Soul Surfer

[Vanilla]

Review/Discuss

[TheMovieman]

You have two Soul Surfer threads...

[Impact]

Very good, Robb was great in this and the music was fantastic as well.A-

[jmovies]

**Has an alright inspiring message but nothing jumps out to make it memorable. In fact, the church stuff became annoying after a while

[Blankments]

By judging actual quality, Soul Surfer is just okay. The surfing scenes are exciting enough, and the acting is overall better than the material (with the exception of Carrie Underwood who is absolutely dreadful.) The script is pretty generic, except for its subject matter. I can't think of another film that goes as in-depth into adjusting to an amputation in the modern era. It's intriguing in a heartbreaking sense, even though we have to deal with scenes such as Dennis Quaid getting angry at a dead shark or really out-of-place interludes of Christian music.

 

Yet oddly, the film's religiousness is what touched me most. Even though I could never compare an amputation to what's currently going on in our country, the conversations in this film were shockingly similar to those that have been going in my life since last Tuesday. The tragic end to the election cycle giving triumph to a man who, at his best, is a moronic egomaniac whose xenophobia and racist tendencies terrify many of the country's population. I don't want to get much into that (except to be clear that I did NOT vote for that evil man), but I've had the conversations in the past few weeks that Bethany has had too. How could God let this happen? What's the big picture on this? How can we find hope after such a hopeless thing has occurred? Oddly enough, this film bluntly states the answer I've been thinking about for a while: the most important thing is the world is love. Even if my country's leader does not believe it, I still can. And it is more powerful than any fear.

 

Would I consider Soul Surfer a good movie if I had caught it any other week? Probably not. But the fact is after the election, it's hard not to search for truth and hope in things. Soul Surfer works only because of how it realistically displays a religious family's reaction to tragedy. In this, it's an amputation, but apply it to a young death, a disappointing direction in world events, or any other form of tragedy, and the family's reactions are incredibly real. Soul Surfer is worth watching just for the Christian catharsis towards something unexplainable, and it is lovely in that way. B-

 

(Please note: If you're not a Christian, I really doubt you'd even enjoy what I got out of the film. And the film still has plenty of issues such as an all too white cast for a movie set in Hawaii, and a bizarre interlude in Thailand that comes with extremely little foreshadowing. Still I liked it.)