Amph God is *Not* Dead 2: Electric Godaloo

He said it himself.

"If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say"

 

I'll be even less generous and say I think God's Not Dead and its ilk are outright exploiting religion for profit. They've got low budgets but the narratives are lowest common denominator, feel-good shlock aimed at reassuring Christian viewers that their religion is both Correct and Obviously True. That makes it easy for church groups to feel comfortable renting out a movie theatre for viewings, which obviously moves a good number of tickets, and then you get the free moral outrage when the evil "mainstream media" points out that your film is garbage, prompting "real" Christians to flock to the film in droves to prove a dumb point. It's almost beautiful to watch in motion in the same way the slaughter at the end of The Wild Bunch is.

By contrast, stuff like The Last Temptation of the Christ, The King of Kings, The Gospel According to St. Matthew - that's where there's some clear appreciation for religious spirituality and its ability to coexist with secular beauty, and not coincidentally those films don't suck.

 

To nitpick, it's The Last Temptation of Christ, not The Last Temptation of the Christ.

You're thinking of The Passion of the Christ ( another good film ).

 

Goddammit I always foul that title up. They should've just named it That Criterion Blu-ray Ramza Owns with Willem Dafoe on the Cover.

 

They ought to do more of those Oh, God movies with George Burns.

 

Maz Kanata looks a bit like a cgi George Burns.

 

Snoke looks like Mason Verger.

 

Obviously you don't know my parents. I had to be up and dressed by 7 every morning. I probably would have done better in math if I could have slept in.

 

I'll be even less generous and say It's not feel good schlock, it's fear mongering "the world is ending" garbage. "We're at war". With whom? This caricature of the "librul genda" as portrayed by Ray Wise? It's absolute insanity. Nowhere is anything close to this going on, but I'm kind of surprised they didn't try to slip in a "based on actual events" or something. They're just trying to scare up votes with blatant disinformation.

That attitude of being at war is prevalent in that community because otherwise they can't play out their victim fetish, but it's problematic for them because they've actually got nothing to be persecuted about so they've cooked up this completely implausible scenario to rustle up their otherwise perfectly safe jimmies.

Pretty disgusting, but I am anxiously awaiting God's Not Dead 3: The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back, wherein persecuted christians in the year 2043 in christian internment camps pray to God to send one of their greatest Jesus warriors to the past to stop the Muslim invasion of America by preventing Syrian refugees from entering the country.

 

No, you wouldn't have been good at math. Homeschoolers are good at one thing: reading (I scored like 99th percentile on the ACT).

Yeah, we get it, #notallhomeschoolers, but the rule is that homeschoolers are poorly adjusted and ill-prepared for the real world because that's what happens when you don't socialize properly (and you weren't socialized properly).

Congratulations on your success (in reading/english, obviously), but you don't have to defend an entire institution because you feel like you made it out ok (even though you've admitted to being bad at math, an essential part of lifee, for the most part).

 

How I define bad should be your question, because that there is called assuming and you know what that makes. I tend toward perfectionist tendencies when judging my scores. And I have to respectfully disagree on the socializing because again you have no idea if I was/wasn't. I was not bad at everything but English. The first comment I made about my professor throwing out my score was not in English. My point was you shouldn't paint everyone with the same brush because you had a few experiences to the contrary. You know, stereotypes.

Not to mention one of my homeschool friends growing up was amazing at math, she was taking college courses for it in high school and it also wasn't the only thing she was good at.

 

You calling me an ass, bruh? You said bad because you are bad or you would have used another word (on account of your superhuman language skills).

Again, you're talking about exceptions, and that's great, I'm really impressed with the way you've latched onto that idea, but it's not the rule. Thanks for participating in this discussion that has nothing to do with the topic.

 

Well that's your opinion and I have mine that's what makes people different. My point is that what you think of as the exception was my normal in half the homeschoolers I knew.

 

Either you're delusional or, nah, you're delusional. Have fun.

 

You know, I am perhaps alone in the world in feeling that The Gospel According to St. Matthew is overrated. I think the best film actually about Jesus is, well, it was a miniseries, actually. It's the Franco Zeffirelli Jesus of Nazareth. It's just so incredibly beautiful. I had despaired of anyone actually being able to make the parable of the Prodigal Son actually moving again, but the telling of that story in the film is in. cred. i. ble. And it's compositionally so influenced by the great religious paintings. Olivia Hussey as Mary is a perfect cast and she has that kind of luminous beauty that makes Zeffirelli able to reach some real heights of beauty in her section of the film.



And Michael York as John the Baptist. That sounds insane, but it's so good. And Ian McShane as Judas. And Laurence Olivier as Nicodemus and he actually gives a **** and gives a good performance. I mean, it's just so good. The last supper scene is just . . . so moving. Robert Powell is amazing in that scene in particular.

Wait, why are we talking about good movies in this thread? I have a suspicion I started it. Or, no, wait, someone else brought up Calvary. Oh, well.

 

best on-screen jesus.

 

Not to sound controversial or anything like that, but how could God be dead if he never existed?

 

You're not wrong, which is why that wasn't my point.

 

I find it absolutely hilarious. It's not "The Room"-level, but I do think it's a tier or two down in the "so bad it's good" category. It's a copypasta in movie form, full of one-dimensional caricatures. And the very best thing about it is that it's self-righteous and it seems like everyone who's working on it really believed in what they're doing.

It's so appropriate that it ends at a rock concert, like so many shallow stories written by barely-literate teenagers on fanfiction.net. That part reminded me of the trollfic My Immortal, which at random points will funnel major characters into My Chemical Romance concerts before the Mary Sue protagonist has vague sex with one of her crushes from Harry Potter.

I may find this funny because I grew up in evangelical Churches and, for all intents and purposes, am an evangelical Christian. I have been on the receiving end of some criticism in Sunday School debates, particularly about evolution, philosophy, and politics, but I am not on the receiving end of the same type of criticism that atheists are. I can understand why atheists and people of other faiths don't find it so funny.

However, the movie doesn't really address atheism, philosophy, or any other target it pays lip service to. Every philosophy professor I ever had was charitable and offered students intellectual challenges, not sermons about how we need to bow down to Richard Dawkins, and certainly not constant appeals to authority. No teacher I ever had insisted that even Socrates was right about everything, so why in God's name would a philosophy professor, atheist or not, want to turn The God Delusion into his students' holy book? And why would a philosophy professor not understand Nietzsche, by the way? Christ, I think most middle-schoolers glancing over Spark Notes five minutes before a test could provide a better analysis of Nietzsche's quote on that test than Sorbo did in front of his entire class.

Had the filmmakers any familiarity with college, they might at least have gone for a slightly more plausible scenario by making the class about literary criticism, for example. But even then, all of the arguments made by everyone are utterly ridiculous, and I refuse to believe that even the least credentialed mustache-twirling professor in any field would, if his mission really were to convert all of his students to atheism, be so clumsy about it. I also refuse to believe that his students and college administrators would stand for it.

In fact, as has been said before in this thread, Sorbo doesn't play an atheist, but a heartbroken Christian who's chosen to blame and reject his faith rather than confront his problems head on. This could make for a compelling story, I think, because matters of faith and the problem of pain are real things Christians struggle with. The result could be either a refinement of faith or a loss of faith, but either way, the story would be worth exploring. However, there are no real, concrete reasons for the man's loss of faith in this case; it's simply a fact plastered on his character like a temporary tattoo, to be washed away under entirely arbitrary circumstances.

Remember that this film grossed $64 million. It's helpful to know that this is how some people see the world.

 

Absolutely the faculty wouldn't support that. You can't discriminate against someone by forcing them to renounce their religion for a grade. If this took place in our world, the student body would likely protest and support the student, and there would absolutely be a legitimate lawsuit against the school if this kind of thing were allowed to happen. But this film takes place in an alternate reality where Christians are actually persecuted and have zero rights, and America belongs to satan because they took praying out of school and won't teach creationism--a world which must have taken a lot of imagination to create, so they have that going for them at least.

 

While I agree with much of your post, Christians are not free from persecution in this reality.

 

In the united states? Where this movie was made? Where this movie takes place?

 

Not as far as I'm aware.