akmil-abdulah

From the very beginning you can tell this movie has the stench of "Christian propaganda" all over it. From the cheesy opening music, the second-class actors, and the way the plot is written, it almost looks like this film was directed by Kirk Cameron. I've read other reviews where even Christians themselves find this a terrible and offensive movie, because it does exactly what Christian fundamentalists do, which is demonize EVERYONE that is not Christian. The only good guys in the movie are the Christians, but any Muslim or non-believer is tainted as "the bad guy". Personally, I didn't find it offensive, but it almost made my blood boil that Christian fundamentalists are using Hollywood as a platform to push their religious propaganda to young people, hoping to infect them with the mental virus of Christianity. I liked the idea of a movie about a "God" debate, but from the very beginning, the writers went out of their way to establish who's the bad guy and to make them look so bad, that it almost looked like a Mexican soap opera. I am glad this film backfired based on the amount of negative reviews I see, but it is disgusting and sickening to see how religion is using these new tricky techniques to get people to watch their propaganda.

I am not giving it a 10 because I thought some moments were a bit dumb and ridiculous, but I am willing to forgive some of that since this is a comedy. I must judge the movie based on the kind of movie it is and the way it is presented. The direction and production, special effects, were very well executed, illumination, sound and video quality were excellent. It was also well edited and coordinated, which are aspects in which many Dominican movies fail. Aside from the technical aspects, the movie was a lot of fun to watch, the jokes were hilarious and the story itself very entertaining. Sometimes the story fell into the silly side like when the girl got kidnapped and the way she was acting. I was surprised how they ventured into unexplored territory in Dominican filmmaking, such as action sequences and special effects, all of which were very well executed for the young Dominican film industry. I highly recommend it.

I think this movie deserves a much better production. Many scenes were poorly cut off, leaving you asking what happened, especially the ending. I was very disappointed with how poor that last scene was cut and left up to the viewer's imagination. I can understand the technical shortcomings of poor illumination or poor sound in some scenes, or poorly filmed scenes due to low budget, but when you choose to cut a scene short or coordinate it poorly, that has nothing to do with budget.

The acting was great, and the storyline was excellent. They just needed to present it better by adding missing scenes, better closeups and angles. Perhaps the director thought the scenes were clear but instead he left the audience hanging in the air with many scenes that seemed unfinished and some with rough edges.

The editing was not very good either. Some scenes didn't make sense how they were put together and demonstrates lack of experience in filmmaking. And that editing style of providing bits and pieces of the past (when characters were younger) and spread them across the entire movie is very confusing especially when the characters look exactly the same. In some cases, you can get away with this editing style, but it has to be properly done. In this case, it caused a sketchy and awkward scene flow. In some cases, the scenes were irrelevant and could've been left out of the movie altogether.

The transitions between scenes was very amateur. They could've been more creative and finish scenes better. It got 5 stars out of 10 due to it being an excellent story besides all the technical problems.