Why Is Christian Film So Bad?

From Relevant Magazine:

The term Christian film has become synonymous with substandard production values, stilted dialogue and childish plots.

Even with successes (Bella, Facing the Giants), we are on the outside looking in. You can have the huge budget, skilled and experienced technical crew and a firmly executed marketing plan, but if you film a pedantic script with summer-stock-reject actors, your better-looking product is simply lipstick on a pig. Throw in Christian film’s inherently agenda-driven plots and dialogue and you have lipstick on a preachy pig.

Rather than developing organically, the average Christian film is more pushy and sanctimonious than the global-warming agenda movies. Violence is almost non-existent, salty language never happens, unmarried people never struggle with lust and evil is never very bad, because showing various forms of sin is not allowed. By movie’s end, everyone is converted with no residual issues. Life is reduced to an after-school special with prayer thrown in for good measure.

If a film claims to be Christian, it was supposedly done for the glory of God, but we do not glorify God by making lousy movies.

We need great films.

I've often wondered why "Christian films" have to be so bad. Even successes such as "Left Behind," "Facing the Giants" and "Fireproof" come off as stilted and, well, just not real or relatable.

I maintain, just as in life, that sometimes the best way to deliver a message is not to come out and say it. Let the viewer realize the message on his own. Christian filmmakers simply don't have the self-restraint not to deliver a sermon in the story.

It seems to me that what Christian filmmakers need to do is to make the kind of films that Hollywood made fifty or sixty years ago. They had a message, usually wholesome, and are beloved even by audiences today. I think the people are hungry for more quality entertainment like that.