Chapter 4

As I travel back to chapter four in my readings of U.E.M. I can't find anything I particularly disagree with in this chapter. The chapter was called Moving from Film to Digital Movies and it basically gave a brief overview of some major Christian movies released over the years. It then moves to the rise of Internet phenomena such as Youtube.

Being an Aspiring film maker my self, seeing Christians being successful in the film industry excites me. Though there will always be the "tribe" oriented content over quality films like Left Behind, I am amazed to see films like Chronicles of Narnia hitting the mainstream theaters and doing quite well. My main concern with these films though is that they may be loosing part of their message. Many people will go to see a film like Narnia and go out of the theater saying, "wow that was a great movie," and miss the messages of Redemption and faith that run through these stories.

I believe film makers are noticing this trend too and may be using it for money. This can be demonstrated by the second Narnia installment, Prince Caspian. The Plot starts somewhere around the fifth chapter of the book and takes large deviations from the original story. These changes cause many of the key elements of the book to be missed. In both films many of the dialogue from the character Aslan is removed, thus rendering the movie into nothing more than a fantasy war film.

This I believe is something that Christians in the entertainment industry have to watch out for. I do think that, many times producers miss the mark and focus on persuading more than entertaining. The opposite seems to be happening more and more frequently, a focus on entertaining at the expense of the narrative and the message.