Facing Giants Essay

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Formalist Approach in Facing the Giants The movie, Facing the Giants, is not your everyday Friday Night Lights football film. It is, instead, a film that utilizes football to teach a life lesson in the realms of belief in a higher being; in this case it would be Jesus Christ. Most films approach storytelling in an array of camera angles, graphics, suspenseful acting and with dialogue that needs to be analyzed to understand the true meaning. However, Facing the Giants is quite the contrary. Its explicit content expresses the movie clearly through the mouths and actions of the characters. The message that the writer and director is trying to get across is very apparent and because of that, it may seem like a typical Christian cliché movie. In my opinion, the film may dangle the Christian faith in your face, but it goes along well with the moral story being told despite how amateurish the acting may be; the movie contains respectable production values considering the low funding it had to work with. The two brothers that wrote, directed and produced this uplifting piece are Alex Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick. Alex Kendrick began his journey by serving as an Associate Pastor of Media at Sherwood Baptist Church, where he founded Sherwood Pictures and began writing, producing, and acting and directing feature films. He and his brother have both participated in other hits such as, Flywheel and Fireproof. They even wrote a novel for Fireproof, one of NY Times bestseller, The Love Dare. Facing the Giants is one of their first productions, having a budget of only 100,000 dollars. Even with so little spent in comparison to another movie, Zyzzyx Road, released the same year, having a budget of one million that only made a whopping thirty dollars at the box office; Facing the Giants scored 10.1 million dollars for its efforts. The film was in limited theaters
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