I watch these missionary films from time to time. There is an earnestness in most of them that makes up for the fact that they are so horrible.
In my city is Pat Robertson's film school, training hundreds of people a year to make these things. I often wonder what will happen when they actually are able to make good movies?
I am beginning to believe that this may never happen. Film may be making Christianity obsolete. I know this may sound strange. Cinema seems profoundly malleable, a vehicle for any story. And Christianity has survived by adapting far, far from what Jesus believed, making any necessary compromise.
But film has rather rigid dynamics when combined with the forces of how we define ourselves through stories. It is extremely flexible, but only within a conceptual marketplace where the collective projections of self reinforce each other. Cinema allows us to define our own cosmos. It worries me that the rivers are sometimes so banal, but such the way of the collective — and young imaginations have surprising sophistication.
Christianity on the other hand is about accepting a prefabricated story. Well, different ones depending on the preacher's agenda, but the cosmos is defined in a very top down manner. Theoretically, they could overlap a lot, but that is not what the world seems to want. Even the most obvious Jesus stories like Harry Potter don't follow the rules of the Christian institution.
This film has prompted me to believe that it may be impossible to make powerful cinema with the existing dogma. Everything about it fails.
The irony is that the story flows are about rigid superstition being made obsolete, not by the Bible in the story, but because people simply want to explain for themselves what the world is.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
