(The following content is reran from the 2018 Christmas marathon on Letterboxd, as originally seen here.)
Keeping our eye on the fringes for a start, God's Not Dead has an incredible mean streak mile wide. Without any rhyme or reason behind the inclusion of many characters and their subplots beyond tangential blood connections to other characters lacking in purpose, I believe the best way to impress the film's failings in this arena is to simply rattle off the worst examples rapid fire. A fair warning: These are all The Worst.
A blogger whose only presented crimes are not believing in Jesus and disliking Duck Dynasty is diagnosed with cancer shortly after confronting Willie Robertson. Every time we see her, she's grown more miserable and destitute as her boyfriend dumps her because she's going to die and the reality of her own mortality hangs over her head with every passing hour. When she decides to confront the movie's headline act, the Newsboys, at the end of the film, they convince her that all will be well if she simply loves Jesus, which she does. Her ex-boyfriend is the brother of someone sorta related to the main story, and his whole thing is being the worst person in the world despite also being a man who played Superman. He visits his elderly mother, brags about how he escaped the devil, and gets a few Jesus truth bombs dropped on his head by the dementia-riddled woman before committing manslaughter. Elsewhere, a girl from a Muslim home tries to hide her conversion to Christianity, only for her little brother to walk in on her listening to sermons on her iPod in a scene framed as if she's pleasuring herself. Her father finds out, beats her, and throws her out of the house, leading the girl to a set of pastors who convert her to Christianity proper even though she already did so. Said pastors are constantly dealing with God breaking the sparkplug in their car, supposedly so they can help the townspeople through various crises of faith. For a while, they're at least somewhat likable in how goofy and endearing they act, right up until they choose to convert a man who's dying on the sidewalk instead of calling for an ambulance. They then say this preventable tragedy is a cause for celebration, and laugh.
It's a horrendously repetitive narrative structure. Whenever we need to spice up the slight main story, we cut to one of these other figures, who do their thing for a few minutes before jumping back to the copypasta. Set-up, suffering, Jesus is the answer/swordbearer, repeat. That everyone serves only as ciphers isn't much of a surprise, nor the emotional simplicity or vacuousness with which the film treats their problems, nor the lack of care for framing and shot composition in favor of getting points across as bluntly as possible. The film comes from an evangelical perspective, and evangelical Christianity is not well-known for its tendency to empathize with outside perspectives or deal with dissent in a forgiving manner. "You disobey Jesus and the wrath of God will fall on thine head" is the extent of their shtick when it comes to sinners and nonbelievers, so you get what's advertised on the marque pretty quick.
I was looking for a way to lead the above paragraph into something along the lines of, "What IS surprising, though, is the total lack of care shown towards the actual meat of the film," with some ramblings about lost opportunities or potential for a better film, but then I realized there's nothing surprising about a copypasta meant to rile up the excessively religious coming out awful when stuck on the big screen. Our nominally main story about a freshman philosophy student having to debate his overly contentious atheist professor on the existence of God indulges freely in all the tropes of the online tale: a teacher who disbelieves so hard he actively hates God, the prevailing notion of the lone Christian standing against a sea of nonbelievers, arguments for belief requiring edited scripture or turnabout logic to function, a remarkably quick turnaround from initial proposition to total conversion from everyone in the class, and a self-satisfied air about a supposedly watertight argument that wouldn't pass inspection at Noah's dock. One can have quite a lot of fun mocking the main character's phenomenal photoshop powers in the face of his lackluster debate skills, or Kevin Sorbo debasing himself by throwing tantrums to cut down the university-system's validity, or even the focus on a Chinese student who's instantly enamored with this Jesus person he's never heard of as a means of getting some model minority work in here. All bad, all wrongheaded, all laughable, but not surprising in the slightest.
If anything surprises whatsoever, it's just how deep the aforementioned mean streak runs. So much time is spent on the philosophy class debates, with the occasional cut to something good happening to an unrelated Christian or something bad happening to an unrelated atheist. There's perfect groundwork for the film to at least possess a coherent argumentative structure, a la "Here is why I am right, and here is a portion of a side story that further proves my righteousness." Win the debate, show how it applies to the "real world," spit on the stinky professor and watch a concert. Except the professor is the man who's hit by a car and forced to convert in his agonizing final moments. It's not enough to simply win the argument and provide a logical, scientific basis for believing in God; we must completely destroy the primary atheistic force in the narrative and render his contributions bunk. The nonbelievers are both wrong AND deserving of death, and the further addition of celebration at his passing through both dialogue and a massive concert playing around the hit-and-run tanks an already bad product to the depths of a half-star rating.
I do honestly intend to play fair with Christianity and religiosity wherever applicable with this holiday project. Sitting down for a Christmastime marathon and using it as an excuse to savage those whose beliefs don't match mine isn't much in the holiday spirit, and I'm genuinely curious to see what the unexpectedly numerous mainstream Christian cinematic offerings from 2014 look like when considered as a whole. In the case of God's Not Dead, though, the film's text and proud display of support from an officially-recognized hate group means I can only fight clean for so long. It wants to advance a mindset under which exactly one way of life is ever acceptable, and those who refuse to cooperate must face a holy purge, and it does so with a sprawling, unconnected mess of a plot without any concern for writing good characters or convincing dialogue. Anything that one might call decent here, like the occasional camerawork or the tiny chill I get toward the end of the title song (because any musical piece doing the whole "we're whispering the first part of the chorus but then we burst back into full bombastic swing" thing can elicit such a reaction regardless of poor or repetitive quality), simply compounds the issue by making something grounded in regressive, scornful attitudes seem attractive. To an extent, it's not even worth getting upset over, so ridiculous is its perfect embodiment of every negative evangelical stereotype...
...until the main character claims you can prove Darwin's "nature does not jump" claim wrong by compressing billions of years into a single day, pretending you didn't do so, and claiming most of the modern biosphere assumed its current form in a relatively brief period of time. Then I have to pause the movie and yell about why it is wrong for several minutes.
Least the next film here has someone competent in the director's chair! I'm looking forward to this adaptation of the part of mother! where Jennifer Lawrence tries to deal with a burst pipe.
0.5/5
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