Why Christian Movies Are BAD

Wise Disciple

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And just to say this really quick, because I'm sure there's somebody out there not familiar with us, and they're wondering, who the heck are these guys talking about this stuff?

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I mean, just to give our bona fides really super quickly, before I jumped into ministry years ago, when I was in college,

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I studied film, creative writing, I was going to be a screenwriter, had plans to go out to LA, get an agent,

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I had written some spec scripts, one of them got picked up by an independent film crew and was going to be filmed in Canada for a film festival.

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And so, you know, a lot of people say, hey, I write. But we're just trying to say, hey, there's a bit of some background and experience out of which we talk about worldview analysis segments, for example.

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And that's just me, you actually are a published author. So maybe you can tell the audience about that a bit.

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Yeah, so I'm a science fiction author, I have released three to date, I have a fourth one that's coming out in early

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November. And I've been, so I've been writing in some form, as far as the fiction stuff for a while, my first book published in 2014.

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And as part of being a fiction writer, I also a couple times a year, at least before COVID, would also do small workshops on writing and storytelling.

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Right, right, right. And then of course, we've had guests on. Brian Goodell is somebody that immediately comes to mind, Hollywood filmmaker and author himself.

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And we've talked about stories from this perspective as well. So, so hopefully that kind of takes care of some of the credential questions.

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But let's go into the next question. The question that I have is, if Christian movies are on balance bad, the question is why?

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Is there a pattern of storytelling, quote unquote, mistakes that make

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Christian movies bad? Now, I think that a great story is the right combination of a lot of factors.

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And I'm curious to get your thoughts about this. You need developed characters, you need authenticity, or what's sometimes called veritas, you need great dialogue, you need high stakes situations, and more.

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And all of that kind of comes together into this wonderful cocktail of the experience of cinema.

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If a great story is doing its job, you suspend disbelief and you are taken into the universe of the story willingly.

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And if it's doing a brilliant job, you forget that you're watching a movie, you are completely engulfed in the experience of it.

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What's your take on the elements of a great story? Characters, believability, and conflict.

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And I think that the believability piece, we'll probably get into this, the believability piece is especially important.

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And it's equally important for science fiction and fantasy as it is for drama, for historical fiction, whatever.

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Because you have to believe that these characters are real, that the situations they're living in are real and internally consistent, right?

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And especially if you are doing something that is supposed to take place in the same world, roughly speaking, as we live in, it has to be recognizable as the world in which we live, right?

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And I think that's a really important piece. And then the conflict is a really big piece too. I mean, conflict is what keeps people reading.

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Because if you have really interesting characters, that's only going to take you so far if they never have any problems and there's not anything for them to solve.

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That's right. Or if the problems aren't very compelling, the more mundane problems tend to be a little bit more boring.

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And this is the problem with Christian movies, I would argue, is that it hardly ever comes together in that special cocktail of an experience for people.

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It suffers from a pedestrian polish. It comes across like a high school play. And the reason why is because in some of those key areas that I think that we're talking about, they just really fall short.

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And one of those areas, Logan, for me, is that authenticity, that believability.

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In other words, a great story needs to be authentic enough to cause the audience to suspend disbelief. And Christian movies don't do that very well because they don't spend enough time developing characters properly.

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And they don't let the characters become real people. I think it's the Pinocchio problem. It's Pinocchio wanting to become a real boy when he was really made of wood.

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And that's the same problem that characters in Christian movies suffer from. They're too wooden. They're not authentic.

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Our characters fit, in a lot of Christian films, fit too easily into very snug stereotypical boxes.

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And I don't know if you want to get into examples this early. So for example,

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Fireproof, one of the things I was thinking about that, there are things I like about Fireproof. Because one of my problems with Christian films is they tend to be extremely sanitized in terms of what sin we ever actually see.

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And one of the things I did like about Fireproof is it actually does address pornography, which that's something that we don't talk enough about.

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But it's also worth noting that Kayla, the non -Christians in the film are basically, they don't have very many redeeming qualities, right?

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So when you look at the non -Christians in the film, there's either somebody who's cheating on his wife, or is looking at pornography behind her back and also screaming at her and just in general being a terrible person.

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There's nothing at all wrong with the Christian whatsoever. And you can go on with examples.

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I think God's Not Dead has another example. You've got the atheist professor who's a jerk to everyone, including in his private life, right?

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And the nice college student Christian who's just super earnest and only ever wants to do the right thing and is never smoking pot.

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And that really comes across as inauthentic because I think,

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Nate, you and I both probably know atheists who are very good spouses, right?

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And who they spend time with their children. And obviously, we have disagreements with them and all that.

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And then we also might know some very judgmental and Christians who have some un -Christian attitudes.

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And I think that especially if you're coming at this from the perspective of an outsider, and you're a non -Christian who maybe had a very bad experience with the church in your youth, or you know someone who has, right?

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I think that that's not a recognizable reality. And I don't think that means you need to make your

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Christians villains or anything like that. But you need to have some nuance with your characters, sort of the fatal flaw of the hero, if we want to go to the sort of adventure archetypes.

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One of the things that David Mamet says is that drama is meant to entertain, not to inform.

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And I think that's just another way that Christian movies make some big mistakes is that they are more designed to inform than entertain.

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As a matter of fact, some Christian movies will go the whole hog and evangelize and inform the audience of the gospel before the film is over.

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And that's their prerogative to do that. I mean, I certainly think the whole world needs to hear the gospel.

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Can somebody give me an amen? But the problem though is when they do that, they hurt the development of characters, because overused exposition means characters aren't showing us anymore, they're telling us, which quickly becomes shallow and it becomes pedantic.

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And overused exposition also means that characters lose the authentic factor because they come across as people just reading lines, which is,

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I mean, this is really inside baseball now, but there's always a problem with writing dialogue. Because on the one hand, the screenwriter or the author needs to tell a story and needs to write dialogue in a way that is compelling for the reader.

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But I would argue it's well understood that the way that dialogue reads in a story is not the way that people normally talk.

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It's disguised to make it look that way, but it's just not the way that normal people speak in normal everyday situations.

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And so you have this balancing act where you're trying to tell a good story, you're trying to keep out what must be kept out in dialogue, but then at the same time, make it sound like it's what everybody says when they speak.

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And so it is really hard because you run the risk of saying too much, which is a problem, especially for rookie writers, is over explaining, over stating things and not using the power of the unsaid or the unspoken.

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There is a way to reveal struggles in marriage. I mean, to bring it to, we're going to talk about fireproof all night now, but there is a way to reveal struggles in marriage without having the character say and do things that are stereotypical and cliche.

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You can display a strained relationship in a marriage without even having the character say a single word to each other.

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Or you can have one of the spouses talking to the other spouse, but the other spouse is completely ignoring them.

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And then there's these unexpected silences that add to drama, the pauses when there shouldn't be pauses, the silence when there should be speaking.

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The manipulations of the audience's expectations are all ways to tell the same stories more compellingly.

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And the subtlety and the nuance that all could come together really well. The Sixth Sense does a great job of this.

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There is a moment where Bruce Willis sits down with his wife at the dinner table at some restaurant.

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And he basically just goes through this monologue of his day, but his wife doesn't say a word at all.

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And it's really clever how that plays out. The camera does this slow 360 tracking shot to elevate the drama.

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But you get what the author, excuse me, the filmmaker wanted you to get, which is that there's this tension between him and his wife.

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But just to hit that point one more time, inauthentic stories that do not give us developed characters, do not give us great dialogue, do not give us high -stakes situations, they are not meaningful at the end of the day.

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And if they're not meaningful, then people will dismiss them. Now, somebody might be watching this at this point and saying, well, wait a sec, guys.

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Christian stories are very authentic. Fire Proof is dealing with real marriage problems, like real couples are going through these issues and situations that people face all the time.

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And I would say, yes, I completely agree with that. But Christian stories need to handle real situations more authentically throughout the movie.

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The way they play out needs to be authentic. And it's just not happening with these Christian movies.