Movie Reflection : Bruce Almighty

I watched the movie Bruce Almighty. Bruce Almighty stars Jim Carrey, who plays the protagonist, Bruce Nolan. Bruce, a television news field reporter, is given the power to play God for a period of time by God. The character God, played by Morgan Freeman, was tired of Bruce’s constant grumbling against him for the various misgivings that Bruce had about his job and his life. God challenged Bruce if he could make a better God than he does.

With his newfound powers, Bruce foremost sought revenge against various people who had wronged him or disparaged him in the past. This includes taking out a gang who had beaten him up, and embarrassing an arrogant colleague by making him speak gibberish as anchor on television news. He also flaunted his powers, using it to impress his girlfriend by pulling the moon nearer to the earth to set up a view, inadvertently causing a tidal flood in Japan from the altered lunar forces on the earth. When presented with prayers in the form of emails on his computer, Bruce simply replied 'yes' to all of the prayer messages. This resulted in many people winning the lottery, which diluted the winnings to such an extent that the payoff was a meager $17. These people were unhappy and went onto the street to riot. Bruce also made use of his powers to gain the prestige of having the most exclusive news coverage as field reporter. He was able to engineer events on the ground which he then covered and reaped the credit for. He subsequently earned a promotion to become news anchor on television.

However, Bruce’s girlfriend, Grace, felt more alienated by Bruce’s success, which also attracted him the attention of a female news colleague. Grace decided to leave Bruce after catching him being kissed by that female colleague when she arrived on scene at a party. Bruce realized that despite obtaining success in his own eyes, he had lost the thing that had mattered to him. He also realized that his actions had resulted in more harm than good when he saw the town being burnt by the lottery rioters. While feeling heartbroken while walking along the road, he exclaims his surrender to the will of God. He was momentarily taken up to heaven where he had a conversation with God. When Bruce’s consciousness returned to earth on the road where he had exclaimed to God, he was hit by a truck, and ended up in hospital where his girlfriend attended to him and they rekindled their relationship. Bruce returned to his job as a field reporter and to his normal daily life, this time finding a level of satisfaction of his role as field reporter covering the simple stuff, and an understanding and contentment of his life as it used to be despite things not turning out the way he wants them to.

What do I think of the film? I like it, although I wonder whether I can accept its moral of the story, and particularly about its depiction regarding the character of God. The moral of the story would reflect the common Christian saying that we should trust in God because our will might not be for the best of things, and God might have a better plan than what we think is right or good. As the movie suggests, it might probably more difficult to play God than one would realize. The movie depicts the role of God as having to deal with countless prayer requests. Some people may argue that God is supposed to be omniscient and not hindered in responding to prayer requests by the sheer amount of it. I would think that even if God were limited in having to respond to prayer requests one at a time, he should have invented a system of delegation for his angels or saints to handle them for him. I find it troublesome that the God in the show seem to prefer to take a hands-off approach when it comes to dealing with human problems, believing that it is better that humans find their own way to their own solutions. It seems hypocritical to me that the movie’s God would necessitate that Bruce handles prayer requests when he himself is quite laid-back about it. But perhaps I shouldn’t be nit-picky about the representation of what God is like in the film, but to get the gist of what the moral of the story is about. I do hope that the real God is more caring about people’s problems, and is doing something about them. There are problems in the world which I feel that no one else except God can resolve, and where his dire intervention is needed, especially when it comes to issues of evil and suffering.