First, to those complaining this is "too Christian", it's anything but. This documentary tries to ride the line and show multiple sides, but it leans heavier to the "he was misguided" side with some strong digs toward evangelicals and missionary work in general. It is anything but sympathetic to mission work and goes out of its way to highlight all the "damage" done by missionaries, or at the very least, the wasted efforts (by interviewing a missionary turned atheist).
I appreciated the various points of view and the attempt to be impartial, but several things gummed up this documentary.
The animation was not appealing to me. I would have preferred re-enactments or a different animation style. It seemed cheap and cheesy at times, though still effective and better than nothing.
The editing was confusing, leaving me wondering what the point of the documentary was. For a documentary about such a focused and driven (misguided or not) young man, the film it self was far less confident and focused, meandering from non-commitment, to moments of sympathy, then on to scathing appraisals of disagreement, and finally landing with an awkward sense of off-balance closure with a religious, but non-Christian, poem by the dad.
I felt like this film tried to be something everyone could appreciate, but ended up being something that probably won't please the skeptics or the believers. We might assume that's the expected outcome of neutral journalism, but it felt too cobbled together and forced to seem relevant.
The information was fascinating, but the film, for me, was disappointing.
