Plot Summary
When Aaron Chase’s brother dies in a school shooting, his family moves to a new area in the hopes of starting over. He ends up going to Rosewood High School, whose arts department budgets have been slashed due to overall budget cuts. The students in those departments are disappointed and seek to put on their own show. Aaron gets involved and decides to stand up for the faith he has been hiding, even though an evil atheist teacher is trying to stop him at every turn.
Production Quality (2 points)
For what it’s worth, Liberty Counsel and JC Films made sure Uncommon looked good on the surface. Video quality is clear and camera work is professional. Audio quality also meets industry standards, although the soundtrack is bloated and full of cheesy songs. Sets, locations, and props demonstrate that time was put into them. Yet editing is quite poor, as there are far too many musical montages and filler scenes that appear to just be filling up the runtime rather than imparting real content. Essentially, care was put into making this production look good, which is fine, but it’s just not enough when it comes to substance.
Plot and Storyline Quality (0 points)
As is to be expected, Liberty Counsel and JC Films construct a false reality where religious persecution is rampant in public schools—to a degree that is unrealistic and requires half-truths to be told—and which is full of heavy-handed propaganda messaging and narration to drive their points home. Atheists are extremely offensive strawmen, while Christians are downtrodden and overly perfect. Dialogue only forces the plot along, which is actually quite boring and melancholy when all is said and done. There is an attempt to be complex and different with some of the plot elements, but it’s not enough to make up for the outright twisting of reality that has to be done to make this movie’s message work. Basically, when all is said and done, Uncommon simply boils down to a sophisticated version of God’s Club.
Acting Quality (2 points)
Another interesting element to Uncommon is that time and care were also put into the casting and acting. This is a semi-professional cast, yet they appear to be coached fairly well. There are some awkward moments and unrealistic emotions, but on the whole, this is actually not that bad of a performance by this cast. If only this truth could translate to other films.
Conclusion
Uncommon is an anomaly. Usually movies that have small-minded plots like this one are terrible in all areas, yet time and care were spent on production and acting. It proves that anything can be done if you put your mind to it. Just think if this type of effort was put toward other movies that have better plots than this. But in the end, Christians overall need to steer clear from these types of plots for like forever, unless they’re going to portray real persecution that happens anywhere except the Western world. We need to change the mentality that ‘the atheists’ are always around the corner trying to snipe us and just live out our faith the way God wants us to. Jesus didn’t constantly gripe at or sue the Pharisees or Romans for religious persecution, and He had plenty of His ‘rights’ violated. God’s work can proceed whether or not you have your Bible club in a public school. People need to know that Christians care, and with stuff like this being put out there, it’s really hard to see that Christian leaders care about anything except ‘getting back’ at atheists.
Final Rating: 4 out of 10 points
Box Office Revolution 