Beliefnet’s Idol Chatter blog rounds up recent conversations surrounding the marketing of the film “The Road” to evangelically-inclined Christian churches. Based on Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the apocalyptic film follows a father and son through a world made bleak and barren by an unspecified cataclysm. The website for the Christian marketing campaign suggests that the movie provides Christians the opportunity to discuss “vital overarching questions of life, such as fear vs. faith, good vs. evil and hope vs. despair.” “But,” writes Beliefnet’s Paul O’Donnell:
despite Steve Rabey’s contention on Get Religion that redemption is “nowhere to be found in ‘The Road’,” the movie has patent Christian content, reflecting the uncharacteristically godly questioning in Cormac McCarthy’s novel on which the film is based. (See the Wall St. Journal raise the “G” word repeatedly in their recent interview with McCarthy.) Hollywood Jesus sums up these religious themes succinctly in its review: through the humanity of the innocent, HJ opines, “[this] world can still be saved. There is still hope.” And not to put too fine a point on it, but the Bible did apocalypse before apocalypse was big box-office.
What’s surprising, instead, is that Dimension would bother marketing to Christians. Hollywood’s past few attempts to pull from the pews have failed miserably.
Read the entire Beliefnet piece here and the Christian Post‘s coverage of the controversy here.