The movie “For Greater Glory” has a very good rating. When I read the description or synopsis, however, it seems to put a lot of emphasis on religion.
Other movies with a suspiciously high rating and similar descriptions have turned out to be religious propaganda, at least IMHO.
So, could people who have seen it chime in with their opinion? Is this movie trying to push religion on its audience? Or is it a good movie that just happens to have religious oppression as a thematic element?
Well, it has a whopping 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. That is only a little worse than “Dark Shadows”, “Battleship”, or “What To Expect When You are Expecting”.
I pretty much ignore critics ratings because they don’t have very much correlation with whether I’ll like a movie or not.
I consider Yahoo Movie’s User Rating a much better predictor of whether I’ll like a movie or not. The Yahoo Movie User Rating for this movie is 5 stars, at 153 reviews.
But this is also part of my hesitation about this movie. Other movie ratings have been greatly skewed, positive or negative, by fundies. (Yes, I have no proof. It’s my opinion.) On the negative side, The Golden Compass had a horrible rating for the first week or so due to fundies trashing it because it was “anti-religion”. It was only after a couple of weeks that the rating got to a reasonable value. On the positive side, I’ve seen pretty awful movies getting very high ratings because of the religious message.
And that’s what I’m really asking. Is this actually a really entertaining movie that the critics hate, or is it religious propaganda with the ratings getting propped up by fundies?
Thanks for the replies so far. However, I’m still waiting for people who have actually seen “For Greater Glory” to respond with their opinions about my question.
Bear in mind that some films get good user reviews because the few people who bother to see it are predisposed to like it. Unless you’re one of those people, stay away.
This is especially true for religious films. The movie companies often have special advanced screenings for churches, sometimes where the churches get special rates for tickets or free tickets. The audience is predisposed to like it, especially at special screenings where they are there with all their friends and fellow church members.
And the audience for religious films can be especially uncritical for those films. They can be happy and rate the film high because of the positive message and lack of dirty language and other bad things, but overlook the bad acting or writing.
I admittedly haven’t seen the film, and don’t know if it’s good or bad. But if you rely on online user websites I’d wait a week or two until more average viewers have seen it and rated it.
