God's Not Dead (2014)

Today on Movie Russian Roulette, Alex gets angrier about a movie than he's ever gotten in his entire life. This is God's Not Dead.

believing is good, right?

I'm bringing a lot of baggage and personal bias into this one. I'm not going into this intending to trash religion, but goddamn if this movie doesn't make it tempting and easy.

Overview: A college freshman takes an intro-level Philosophy course form the infamous Professor Radisson, an atheist, who opens the first session of class by requesting everyone sign a statement stating God is dead in order to move on to more important issues.


Yes, that's the level of cartoonish villainy we're dealing with here: a professor of philosophy who squelches opposing viewpoints! This guy who couldn't possibly exist in the real world because any real college would give him the boot gets stood up to by brave Josh Wheaton, who says he can't state God is dead. Strawman debates ensue. There are also subplots about a ruthless reporter who does candid surprise interviews, a young Muslim girl, and a Chinese exchange student, but these mostly don't matter to the main plot. I'll get into them in the "My thoughts" section.

Notable moments/quotes: Registration official trying to discourage Josh from taking classes with Prof. Radisson after noticing the kid's cross necklace: "Think Roman coliseum, people cheering for your death..."

Professor Radisson: "God is dead. This is, of course, a metaphor. Not to say that God has somehow died, but that he never existed in the first place. Except in the depths of our forebears’ imaginations, a useful fairy tale in days gone by. When his fiery anger was used to explain away plagues and crop failures, diseases which we now ascribe to bacteria and virsuses, chromosomal disorders and plate tectonics. In short, science and reason have supplanted superstition, and we are all the better for it. And with your permission, I’d like to bypass discussion altogether and jump to the conclusion which every sophomore is already aware of: there is no God.” He then requires his students to sign their names on "God is dead" to agree with him and meets claims of opposition with a reminder about how much harder they'll make the course on themselves if they persist. In reality this might be someone using a variant of the Socratic method or encouraging opposition and discussion by arousing anger or passion based on previously held beliefs, but here...

not so much.

When Josh rails against the professor being the sole judge of the debate over the existence of God and insists the other students judge, the wise Professor Radisson has this to say: "Well, why would I want to empower them?"

There's a running subplot about a reporter. She ambushes some redneck famous for hunting or something, and for her big Armor Piercing Question has this to offer: “So what do you say to the people who are offended by your show, not just because of the hunting, but because you openly pray to Jesus in every episode?” This comes, of course, just after she ambushes the guy and his wife just outside their church.

The same reporter, later, at the hospital after being told she may have cancer: "I don't have time for cancer. I'm too busy."

Josh's girlfriend, who he met at youth group back in high/middle school, is none too pleased about Josh taking part in this debate. She points out how he's basically ruining his chances at a good grade, harps on him about how he needs an excellent GPA to get into law school, then actually says God wants him to be with her so he shouldn't do this debate. To the movie's credit, this is later portrayed as the abusive, manipulative bullshit it is, but...

really?

The professor tells Josh he'll have 20 minutes at the end of each of the next 3 class periods to make his case, with "minimal interruptions" from him and questions from the class as applicable. The good professor, however, prefaces turning over class to Josh for his presentation with this: "But there are still some flat-earthers out there who consider the existence of a supreme entity to be necessary, or self-evident, or both. On that note..."

Josh naturally has amazing video supplements to go along with his speech that look like they were made by a Hollywood studio rather than a college freshman. Um... really, flimmakers? Have you been to a college campus lately? Plenty of freshmen can barely find their way around Powerpoint, let alone make even the most basic video, at least judging by my college days.

At the end of the first day of the debate, Josh closes out his presentation with what boils down to "There is no other explanation other than God." The professor hammers him on this weak point, but is both a dick about it and uses only an argument from authority, which most people who have any training in rhetoric or public speaking should recognize as one of the weakest arguments (and sometimes outright labeled a logical fallacy) that can possibly be made in favor of a position.

After this class, Captain Atheism confronts Christfag.
R/atheism: "In that classroom, there is a god, and I'm him. I'm also a jealous god, so do not try to humiliate me in front of my students." He then vows to ruin the kid's hopes of going to law school.

Because Josh takes on the debate, his super-Christian girlfriend dumps him. Yyyyeah, doesn't make any sense to me either. She goes on to get upset that Josh isn't more broken up over it, leading to a golden delivery of this old chestnut: "My mother was so right about you. I wish I'd had the sense to listen."

(Amy the reporter has just told her lawyer boyfriend she might have cancer at their dinner date.) Shark in a suit: "This couldn't wait until tomorrow?"

Amy: "You understand I might die?"

Scum of humanity: "And I'm sorry about that."

even this guy thinks that's too far

We're introduced to the good Professor's girlfriend at one point, who is still a student at the college where he teaches. Did this PHILOSOPHY professor skip all his Ethics classes? The movie even mentions later that they started dating after she passed a midterm exam in his class.

Professor Neckbeard, to much younger girlfriend: “There’s only room in this relationship for two, and that means I don’t get a mistress, and you don’t get to drag a 2000 year old carpenter turned itinerant rabbi into our lives.”

My thoughts: This movie is a classic, and infuriating, case of preaching to the choir. If you already agree with this movie, it'll probably reinforce what you already believed. Great. If you don't agree with this movie, it does nothing to try to win you over.

Aside from that, I'm at a loss for where to begin, so I'll just wade in randomly and see what I can address.

About the first 15-20 minutes of this 2-hour snorefest involve almost nothing happening except setup for a few subplots that never really become relevant. One such subplot revolves around Amy, a young reporter/blogger who apparently makes a living off of ambushing prominent Christian celebrities who agreed to be in this movie, asking vague, self-righteous questions, and then somehow turning that into money. Case in point, I'll remind you of one of her quotes above: “So what do you say to the people who are offended by your show, not just because of the hunting, but because you openly pray to Jesus in every episode?” The guy gives a reasonable answer about how he's not forcing religion on anyone (because he totally doesn't judge people IRL, no sir), and Amy just nods like an idiot. Amy's subplot revolves around her getting cancer, getting her car broken into, and losing her boyfriend. This happens because she doesn't belieb, and because this movie has all the subtlety of a Lifetime movie, that makes her a bad person.

Another subplot revolves around a young Muslim girl. To the movie's slight credit, she and her family are not portrayed as terrorists or something. She wears a hijab, and there's a throwaway line about how a passerby "wishes she didn't have to do that," but for most of the movie the portrayal is respectful. However, one fateful day, her little brother finds out she's listening to the sermon of some minister or other on her iPod, and this leads to their father BEATING HER and throwing her out of the house.

Okay.

I'll be the first to admit I'm unfamiliar with the finer points of Islam, and there's a lot of misconceptions and misinformation out there these days thanks to extremists on both sides, but from what I know, Muslims do accept Jesus as a prophet, just not the full-on son of God. So logically, while I could see her dad getting upset, it's not as though she's embraced a vastly different religion as far as tenets go, just one that quibbles over the details. However, as history has shown us, people will kill each other over tiny, tiny religious differences (Sunnis and Shiites or Catholics vs Protestants, for example). Ironically, what this movie wants to hold up as one brave young woman standing up for her beliefs just serves to underscore the tragedy of how religious differences can become an instigator of division and conflict. I'm sure the movie's response to this would just be "Well everyone should just covert then!" but... yeah, probably not happening. Ironically, this movie carefully avoids endorsing any specific branch of Christianity; are the characters supposed to be Catholic, Methodist, Orthodox, Baptist, or so on? Who knows, since the movie wants to avoid dividing its camp by remaining as inoffensive as possible to its base (so it can earn money from all churchgoers, not just a few, obviously).

The professor, too, gets his own subplot, and it starts out fairly promising. We follow him home and see he has a loving girlfriend (she's a former student, sure, can't let him be too much of a good guy) and he shows a softer side, admitting what he does in class is at least in part an act for the students' sake. For a few minutes, he seems like an okay guy, just one who drives his students to extremes for the sake of discussion and argument. But then, his lady brings up that she's Christian. The professor gives a tired smile and just insists they not talk about it. Things get worse from there, however, as they host a dinner party for the prof's colleagues, where Radisson repeatedly humiliates and demeans his girlfriend in front of everyone over everything from disagreeing with him while playing maid to committing the awful sin of forgetting wine in the car and ruining the taste. She leaves him. At the end of the movie, just when he's about to go try to patch things up after realizing he's a douche, he gets hit by a car, converts to a nonspecific branch of Christianity, and dies. It's meant to be a beautiful redemption, but it just comes across as tragic, or at least it did to me, since every time the movie started to develop his character, it got crushed under the weight of the movie needing him to be the snooty atheist bad guy. Yes, this movie hates intellectualism too, since Josh spends a good five minutes explaining how evolution is wrong (yes, it's as cringe-worthy as it sounds) since in this movie's simplistic view, science and religion can't get along. If only they'd stuck to that view, never touched a camera, and went to live among the Amish.

In case it isn't clear by now, this movie paints atheists and other religions as evil or at least misled and Christians as the put-upon saints too beautiful for this Earth. The self-righteousness is staggering and more than a little nauseating.

not quite this disgusting, but only because it had 2 hours instead of 8 years

However, even more than its contents, I take major issue with how it's presented. Yes, the conflicts and characters are over-exaggerated. Yes, the dialogue is awful. Yes, none of the actors (outside of a delightfully hammy Kevin Sorbo) seem to have any acting talent. However, for a movie that's allegedly about a debate over religion, it keeps meandering away from said debate. Whether it's for any of the subplots I explained above (or a couple others that were so much filler that I had nothing to say about them), a random Newsboys music video, or to pretend to do character development only to jerk back to the status quo. Josh's experience in class gets swept aside in the name of... something. I have no idea what the hell the movie was trying to do, but I got the sense that they were almost afraid to show too much of the "debate" (with good reason, as the Prof's counter-arguments and Josh's points frequently revolve around logical fallacies, stupidly enough) and preferred to give it a grander, epic scope, but it results in a jumbled mess. This movie is almost two hours. If they cut out the pointless, meandering subplots (most of which feel like wandering into another movie made by the same folks for a while), this movie might be a more bearable hour to 80 minutes. I'm always in favor of shorter B movies, and I think they would have been wiser to follow this tack. As it is, it feels like these cinematic soldiers of God lost their roadmap and are just shooting scenes as they think of them without any thought to composition or coherence.

This review is starting to get almost as bloated as the movie, so I'll start to wrap things up. Overall, this movie is a jumbled mess of good intentions, with-us-or-against-us thinking, logical fallacies, scattershot subplots, and corny acting. This one should only be undertaken by truly brave souls. As it was, I found myself shouting "Why?!" at the screen and actually having to pause the movie a few times to calm down from the sheer rage I felt at times.

At the end of the day, it's a propaganda film, and there's only so much you can expect from these. Still, this is beyond even Left Behind bad, crossing the line from being preachy but inoffensive to passive-agressive "Believe or God will punish you." I, for one, hold out hope these people represent an extreme in the world and are just a vocal minority with access to money and cameras.

I give this movie a Nic Cage Talks About Born-Agains out of five. Facebook's still a thing.