God's Not Dead

It's impossible to review Christian films because if you're a believer you think this is a great film with a great message. If you're a skeptic or an out and out atheist you'll not view it kindly. Credit however should have gone to such items as Crash, Magnolia, and heaven forfend Boogie Nights because in terms of structure God's Not Dead most closely resembles those films. There's a bunch of stories with people all interconnected somehow.

But the main plot line involves young Shane Harper who is a Christian kid who is taking philosophy as an elective course. Instead of free academic discourse we have Professor Kevin Sorbo right off the bat wants to have his students declare God is dead. Harper is the one holdout and Sorbo essentially turns the class over to him, not for just one lecture, but for several periods where Harper has to get up and defend his faith.

Back in the day I had college professors, mostly liberals to be sure, but would never act like Kevin Sorbo does. Later on we learn in the film that he's got some deep issues.

As for Harper, he's told by the local pastor David A.R. White that this is an opportunity to go to bat for his faith. It would have been a lot easier to just drop the course and take another elective. In fact Harper is such a devoted believer one wonders why he's not in some place like Jerry Falwell's Liberty Baptist University or Pat Robertson's Regent University. Especially the latter since they have a law school there with guaranteed employment in the Justice Department when a Republican administration is in power.

As we all know Kevin Sorbo first came to prominence portraying that most mythic of pagan heroes Hercules on television. Another former television superhero in this film is former Superman Dean Cain who is a lawyer with one colossal ego. His part is almost a caricature, especially when his girlfriend tells him she's got cancer. What a comfort Cain is to her.

Christian icons like Willie and Korie Robertson from Duck Dynasty make an appearance. The finale is a concert by that most noted Christian Rock group the Newsboys.

As a non-believer, not an anti-believer and there is a difference despite the position this film takes I'm not thoroughly trashing a job moderately well done. Why though the existence of a Creator/Deity is automatically meaning that a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity is necessarily valid. Or a literal interpretation of any religion for that matter. Harper even concedes that there was no literal 24/7 creation. I suspect that if he had tried to defend the Bible in a literal interpretation of the flood or Joshua stopping the sun, etc., things might have turned out differently.

One thing however did offend me greatly. David A.R. White is playing host to a visiting missionary from some unnamed African country. These are the same people who are currently pushing with glee and delight pogrom like laws against gay people in many African countries. Of course no mention of that in God's Not Dead, but I assure you that any gay people who see this film will mark it well for this colossal bit of hubris.

Technically God's Not Dead is not a horrible film, but people depending on their point of view will react accordingly to it.

I am not sure why all the reviews are so negative. This movie has been able to do one of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed. It is so bad and ridiculous that it has actually managed to unite Atheists and Christians alike in being both offended and disgusted at the same thing. Do you know how difficult that actually is? Come on people, you should be happy that it one thing has proved that we all can get along and hate the same thing, arm and arm... LOL!! I mean this movie (and I use that term loosely) is so bad that it really has me wondering what the creator of this movie was thinking. I mean overly cliché'd stereotypes, mixed in with a ridiculous premise, coupled with even more ridiculous subplots. All culminating around the premise of a professor at a University requesting to do something that I am pretty sure would be deemed illegal and I have never come across or even heard of, someone making people sign a paper denouncing their religious faith. My favorite part is they then allow this kid to argue points of which in this day and age people can watch on any youtube clip, probably have already come to their own conclusions and doesn't answer anything on either side, in my opinion. So the fact that everyone thinks this movie is preposterous in a united front is quite amazing, and if that was the intent of the creator of this movie, then he is a genius!!

This movie was horrible. It makes no good point whatsoever and totally misrepresents the position of atheist, reducing it to a silly emotional statement, which it is not. Moreover this movie is machine-gun-spraying fallacies.

As for a positive thing, the acting is not totally bad, but for me movies are not just about "technical things". I welcome criticism and ideas, messages in movies and moral teachings, but this movie fails on this plane very badly.

I could imagine giving a movie like this more stars if it would address some points better and not use fallacies and emotional appeal to convince the viewers of the students position.

... when he said the movies are a great big empathy machine. At least in this case he probably was, because this film is a great big stereotype machine.

I'll cut it some slack on acting and direction because the whole thing was shot in 20 days with probably a low budget. The screenplay itself, mainly focusing on the conflict between Christian student Josh Wheaton and his atheist philosophy professor, really has a narrow point of view. The film really paints everything with a black and white brush and makes assumptions about atheists - AND people from other faiths and countries - that cause much of the criticism of the Christian community in the first place. I know several atheists, and they are not all narcissists that abandon sick friends or people that blame God for some tragedy in their past. Many of them have a behavior code that exceeds that of Christians because they do not have a "ticket to heaven in my pocket" mentality which many Christians do have and I have observed.

Meanwhile, we get a look at what is supposed to pass for a typical Arab-American Muslim household, as dad always makes sure that his daughter Ayisha has her face totally covered when he drops her off at school. He doesn't seem to mind that she has on short sleeves and clothes that are just as revealing as her peers. Note to dad - the face is not the only physical thing about a young lady that catches the eye of young men. No matter though, because as soon as dad is out of sight. Ayisha removes the face covering. It turns out that Ayisha is a closet Christian, and when dad finds out he reacts as we would expect any Muslim man to react who is three times his daughters size - he smacks her around fist to face and then physically throws her out into the street.

Getting back to the film's main protagonist,Josh, he is now having to debate the philosophy prof in class as to the existence of God using philosophical arguments or else he will fail. The in-class debate part of the film was interesting, but I believe professor Raddison when he said they did not have pre-law at the university, because just about every action he took was completely illegal, from threatening his students with failing grades or at least greatly enhanced workloads if they did not write down "God is dead" on a piece of paper and sign it, to confronting and taunting the student Josh when he began to get his goat.

Josh makes a big deal during his portion of the debate about God allowing free will to reign on earth and that being the reason for all of the evil, and then the plot goes on to disprove exactly that by implying divine destruction of the ignition capabilities of every car that two random missionaries on their way to Disneyland touch (in one of many sideplots) so that they can be at a particular place at a crucial time. As one missionary states to the other "God has you exactly where he wants you". What happened to free will if these two are just manipulated actors in God's grandiose play? Other interesting points - apparently all atheists turn to Christ when confronted with death (a point the late Christopher Hitchens disproves), and exactly what is this generic cancer that the atheist blogger has? Inquiring minds want to know. Plus - filmmakers - I know plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, but many of us know an "I am Spartacus" moment when we see it (Josh's argument in favor of the existence of God causes everybody in the class to stand and say "God is not dead"). The great irony here - the screenwriter for Spartacus was James Dalton Trumbo, who just happened to be an atheist. I would say this film is worth watching as a curiosity if nothing else.

So first of all, in God's Not Dead, let's get this out of the way first: this is not how a college classroom works. As someone who has now been teaching in a college for over a year now, I've seen first-hand how students act and react to things, and more importantly how professors act. Maybe this character that Kevin Sorbo plays has tenure, maybe he's an 'untouchable' in Academia. But how this class operates - how he firmly puts it to these students that they must write down on the first day of class on a piece of paper 'God is Dead' and that counts as 30% of their grade - is just stupid and illogical off the bat. What goal is this professor looking for? Does he want a *sincere* answer from these students? The conflict comes that one student (named Josh Wheaton... like uh, Joss Whedon, I guess for some reason) challenges the professor by not writing it, not because of any logic about how a classroom works, but because he's a Christian and won't give in. So then an entire debate is set up - forget a class being taught or lessons - between the theist side and atheist side.

This isn't to say the movie doesn't pour on its message thicker than syrup on a dozen stacks of pancakes. But even having to think about this shows that the director and writers here don't care about having actual, human characters here. Not really. They have some kinds of shades of what a person might be like, like, well, words and thoughts and things, but there isn't much past: this side believes, and this side doesn't believe, and they really, deep down, don't believe because either someone in their family died (the professor) or may be dying soon (the reporter woman, who by the way gets a very hackneyed scene where an a-hole boyfriend breaks up with her after her cancer news).

It would be one thing if it was just this BS straw-man back-and-forth in front of a plastic classroom full of stick figures for these mouth-pieces to talk (and that's what they are, make no mistake about that, unless you're already coming to this as the heavily-converted). It's really in the structure of something like Crash, a multi-character 'tableau' that has some very minor connections to some of the characters - it all comes together, naturally, at a Christian rock concert in the last third. There's multiple crappy plots to go along with the main 'plot' of the freshman student and the professor, including the local pastor/preacher/whatever and a car that won't start (the rental car guy that comes is meant to bring the one 'joke' that falls flat), and a Muslim girl and her strict father, who we know NOTHING about and decides to go for Jesus and gets slapped and kicked out of her house.

Who is she? What about the reporter, who we maybe know a little more about due to her sorta-storyline with cancer and interviewing a guy from Duck Dynasty (huh) and then later in a prayer circle with the Christian rock group at the end. She has just the shades of anything like real motivation, past "I'm going to die, that sucks." And what about the professor's girlfriend, who is made to look like a doormat to her boyfriend (always an a-hole, even up until the very end of the film), and says she is a Christian but has little to really say against her super-Athiest-Dogmatic man? So many of these scenes, for all of the characters, are just springboards so that people can get into these arguments and talks about God and faith that are, for lack of a better or more original expression, preach to the choir: you already know coming to this that God exists, right? Then get ready for some mighty Christian rock (ugh) and messages from certain intellectuals in lecture-form about this. You know God doesn't exist? Or are unsure? Well...

There's no middle ground here, no other voice or nothing to make for any real spot for ambiguity. And even with the sense of these students really having their own thoughts or expressions in the class there's basically nothing (one student, out of the blue, quotes Richard Dawkins like she knows it off the back of her hand, at the start of a 101 Philosophy class, and another, the Chinese student, kind of a supporting character, has a moment with his far-away dad who says simply 'yes, the professor says God exists, He exists, go away'). Ultimately it comes down to the script for a lot of these problems, and how it's really, aside from having badly written characters and bad dialog and not necessarily bad filmmaking but bland direction (and among the actors, only Kevin Sorbo doesn't look there to drone on with little emotion), it's an anti-intellectual film. It's epitomized in the whole 'hook' of the college classroom, which is (to repeat myself) how a classroom works, on any level.

So near the end, if you're still enraptured by the message and praising Jesus as people become converted and songs are sung and the Duck Dynasty guy returns (?) then have at it. But as a film, as a story, with characters, and a meaningful message, it's as subtle as an anvil dropped Wile E Coyote.