Facing The Truth About "Facing The Giants"

By: Warren Smith

COMMENTARY--- Months ago I started hearing about “Facing the Giants,” a movie that had a limited release in early October. The word was that a Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., had come up with about $100,000, used hundreds of volunteers, and had made a movie that was as good as anything Hollywood could produce.

There’s no doubt that the Christian public relations machine was behind the movie. I was getting e-mails on an almost daily basis from someone telling me I “just had” to see this movie. Never mind that they themselves had not seen the movie. Then I started getting editorials – one from Scripps-Howard’s Terry Mattingly, an excellent writer whose word can usually be trusted – that said the Motion Picture Association of America had given this movie a PG rating because its “Christian message” might offend people. This “injustice” set off another round of Internet publicity and support for the movie.

Indeed, this movie has gotten so much positive publicity that I thought we might get another “Hoosiers” or – dare I say it – “Chariots of Fire,” which is “gold standard” for excellence in Christian movie-making. But, alas, I have now seen the movie, and I can tell you that it is bad in just about every way movies are measured – from the acting to the writing to the story itself. I can also tell you that the movie’s PG rating is not the result of anti-Christian ideology, as Mattingly and others would have us believe. “Facing The Giants” deserves its PG rating for its discussions of and portrayal of infertility, depression, anger, and other adult subjects that would have been inappropriate or overwhelming for the young children for whom G movies are often targeted.

But what is perhaps most discouraging to me about this movie is not the movie itself. I can forgive a movie being bad. Really bad movies are made every day. And this movie was made by amateurs on a limited budget. It has every right to be a bad movie.

No, what is discouraging is not that it is a bad movie, but that so many Christians, even Christian movie reviewers and professional journalists such as Mattingly, and John Dawson at WORLD Magazine, gave this movie a “pass” because of the good intentions of the moviemakers. That is an understandable, but journalistically bankrupt, position to take.

But the lapses in judgment are not limited to Christian journalists. At sites like “Yahoo! Movies,” where users are invited to submit reviews, there are more reviews for this movie than for movies that did literally ten times more at the box-office. And they were almost without exception glowing reviews. The few brave souls who posted bad reviews could count on the next few reviewers to question their character or their Christianity or both. This can mean only one thing: there was a concerted campaign by the film’s promoters to “pad” the user sites with positive reviews. In the world of dog-eat-dog capitalism and “guerilla marketing,” that’s “business as usual.” But in the Bible, they have another phrase for it: “Bearing false witness.”

And, of course, there’s the theology of the movie itself, which is yet another indication that evangelical theology now apparently lives somewhere between Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen. “Facing The Giants” portrays God as a cosmic bell-hop who always gives us what we ask for. The “name it and claim it” theology of the movie gives a team that has never had a winning season not one, but two, state championships. The infertile couple gets not one, but two, children by movie’s end. Throw in a paralyzed man who stands for the first time, a new truck donated anonymously to replace a junker, and a rookie who kicks a 51-yard field goal to win the game and I starting wondering why someone in the movie didn’t ask for world peace or an end to poverty. The only reason I can think of is that such a request would have benefited someone else, and not me, me, me!

I admire the energy and financial risk it took to make “Facing the Giants.” The Georgia church that marshaled the volunteers and did the car washes to raise money for this movie deserves praise for its tenacity and perseverance. It produced a movie that might end up making money. This is not an insignificant accomplishment.

But let’s face the truth about “Facing The Giants.” It’s an amateur movie, an “apprentice” effort. As such, it has its virtues. But to pretend it is more than that is to dishonor the truth and hurt the cause of serious Christian filmmakers – not to mention whatever witness we hope to have with a non-believing, but not yet quite brain dead, secular world.

Warren Smith is the publisher of Evangelical Press News Service. He can be reached at warren.smith@thecharlotteworld.com
(10/18/2006)

[Back]