God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness

Michael Manson did a great job as a 1st time director.

The first few movies in the "God's Not Dead" franchise were so corny. The antagonists in the first few movies were stereotype atheists and borderline cartoon characters. GND3 actually seemingly had real characters that had real relatable issues and doubts about their faith. It actually tackles the problems with Christian victimology without being too heavy handed. v

The problem with this movie is the that it has too many unnecessary scenes. There are boring stretches of time that could have been cut out.

Even though it has some serious slow parts I give it points for attempting to tackle a different point of view than the originals.

Poorly directed. The actors seem fine, maybe a little stiff, but the director seemed very confused.

Odd subplots that don't need to be in there. Scenes and characters that don't add anything. Boring and pointless conversations that don't lead anywhere.

If the goal was to be as religiously vague as possible then...well done.

They were trying to be as inclusive as possible to not scare off potential non-Christian viewers and I guess the way that happens is they decide to take all genuine conflict out of the story and you end up with a boring lump that's equivalent to opening a random page in the Bible and trying to find some masterful meaning out of an incomplete thought.

Whatever. And the ending is atrocious

Compared with the first two movies this one is way better in terms of story, acting and overall tone. Instead of having overtly atheist two-dimensional straw men as in the first two films, all of the characters both religious and non are drawn with some depth. And instead of the religious characters being unambiguously good and everyone being evil, both character types are given to actions both good and bad.

I can't say that this is a "good movie" in comparison to big budget titles, but within it's trilogy and within the genre it's a cut above the rest.

Full transparency; I am an atheist, but not a fallen Christian. I watch these movies to get a sense of what this segment of the Christian community is saying about people like me. And where in the first two movies I was laughing at the naive portrayals, this one was much more balanced.

In summary, It's pretty much a Hallmark movie, but with more overt religiousity. If you're into that, give it a go.

This is easily the worst of the series, but I still loved it! Part 3 didn't have as much unintentional comedy as the first two, but it was still damn near a laugh-a-minute escapade of truly incompetent filmmaking.

Much like the previous entries in this series, Light in a Darkness is a self-congratulatory celebration of the victimhood of christian persecution at the hands of evil secular societies. I imagine that evangelicals across the nation pleasure themselves without guilt while watching this and pretending that the premise is even remotely plausible. I get the feeling that they're unable to appreciate this film the way Zeus intended: as a movie so bad that it's good.

I'd recommend this to pretty much anyone who enjoys bad films. If you liked The Room, you'll love the GND movies!

And coming from an atheist, that's saying something.

The first "God's Not Dead" was a two sided ego match between the good Christian student and his evil atheist strawman of a professor. It wasn't deep, it was actually rather hateful against anybody who was non-Christian. But like most Christian movies it wasn't made with the intention to change hearts or minds but instead to preach to the already converted.

It also made a lot of money so damn right they'd make a sequel.

And in some ways the sequel was even worse because it focused around a total non-issue. A history professor mentions Jesus in class and for this she's sanctioned, put on leave and needs to go to court to defend her rights. Meanwhile the evil ACLU, who have actually defended the rights of Christians to pray in the real world, are portrayed as hating Christianity for no good reason. I mean they cast Ray Wise as the lead prosecutor and had him play it as demonically as possible. I'm not kidding. They really wanted to make it seem like he was the actual devil.

It also made a lot of money so of course they'd made a sequel.

But somewhere between the making of the second and the third something changed. We actually got a real movie with a message but one that didn't paint atheists as being the bad guys. In fact Reverend Dave, played by David A.R. White, is seen as being a much more understanding and caring individual than he has in the previous movies.

The end result is a surprisingly decent movie with a Christian message. What was even more surprising was how so many Christians seemingly didn't go see this movie for whatever reasons they had, Maybe this only goes to show that they're not interested in a movie that changes hearts and minds but only repeats to them what they already have in their own minds.

And quite honestly, I think that's really sad.