Towards a developed sense of discernment:
Reviewing movies
A parable is an attempt to subvert other definitions of the world in favor of the world that you are creating with your story. Every movie is a parable. It is an attempt to remake the world into the world that you want it to be. It cannot be any other way. I am not imputing ill motives onto Hollywood, this is just the way that the world is because God spoke the world into existence. Story telling is warfare and we must have our rhetoric goggles on whenever we are watching a movie. With this said, there are two ways of deciding on a movie’s worth. The first is to go in open-minded with no preconceived ideas, let the movie wash over you for awhile and then examine the movie for 10 min or 10 days and try and decide if the dirt will ever wash off. The other way is to go in skeptical and prepared. I am in favor of the first method, (a joke). Of course as Christians we want to be wise in our movie and entertainment standards, not just because we don’t want our children to grow up and do drugs, but because we want our homes to be filled with wisdom and maturity and stories (which are to be entertaining and useful). Stories are the foundation stones of our worldview and our living. The Bible is filled with stories, the world is filled with stories, and our heads are filled with stories, (and, like Eustace Scrubb, usually all the wrong stories). Our story hearing should be directed toward being changed by the stories into wise Christians.
Wisdom is skill in living in the world that God made. The primary building blocks of wisdom are the fear of the Lord and a true understanding of the world. Believing true stories and rejecting false stories then is the mark of wisdom. And that is what these movie reviews are going to shoot at; teaching how to understand, interpret, and classify stories as they are presented to us in Movies.
There are six category questions that I ask while watching and when reviewing a movie. These are helpful revealers of rhetoric. This is how I discern what a movie is arguing for and what kind of world the movie makers believe God (or their idol) has made.
Sin and Salvation – Who needs to be saved and from what? What would prevent salvation? Who does the saving and how? Is there a hero or an antihero?
Justification – Who is shown to be vindicated by the end of the Story. Who are the good guys (those whose actions are justified) and who are the bad guys? From what source does their justification come?
Eschatology – In which direction is the flow of the story? What is the purpose of history? How effectual are love and righteousness? Do the wicked or the righteous come to a bad end? Is History random, fated, controlled, or willed?
Beauty – Is the story told well? Is the story beautifully portrayed? Is the definition of beauty creationally consistent, or is it opposed to God? Is beauty married to goodness and truth or at odds with them? Is this movies world full of glory, mystery, and things unseen, or dull, boring, and quantified?
Glory – Who is glorified and why? What actions lead to glory? What constitutes glory? Does glory follow humility and death or force of power? Does Glory flow to those who think of themselves or to those that think of others?
sins (with a small s) – what sins are portrayed, implied, condoned, or displayed and does this affect the age appropriateness of the movie? Are there scenes that make the movie unrecommendable by there presence? Are there scenes that you out to have gone without? Was the skin level out of hand (even if it is condemned by the story)?
