) and it was even worse than I was expecting it to be. The strange thing is, I firmly expected the classroom "debate" to be the most infuriating part of it, basically like a Jack Chick tract writ large. It's not though. In fact, up until the very last class, those scenes are pretty tame (still fairly stupid, but tame). The film seems remarkably uninterested in the actual argument the main character is making.

Instead, the movie has roughly 100 different side plots that all intersect in increasingly stupid ways. There's a Muslim girl who gets kicked out of her family for being a Christian. There's a Chinese boy whose father won't let him mention God on the phone because "you never know who might be listening". Then, *deep breath" there's a Christian woman who is, inexplicably, dating Kevin Sorbo's Professor Radisson and has a mother with dementia (only "dementia" apparently means staring straight ahead like a statue, asking "who are you, again?" to all family members, and giving a long, out-of-the-blue monologue about trusting God) and a brother (Dean Cain) who is dating a liberal blogger until she gets cancer. There's also a sub-plot with a pastor and a missionary that intersects with half of these and is what constitutes comic relief in this movie. Also, the main character (Josh) has a girlfriend who breaks up with him because he's committing "academic suicide". As bad as all that sounds on paper, I promise that it is 100x worse on the screen. None of these people can act, with Josh's terrible girlfriend coming off the worst. To be fair though, even great actors weren't going to be doing much with the caricatures in this script.

- Dean Cain is literally the world's biggest jerk (which is quite an accomplishment in this movie). When told by his date that she has cancer, his response is "you couldn't have waited till tomorrow?" and then goes on a long screed about how love is the most overused word in the English language and how of course he isn't in love with her, they've had a good run, but now it's over. In a movie littered with painful scenes, it stands out as particularly tone-deaf.

- The blogger responds to hearing she has cancer with a matter-of-fact "I don't have time for cancer." She is informed of this by a doctor with the world's worst bedside manner, who informs her (I'm paraphrasing) "I know you feel like the world can't get on without you, but it looks like it's getting ready to do just that."

- The pastor and the missionary are going to leave on a trip, only the pastor's car won't start. Then the rental car they get won't start (even though it was just driven to them). Then the second rental car won't start (by the way, the rental car guy is the best character in this whole stupid film). Ostensibly, this is all God's doing to keep them in town so that the pastor can intersect with all these other dumb characters and quote Bible verses at them.

- Ugh, I just can't with this movie...I've known people with dementia/Alzheimer's, they are not cute proverb spewing machines. It's a terrifying thing to watch a friend/relative go through, and this movie trivializes it.

The movie wants to make serious commentary about everything, and as a result it says nothing meaningful about anything. Muslims who convert to Christianity sometimes do get ostracized from their families. People do get cancer. People do have dementia. These are serious issues, some of the most serious issues, and you can't properly deal with them in two or three short scenes. God's Not Dead doesn't really care about these issues or these characters, they're just emotionally manipulative. Because there is no nuance or development to all these story lines, they end up just being insulting.

Poor Kevin Sorbo. I genuinely felt bad for the guy, because he's trying really hard and is clearly the best actor in this movie, but his character is just the worst. For a philosophy professor, it's incredible how utterly uninterested he is in philosophy. He won't stand for debate or questioning. He's irrationally angry at a student for doing the very thing that he assigned him to do. He never actually offers a philosophical rebuttal, instead choosing to appeal to authority to question Josh's points. The only reason he's not the most contemptible character in the film is because this movie also features a character who insults a dementia patient and breaks up with a woman with cancer (did anyone actually read this script?). Radisson is not just the world's worst professor, he's also a terrible boyfriend. He apparently started dated this girl when she was a student in his class, despite the fact that she is a Christian, which he hates, and he thinks she's stupid, which is shown when he and his fellow professors from the philosophy department mock her mercilessly at a dinner party (there is a moment where everyone acts like she's is the world's greatest simpleton because she doesn't know Latin. I wish I were making all this up). When she breaks up with him, his answer is "No. I won't allow it," and when she ignores that and walks away he says "did you hear what I said?" It's just...UGH. At the end he gets run over by a car and, of course, the pastor is there to help him make a deathbed repentance, in a scene that literally made me want to throw whatever was at hand at the screen. Just like all the other characters, he's a caricature, a straw man, an evil atheist boogeyman.

The actor playing Josh is...okay? It's hard to tell because he's given so very little to work with, but in a film full of embarrassing performances, he at least made me go "I bet this guy could be okay given a small part in a better movie". His character is the least troublesome in the movie, so...kudos for that, I guess? Frankly, what we see of his speeches are pretty well in line with what you might expect from a freshman philosophy student trying to argue his faith (only with extraordinarily elaborate powerpoint presentations that he apparently found time to make in the space of a few days). He isn't making sophisticated points, but he's dancing around the edges of some of the classic arguments. He even has a moment at the end of the first speech where the professor questions him with a Stephen Hawking quote (because, again, this philosophy professor cannot think for himself and must quote others), and Josh answers "I don't know", which is an admirable moment to include in this film. If the film wants to portray a freshman student awkwardly fumbling with a defense of his faith in an unreasonably hostile setting, than it actually didn't do a terrible job at that. However, the movie wants to be more than that. It wants to have this freshman soundly defeat the evil atheist philosophy professor, proving once and for all the intellectual validity of theism. For that, his arguments aren't nearly good enough, and his opponent is far too much of an evil straw man.

The film also ends the "debate" by concluding that Professor Radisson doesn't really think God doesn't exist, he just hates him because his mother died when he was young. Now, there is some truth to the idea expressed here. The Bible says that all men know God, but we deny the truth. I don't think there's any such thing as a purely intellectual belief or disbelief in God. Many objections to God do have their root in an emotional hatred of God (Tim Keller writes very eloquently about this in The Reason For God). However, tackling that emotional bias against God is seldom as easy as pinpointing one event in a person's past, and even then, that doesn't mean you can ignore the intellectual arguments that people forward. You should respectfully engage with the philosophical arguments against God, and this movie has no interest in doing so. Again, these things require nuance, and because this film is so focused on so many things, there's no room for nuance. As a result, it just comes off as insultingly ignorant.

I haven't even really talked about the film-making yet, but boy howdy is it bad. You need a deft hand to make lots of interweaving stories work. Lets just be charitable and say that this movie's hand was slightly less than deft. It jumps jarringly from scene to scene, storyline to storyline. There are times when it cuts to a different scene in the middle of one of Josh's classroom speeches, not because the point he is making illuminates what is going on in the other scene, but because...I guess they just thought they needed to cut away? Who knows. Then they'll abruptly snap back to Josh as he finishes whatever thought he was in the middle of when we cut away. It's baffling. Also, close-ups. Man, this movie had all the close-ups, on all the faces. And hey, do you love dramatic piano in the background of your close-ups? You do? Well, do I have the movie for you! Someone apparently didn't get the message that if you try to make every scene in your movie weighty and dramatic, none of them are. I feel like in this script, essentially every line is underlined and in bold.

Then there's the end. Look, I get that they probably needed to have the Duck Dynasty dude and the Newsboys in there to get this thing made and make some money with it. Whatever. It's idiotic and terrible and the most "preaching-to-the-choir"est thing they could do. Fine, I'll live with that. However, at the end of the film, everybody ends up converging on this Newsboys concert. In the middle of the concert, Duck Dynasty dude shows up on the big screen up front and tells everyone in the crowd to get out their phones and text everyone they know "God's Not Dead" (and the film echoes this challenge to the film viewer at the end right before the credits roll), and how this is a way they can show how much they love Jesus. NO IT ISN'T! What better way to show you love Jesus? Literally any other thing than that. How about call one single solitary friend and ask them about their life and genuinely care about them. That's better. Give even a single dollar to someone who needs it. That's better. Dip your cell phone in gravy and eat it rather than sending those stupid text messages. That's better. Can you imagine the incandescent rage that would pour out from the religious right if any film dared to instruct its viewers to text everyone they know with "God is dead"? You know what all those people who get your text message are going to do? They're going to be angry that you wasted their 5 seconds with a platitude. They will, like Dean Cain's character (In literally the only moment of the movie where his character made sense), take one look at the message, then toss their phone into the backseat and not give it another thought. It's the dumbest call to action I've ever seen. It made me so, so angry.

Look, there is a way in which I genuinely believe Christianity is persecuted in the academic world. There are ways in which your faith will be attacked and undermined in the culture of the US today. It's not going to be from a comically aggressive atheist professor though. It's going to be much more subtle and much more dangerous. If you're hunting for an atheist boogeyman or constantly crying out about persecution, you're never going to be able to actually identify and engage with other worldviews. God's Not Dead isn't interested in making a case for God, nor is it interested in truly portraying faith. It wants to scare you with evil, irrational atheists, then let you laugh and cheer when they get defeated by a freshman kid. It's insulting to film, it's insulting to intelligence, it's insulting to atheists, and it's insulting to Christianity.