The Good Book of Bad Movies

[Falseprophet]

I have to side with Bob for the most part. I might be an atheist, but I also spent 12+ years in Catholic school, a good part of my undergraduate degree studying religion historically and philosophy, and still have many friends and relatives who are theists. And I really hate movies that pretentiously claim to be deep or edgy because they're about religion and then proceed to deal with religion in the most superficial ways.

Faith is reduced to repeating pithy little quotations or practically idolatry, the way "sacred" objects are fetishized in these types of films. That isn't religion, that's magic [http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/WhatReligionCanCannotDo.HTM].

Now, if you want to make an action movie where the good guys get magic powers from God and the bad guys get magic powers from Satan or whatever, I'm cool with that. But to slap it with a controversy-baiting tagline like "RELIGION IS POWER" and pretend you're making a deep theological statement just makes a showcase of your ignorance. This is why I found The Prophecy to be great, silly fun but found Stigmata to be ignorant and offensive--to my intellect and to other peoples' faith.

 

[likalaruku]

What crackpot biased review company were you working for?

 

[OwenEdwards]

Just to be clear, although Tolkien was a devout christian The Lord of the Rings has nothing to do with christianity. If it has influence'd it, it is very little. The inspirations for the story were drawn from Celtic, Norse, and Germanic mythos. Tolkien himself expressed disdain at the allegory used in the writing of his colleague C.S. Lewis

Thanks for the reply. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree strongly on two points:

1) Of course LotR is a complex, non-allegorical story. Of course it takes imagery and ideas from Germanic mythos. That doesn't at all undermine my point about it: it is a Christian story. Its morality is Christian - self-sacrifice for the greater good, sin and redemption, deontological ethics; the wider mythos of Middle Earth is profoundly Christian (Eru Illuvatar, Valar/Maiar and thus Sauron, Saruman and Gandalf being, effectively, angels, etc); its characters are profoundly Christian. This is most strikingly true of the Hobbits; Frodo and Sam, especially, in imaging the officer/batman relationship Tolkien and Lewis both experienced in WW1, talks very strongly about Christian morality and belief in a time of war. Categorically, unequivocally, a non-Christian could not have written the precise same book as LotR; I'm not referring to "quality" there at all, so much as "qualities". Without Tolkien's Christian belief it'd be a lot of philology and mythical tropes stuck together in decent prose.

2) Lewis too dismissed allegory as a top-rate storytelling device. But Tolkien's objection was both a) something of a misunderstanding of Narnia; it is not an allegory, as Lewis made clear, and b) more about the apparent "childishness" or patronising quality of the stories.

 

[NeoShinGundam]

You know, Bayonetta's angels have beaks and are covered in feathers. And yet they're FAR more interesting than anything Legion could come up with. Kudos on more fine work, MovieBob.

 

[maximara]

But yeah, it's not the source material that's to blame, it's the writer. When people make religious based movies, they take the easy way out by saying, "God is good, the Devil is evil and that's that". They don't look at the individual characters and what makes them tick.

Satan as a character is horribly simplified in movies. He's always depicted as a fist-shaking angry man instead of the corrupted and clever trickster that he is in the bible.

Except that if you really read it rather than going by what people say is in it there is not much there regarding Satan as character in the Bible. He is NOT the serpent in the guardian of Eden so much of the whole trickster angle gets thrown out on its ear.

Also, there is at least one oral tradition that has Satan as the sufferer of a nervous breakdown. In this story the Lord commanded all the Angels to bow down to none but Himself. Later the Lord created Man and regarded his creation so much better than his angels that he commanded them to bow before Man. Unable to reconcile this new order with the Lord's original order Satan and bunch of other angels lost it and attacked the Lord. There goes the corrupted idea on its ear as well.

Also the Old Testament Lord is hardly good either--condoning murder, rape, genocide, and whole sale slaughter in His name. In fact one branch of Christians (Gnostics) held that there were TWO Lords--an imperfect and ultimately evil one that created and ruled this world and the one that sent Christ and created the universe.

But when you get down to it supernatural evil in movies are generally portrayed in an almost Snidely Whiplash manner when they are not a mindless killing machine in the Jason or aliens mold.

 

[Omegatronacles]

Um, necroing a thread a month after it has died?

For shame.