God's Not Dead

So first of all, in God's Not Dead, let's get this out of the way first: this is not how a college classroom works. As someone who has now been teaching in a college for over a year now, I've seen first-hand how students act and react to things, and more importantly how professors act. Maybe this character that Kevin Sorbo plays has tenure, maybe he's an 'untouchable' in Academia. But how this class operates - how he firmly puts it to these students that they must write down on the first day of class on a piece of paper 'God is Dead' and that counts as 30% of their grade - is just stupid and illogical off the bat. What goal is this professor looking for? Does he want a *sincere* answer from these students? The conflict comes that one student (named Josh Wheaton... like uh, Joss Whedon, I guess for some reason) challenges the professor by not writing it, not because of any logic about how a classroom works, but because he's a Christian and won't give in. So then an entire debate is set up - forget a class being taught or lessons - between the theist side and atheist side.

This isn't to say the movie doesn't pour on its message thicker than syrup on a dozen stacks of pancakes. But even having to think about this shows that the director and writers here don't care about having actual, human characters here. Not really. They have some kinds of shades of what a person might be like, like, well, words and thoughts and things, but there isn't much past: this side believes, and this side doesn't believe, and they really, deep down, don't believe because either someone in their family died (the professor) or may be dying soon (the reporter woman, who by the way gets a very hackneyed scene where an a-hole boyfriend breaks up with her after her cancer news).

It would be one thing if it was just this BS straw-man back-and-forth in front of a plastic classroom full of stick figures for these mouth-pieces to talk (and that's what they are, make no mistake about that, unless you're already coming to this as the heavily-converted). It's really in the structure of something like Crash, a multi-character 'tableau' that has some very minor connections to some of the characters - it all comes together, naturally, at a Christian rock concert in the last third. There's multiple crappy plots to go along with the main 'plot' of the freshman student and the professor, including the local pastor/preacher/whatever and a car that won't start (the rental car guy that comes is meant to bring the one 'joke' that falls flat), and a Muslim girl and her strict father, who we know NOTHING about and decides to go for Jesus and gets slapped and kicked out of her house.

Who is she? What about the reporter, who we maybe know a little more about due to her sorta-storyline with cancer and interviewing a guy from Duck Dynasty (huh) and then later in a prayer circle with the Christian rock group at the end. She has just the shades of anything like real motivation, past "I'm going to die, that sucks." And what about the professor's girlfriend, who is made to look like a doormat to her boyfriend (always an a-hole, even up until the very end of the film), and says she is a Christian but has little to really say against her super-Athiest-Dogmatic man? So many of these scenes, for all of the characters, are just springboards so that people can get into these arguments and talks about God and faith that are, for lack of a better or more original expression, preach to the choir: you already know coming to this that God exists, right? Then get ready for some mighty Christian rock (ugh) and messages from certain intellectuals in lecture-form about this. You know God doesn't exist? Or are unsure? Well...

There's no middle ground here, no other voice or nothing to make for any real spot for ambiguity. And even with the sense of these students really having their own thoughts or expressions in the class there's basically nothing (one student, out of the blue, quotes Richard Dawkins like she knows it off the back of her hand, at the start of a 101 Philosophy class, and another, the Chinese student, kind of a supporting character, has a moment with his far-away dad who says simply 'yes, the professor says God exists, He exists, go away'). Ultimately it comes down to the script for a lot of these problems, and how it's really, aside from having badly written characters and bad dialog and not necessarily bad filmmaking but bland direction (and among the actors, only Kevin Sorbo doesn't look there to drone on with little emotion), it's an anti-intellectual film. It's epitomized in the whole 'hook' of the college classroom, which is (to repeat myself) how a classroom works, on any level.

So near the end, if you're still enraptured by the message and praising Jesus as people become converted and songs are sung and the Duck Dynasty guy returns (?) then have at it. But as a film, as a story, with characters, and a meaningful message, it's as subtle as an anvil dropped Wile E Coyote.