The first thing to strike me in this movie is that there are not a lot of strong characters. The father figures are weak men, who feel it is their role in life to be best friends with their children instead of fathers. The pastor is somewhat of a weak figure as well, preaching a superficial spirituality. The mother is perhaps one of the strongest characters, but she is especially not likeable, very arrogant. She says at one point that because she prayed for John: "If it wasn't for me, our son wouldn't be alive right now". A scene ensued of her repenting of her arrogant attitude, then she continued to arrogantly instruct the doctors on how to care for her son, with an "I know better than you do" attitude.

Typically, stories about medical miracles seem highly superficial to me, Miracle movies that they are typically geared towards people are non-medical experts. For me, a miracle is something that you know for a fact defies laws of physics and any realm of possibility. Put a copper coin in a box, close it and open it, and out comes a gold coin. A human body is a highly confusing thing for most people, and it has processes of self-healing and operation which most people know almost nothing about, so it's hard for your average person to think of an explanation for healing. Being someone without medical training, I can't explain how when I cut my finger, it gets better; I can't explain it, so does that make it a miracle? For somebody reading the story of John's recovery, it is difficult to explain why one person survived in this instance while countless of other people have died under the same exact circumstances, but John being the one out of a million who survives such an event must mean that this must have been a miracle, and therefore God must have had some sort of purpose for rescuing John which he didn't have for the other 999,999.

This movie if anything, reflects on how superficial Christianity has become in the Western world. We're told we need to look for signs, and when we notice something appears to be a one-in-a-million chance, we insist that it must be a miracle and not question whether is a natural explanation for what we saw. We mold our religious services to be a superficial spiritual experience with no real message except to expect that if you pray, miracles will happen; and trust God will bring a miracle to you; and if you're a good enough Christian, and if you pray hard enough, it increases the likeliness that a miracle will happen to you someone you love. Your role as a Christian is to try to pick out all the things in your life which you can't explain, and understand these things as proof that God is with you in your life. And if you attempt to seek out natural explanations for things you can't explain, this is a sign of a lack of faith, and you're not behaving like a true believer.

It is sometimes strange how newer movies casts people for roles. The personalities with the strongest characters somehow are always black for some reason. In the case of John Smith, the rescuer Tommy Shine is actually a white man in real life. It just seems funny how the director would go through the effort of casting characters which resemble many of the actual members of the story, including the parents, the pastor -- however for diversity reasons, they would hire to represent the true hero of the real-life story a diversity quota hire. We learned recently that Hollywood has created a series of rules that every movie must have a diversity quota and hire minorities into lead roles. It sort of annoys me knowing that Christian movie producers are playing by these same ridiculous rules, even while portraying real-life people. Considering the director is a white female from California and a graduate of Berkeley, this does not surprise me. Interestingly enough, they skipped showing the real face of the rescuer at the end of the movie, who was again, the real hero in this entire story. Imagine the optics that would bring to the ending credits.