Rocky Dennis Story

Movie Review: Soul Surfer

In case you are only aware of the “hits”, the movie Soul Surfer is a “sleeper”: a small movie that becomes widely seen by word of mouth recommendations.

I usually dislike surfer movies (e.g. Blue Crush ) but I do like the photography of the ocean in them, so I watched this one.

The good news: some good surfer scenes, and good photography of the beauty of the waves. The better news: it does have a plot. The best news: it doesn’t push the “crip overcomes handicap” meme too much.

The bad news: The story, which has a potential for drama and depth, is about as bland as a movie on the Hallmark channel.

The true story is based on the life of Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm in a shark attack at age 13, but overcame her handicap to again become a competitive surfer.

What is interesting is not the story per se, but the fact that Hollywood made it in an attempt to outreach to the large “Christian” audience who made “The Blind Side” such a hit. Apparantly, Bethany and her family were Christians (imagine that) not drug taking hedonistic surfers that one expects in such movies.

For this reason, the film was considered controversial because of it’s “Christian” element, and the attempt of Hollywood to “tone it down” to “appeal to mainstream audiences”, made the family have to fight to keep them in:

From Wikipedia:

Prior to the film’s commercial release, it was screened for religious leaders. A scene in which Dennis Quaid’s character reads the Bible in the hospital at his daughter’s bedside had the words “Holy Bible” digitally removed from the cover. … Another debatable scene was one in which Carrie Underwood’s character, a church youth leader, quotes Christian scripture. While those involved with the film were fine with the verse, they did not want the scene to explicitly indicate that its origin was the Bible.

If this was true, it says more about the mentality of Hollywood than of the movie audience.

Ironically, the real problem for me was not the “christian” scenes as such, but that in this movie, the scenes didn’t fit into the plot. One gets the impression that the “Christian” scenes were plopped into the plot in a disjointed manner to appeal to the “Christian” audience, not as part of the character or plot development.

James Harvey - MASK: The Rocky Dennis Story

Reading the comments you linked I feel like I should read it to the end, but I just. Can. Not. I had to spend an hour on cuteoverload to brainbleach the stuff I did manage to read. I'm just in no appropriate state of mind for that. I guess it's pretty amazing to have that effect on people. Very Where the Wind Blows which I love and which gave me nightmares for years after reading it as a kid.

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