This post, which is a kind of summary of observations made based on the movies I’ve watched and reviewed so far, didn’t happen in isolation. There is, in fact, a YouTube video that is a kind of inspiration for it, something the started the old mental gears to grinding.
Perhaps I should give a bit of a content warning about the video, I think I remember a few profanities in it, and I don't agree with him on everything he says, but I do recommend that you give it a watch. It’s not primarily about Christian movies or stories, although “crappy Christian cartoons” do come up in it towards the end. But it's the overall message about lazy storytelling, as displayed in one particular series, that was and is most thought-provoking.
So, with that said, here are my observations about the problems I’ve seen in these movies.
Lazy Theology
For a movie that wants to wear the name "Christian", lazy theology is a serious issue, and it is a far too common issue.
So, what do I mean by "lazy theology"?
Lazy theology is an idea or solution that the movie appears to endorse that has either no biblical support, or very little. My disagreement is not just a matter of possible interpretations, but of seeing that the movie is teaching something very bad while trying to pretend that it is biblical.
In the movies I've reviewed so far, perhaps the worst example would be in the big climactic scene in The Girl Who Believed In Miracles. After the girl is thought to be dead, then comes back to life, and she's outside talking to the all the people who have come to revere her as a miracle worker, she tells them that the message she received from God for all of them was that they are to love each other and be kind and all that jazz. I don't want to reiterate arguments made in the review. The point here is that this is lazy theology. It's almost too much of a compliment to call it "theology" at all.
Now, it could be said that loving each other and being kind are biblical commands. Yet the Bible says much more than that. It tells us that all of our works of righteousness, even all our acts of love and kindness toward each other, are like filthy rags, like soiled diapers. The biblical command to the people who are not believers in Christ is to "repent and believe the gospel", not act nice and be kind. It's not that loving one another and being kind are unimportant, but we must keep first things first. One act of kindness on our parts will not wash away one of our sins; in fact, that act of kindness is itself soiled in our sins, perhaps in pride at our act of generosity, perhaps at how we hope others notice this act of generosity and will think well of us, perhaps at how we intend to use this act of generosity to put the person we're helping our debt.
The Girl Who Believed In Miracles has lazy theology, because it doesn't deal with ultimate things while pretending it does. It tries to offer the viewer, and all mankind, a solution, but the solution is only more law. God has given man plenty of laws, and man has even heaped more and more laws upon himself, and the truth is, trying to keep those laws isn't going to save any one of us, nor is it going to make the world any better. If God's only message to us is to love each other and be kind, then we are hopeless, because we don't do those things, and as we are right now we cannot do them perfectly.
Lazy Character Development
I understand the Christian movies have a "target audience", and that "target audience" very likely doesn't want gritty movies that are too realistic when it comes to the dark side of humanity. I can accept that idea that a story can be very good without delving too far into that dark side. Still, if we don't push and test our characters in important ways, out stories become dull.
In A Box of Faith, a potentially fascinating story is set up, the idea of a mid-teen girl having to survive on the streets while trying to not get caught by a social worker, all while not know what happened to her father. And right at first, it does show her going through a few struggles; she loses a bag she tried to stash in what she thought was a safe place, and she ends up having to sleep under a bridge. But almost right after that, her struggles mostly end: she sets up a living space in a storage shed her father rented, the social worker lady gives her money, she keeps winning free meals at a certain restaurant, she finds as dog as a companion, and she's able to repair a cheap watch and get lots of money for it. She even sees through how another girl wants to steal from her, and the other girl doesn't, for example, try to turn her in or tell the social worker lady where she can be found. In other words, the main character just becomes dull, and the movie loses much of its interest.
As clumsily as it may have done it, and for all of its other many many problems, Daniel's Lot at least tried to maintain a sense of conflict and tension.
Lazy Solutions
This can appear in a few different ways.
One is what I've come to refer to as "Oh no my life is completely falling apart so I'm going to pray and oh look everything is just perfect now" solution. It's a bit wordy; in fact, it's about a clunky as the movies it appears in.
This can have a few variations.
In Shake Off The World, for example, the main character is having a rough time, losing his girlfriend and being bullied at his new school, until he starts going to church. To be fair, the bullies are still an issue even after that, but he finds a nice girl in the church's youth group, and at the end even the bullying thing is mostly resolved.
I haven't written a review for this movie yet, though I watched it a few years ago, but the movie Flywheel does this. The main character is having his past come back to bite him, and so he prays and suddenly things start going right for him just as the movie ends.
A lot of this brings up some issues that Christian story tellers should consider: how should prayer be used in our stories, and how should we portray God as a character in our stories? I know that Christian story tellers want to show that God answers prayers, but I'm not sure we do that all that well.
Lazy Stories
This is such a huge problem.
There is a concept out that there that is important for people who create stories and enjoy reading or watching them: the suspension of disbelief. This means that, for example, if I'm watching a science fiction TV show, maybe Star Trek, then for the sake of this show I accept the idea that there are many different kinds of alien races in the galaxy. I suppose that's possible, but at least so far there is no proof of any such peoples out there. But this suspension of disbelief can only go so far. So, while I may accept that Star Trek has aliens, I can't accept that Mr. Spock can be on the bridge of the Enterprise when it's orbiting a planet a thousand light-years from Earth while at the same time Mr. Spock is also eating a fruit salad in a restaurant in Chicago on Earth. If such a thing appears to be happening, there'd better be a good reason in the story.
Look at a movie like The Badge, The Bible, and Bigfoot, I can accept that the lady might set the gun down while taking a potty break in the forest, and even forget about it when she's done, but I can't accept that the guy would not go back to find it after realizing they no longer had it. In fact, I can barely accept the fact that he would have given the gun to her in the first place. Or in Daniel's Lot, the idea that a man would risk letting his family become homeless instead of selling a valuable piece of property is asking too much, at least for me.
And there are other, smaller incidents in the stories that show a lack of effort. In Guided By The Word, the daughter's main role for almost all of the movie is to either mope about her home or argue with her husband. The movie does little or nothing to explain her anger towards the parents who adopted her.
Shake Off The World is very frustrating in this regard. In the first half hour of the movie, football is a big part of the story, but after that, it almost completely disappears.
Daniel's Lot tries to sell the viewer that a pretty lousy character is actually the good guy. Early in the movie, Daniel is whiny, complaining, a pretty lousy husband and father, and he lies to his boss about why he's late for work. Yet the movie tries to show him as being in the right, even with a bit of a song about how he's in the right.
Conclusion
I wonder sometimes if Christian movies are worth it. At the least, they need lots of work. But by their nature, a movie has to appeal to people, and when appealing to people becomes the primary objective, then compromises are going to creep in, and one sure compromise is going to be that the message will be changed, diluted, watered down. Instead of offering Christ as the answer to man's lost state and need for redemption and salvation, we'll be told that we just need to be kind and loving.
At the least, Christian movie making needs to be ministry, not a business. I know that may not be easy. A movie is not a simple thing, nor is it cheap. Yet the truth is, Christian movie makers need to be careful of trying to be friendly with the world, lest they become the enemy of God. They need to be careful of loving the world and the things of this world, lest they discover, and probably too late, that the love of the Father is not in them. They need to be careful of laying up treasures here on Earth rather than in Heaven. Too many of these Christian movies I've watched lately show this compromise. How else to explain the gospel-less nature of the final message in The Girl Who Believed In Miracles? Or how the gospel is missing from the other movies, too?
