Not all movies or TV shows are junk.
An example of a superb movie is the 2014 God’s Not Dead, which I saw twice on a Netflix DVD, and will watch again before I return it. That’s how much I love it.
Categorized as a “Christian drama” by Wikipedia, the movie’s mainly about a college freshman, Josh Wheaton, who is commanded, as all the other students in the class are, by his atheistic philosophy professor to write “God is dead” on a piece of piece and affix his signature to it.
Wheaton, a Christian, refuses to do as the professor ordered. So the professor challenges the student to defend his faith before the class — a challenge that Harper accepts, at the cost of alienating and losing his girl friend.
Here’s the trailer:
In a series of three presentations to the class, Wheaton rebuts atheism and atheists, touching on subjects including creation (the Big Bang), evolution, cosmologist and atheist Stephen Hawking, and the problem of evil.
The movie is directed by Harold Cronk; produced by Pure Flix Entertainment, a Christian film production company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona; and stars Kevin “Hercules” Sorbo as the arrogant professor, Shane Harper as the student Josh Wheaton, David A. R. White as a pastor, and Dean Cain as an awful heartless man.
God’s Not Dead is intelligent: It does not talk down to you as if you’re a simpleton, nor does it sugarcoat Christianity. The acting is superb, especially the performance by Kevin Sorbo, who is a Christian.
Not surprisingly, God’s Not Dead has been panned by critics, with a score of 16 out of 100 on Metacritic indicating “overwhelming dislike”, and a rating of 17% on Rotten Tomatoes as of May 2014.
Despite critics’ negative reviews, God’s Not Dead has met with significant success at the box office. In its first weekend of release, the film earned $8.6 million domestically from 780 theaters, causing Entertainment Weekly’s Adam Markovitz to refer to it as “The biggest surprise of the weekend”.The movie has earned over $60 million in the U.S. box office, against the $2 million budget, and that’s not counting the worldwide box office. So eat your hearts out, critics!
Here’s the song “God’s Not Dead,” performed by Newsboys at the climatic conclusion of the movie. (I never thought I would like Christian rock, but I absolutely love this song.)
Click here to get your own copy of God’s Not Dead on Amazon.com.
~Éowyn