Truly Dreadful Film

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The plot rolls right along, great acting, great story, I really enjoyed this movie. Whether or not you're religious, check this movie out!

Christian Propaganda. Good acting though.IMO, the story (and movie) is a wasted opportunity to really go the whole nine yards. Guess it did not because then it would have come to another "conclusion"?The only skeptical person was essentially the lead. All experts and points of view he meet and interview are believers.The movie builds the case primarily upon so-called eye witnesses of the Christ resurrection 2000 years ago, and our hero then proves that no human could have survived the described crucifixion.... ergo; Christ must be super natural. Ergo Christianity is right.... this is his line of evidence in his presented research. In any usual progression of knowledge, this is just a silly approach.Our hero first aimed to prove that Christ did not die on the cross, and therefore it could not be an actual resurrection that was witnessed a few days later... only woke up after a hard night out, I guess. But as he progresses in his "research", he finds that Christ (or any human) could not have survived what apparently had happened on the cross, and so when Jesus is supposedly witnessed later, he must have returned from death... This is his body of evidence, this is how he arrives at his conclusion...that is it... and he then jumps to the believe that all of Christianity etc. must then be truth.This is frankly impossible for a skeptical and scientific thinking mind to make this stretch, and to get to this conclusion in that way. Silly.His way of thinking can also prove that since no known aircraft can fly like UFO sightings claim they fly, UFO's are real? Same stretch. Same silliness. One CANNOT come to this or any other conclusion here or in the UFO example. The only "conclusion" they can reach is that perhaps something extraordinary occurred and so deserves attention and further inquiry. And then hopefully this attention will substantiate the anecdotes with evidence and data to support them. Her forgets how scientific knowledge works:"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence" Carl Sagan"The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness." Pierre-Simon Laplace"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence".... "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." David HumeIn truth, all he can ever hope for - even with the best of efforts - when analyzing eye witnessed events thousand of years ago about something unnatural and extraordinary, is to end up in a dead-end situation where he has to make a choice: Does he believe in those witnesses or not? And so the premise of this movie is fundamentally flawed or rather silly, because he can only ever end the exact same place he starts. It is a battle of opinions, unsubstantiated. The actual case for Christ is inherently impossible. Of course it is, this is why Religion is still considered relevant. It cannot be proved and so cannot be disproved.With his collected body of evidence and as a Skeptic and scientific thinking mind, he will firstly never be able to conclude anything above his own suspicion and secondly cannot abide to a suspicion that is not rooted in logic and supported by the current scientific knowledge of how the world works... since he does end in a conclusion under these circumstances, he is no Skeptic. He simply cannot be. The movie is an oxymoron. Or at best, a dishonest tale on how he became a Christian.OrPerhaps I misunderstood the story.Perhaps it is really and at its core about a reasonable guy who is afraid of losing his wife and kid to a religion and then does what he can to convince himself to join them on their path, however silly it may seem to him at first. This would explain his biased and one-sided naïve approach to the Case for Christ.

Unlike Pure Flix's previous efforts, it's evident that thought was put into The Case for Christ, and not just through residual elements from the book. For instance, the cinematography is well-done, there's a semblance of style in the editing, and the production design is constructed with intent and care (even if major aesthetic cues are taken from This Is Us). The acting is usually competent to moderately good, and even the musical score is above average (even if clearly temped with the Downton Abbey theme song, or perhaps even Yeong Wook-Jo's score for The Handmaiden, which is no fault of the composer's because they still did a good job). There are production flaws I could nitpick, but fascinatingly, if you strip away the sly propaganda and fundamentalist blind spots then you actually have an astoundingly average movie! It's even seemingly thoughtful at times, making this easily the studio's crowning achievement. But does it hold up upon a closer look? It's imperative to differentiate between both the author of the original book and the screenwriter who adapted it, since all of the film's thoughtfulness can be presumed as the contribution of the first. I'll commend the source material (assuming it was adapted faithfully), for crafting a multi-faceted narrative with interlocking themes, and I'll commend the studio for telling their first focused story. The film has a beginning, middle, and an end, with elements such as the police shooting and Strobel's relationship with his father serving as parallel narrative lines with clear intent and thematic relevance. Naturally, I don't agree with the arguments behind these narratives, but the studio formed an actual argumentative structure this time and that's a milestone worth celebrating. I'll also congratulate Pure Flix for not using a painfully literal deus ex machina this time (though this probably shouldn't be considered an accomplishment). I mention this because one of the most irritating, scathingly terrible facets of typical Christian storytelling is that instead of having characters evolve on their own, an act of God will change the status quo instead, effectively leading to hollow character arcs and a dubious or muddled overarching argument. Back to the writers...It's evident that the original story was crafted by someone with a more rounded perspective, but was then re-written by an individual with a constricted capacity for understanding. Lee Strobel is poor at being an atheist, and since it's biographical I can content myself with his inadequate yet very human reasoning skills. Whether or not his quality of character really was as deplorable as depicted however can make a significant difference. If it's not a biographical truth, it's an (perhaps unwitting) practice in the art of offensive stereotyping. No atheist that I've ever met or listened to (who fully understands why they do or don't believe what they do), would say the things Strobel says to his family because of his atheism. The first glaring example is when Lee tucks his daughter into bed, and declares "We're atheists". Though they may be incidentally atheist (categorically speaking), most self-describing atheists would actually be opposed to imposing empirical religious views of any kind on an impressionable child, and would instead take a more agnostic approach, preferring the virtue of possibility and how to assess it from a reasonable standpoint. Lee's wife actually asks about that in the film: they had apparently agreed not to force anything on their child, but Lee dismisses it in a completely unreasonable manner for no reason made apparent by the film. Later on, Lee threatens to leave his wife and children because he can't cope with their sudden, "troubling" turn to Christianity. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if this dynamic was artificially introduced in the screenplay, though if it was accurate to the original story then Lee has psychological issues that the film didn't adequately explore. For instance, he only acts like a normal, loving human being again when he's adopted the Christian faith, effectively pinning his character flaws on his atheism rather than, say, his obsession with work or his alcoholism. Besides being a blatant misrepresentation and misunderstanding of nonreligious viewpoints, this film is subverted with negativity towards other perspectives that contradict the attempted message of understanding between people with different views. There's a line of dialogue in the latter half about Islam that hits the nail in the coffin when it comes to a broader sense of arrogance and lack of perspective on the filmmaker's part. The tastelessness here may not be as on-the-nose as God's Not Dead, but it's still there.Now for the part where the film attempts to construct a solid argument to reaffirm their preconceived beliefs... To be fair, they aren't making up examples out of the blue or fabricating sources of any sort, and what they present does not feel outwardly malicious to me. However, many of their arguments rely heavily on presuppositions, wishful interpretations, and false consensus. For example, several of the experts they consult upon further research were already part of the fundamentalist crowd, and do not represent any kind of authoritative consensus. In fact, the actual consensus I've discovered for most of the film's claims are a resounding "maybe". (In other words, they really don't know.) There's evidence to suggest that Jesus was a person who existed, but nothing solid regarding the resurrection, which they would have discovered had they consulted a wider variety of sources. Regarding the quantity of copies published, I'm simply not convinced. When the Iliad was written, people were well-aware that it was fiction (an astute observation made by my sister), and hence the number of copies made don't apply to some kind of historical accuracy. Furthermore, arguing that the bible is more accurate because it printed more copies is like saying that Fifty Shades of Grey is quality literature because it's a bestseller. I don't have much more to say there, that one just seems apparent. There is still some trickery involved though, specifically regarding how the language of film is used to present their arguments (or non-arguments, as I often found was the case).To elaborate, there are various instances of pseudoargumentative nature that are rather sneaky in execution. For example, there's an instance early on where someone says "People don't willingly drink poison for something they know is a lie." This part is reasonable, easily true, and inoffensive. Then, he says "If Christians knew it was a hoax, why would they die for it?" THIS however, is a statement that essentially argues nothing. The fact of the matter is, if it WAS a hoax, these people clearly thought it wasn't, or simply didn't know. This statement is at its core a neutral observation of a simplistic sociological function, and serves as a deterrent from an actual point, neglecting to address any details regarding the resurrection or to elaborate on the aforementioned additional sources. Then the film inserts quasi-intellectual music and has Lee reply "Fair point," as though this statement was somehow substantive. If you don't stop to think about it, this scene uses the language of film (application of music, dialogue) rather convincingly to make it seem like they made a point, when in actuality that statement wasn't of argumentative nature to begin with.It's not hard to find multiple, lengthy point-by-point analyses of the evidence mentioned in the film, and to come to the conclusion that they don't know as much as they say they do. Their claims can generally all be boiled down to eyewitness testimony for events we've never adequately observed, recorded, or seen anything even remotely similar recur. And If you can't adequately explain it, that means you don't know. It's ok to not know things, it really is. A film that teaches otherwise probably shouldn't be shown to children, and in this case even classifies as propaganda. Even if this propaganda is more subversive and of less extremity than the studio's former efforts, I wouldn't recommend this film even for the fleeting thrills of confirmation bias, for Christians and atheists alike. There are of course more pressing matters in life than this one, so regardless of where you fall on the spectrum, remember this bit of advice from Paddington Bear: "If we're kind and polite, the world will be alright."Without further ado, I'd like to thank my sister who endured this film with me and deserves honorary writing credit. I'd also like to thank IMDb for removing their terribly constrictive word limit on reviews. Really I should just start a website or blog if I'm going to write this much, but for now I'm content with my sporadic and whimsical presence on the interwebs. Score: A Zeus and a Horus out of Thor

What I appreciated most about this movie is the fact that this is a true story of Strobel's life & journey. Strobel tells his own story honestly. He didn't want to believe. He didn't want to look at the evidence. I appreciated that Strobel didn't hold back from sharing his true personal struggles. There are many who don't like the movie because it doesn't tell the story that they want to hear. But it tells a true and honest story - both regarding Strobel's life and regarding the historical evidences for Jesus' death and resurrection.