Let There Be Light

My first non-update post in almost a year, and it’s to write my first movie review in over two years. A couple days ago, I watched a movie on Prime Video called Let There Be Light. It’s a Kevin Sorbo film. Literally. He not only stars in it, but he also directed it. So during the opening credits it says “A Kevin Sorbo Film”.

The film is about an atheist author (Sorbo) having a near death experience and realising he was wrong. That sounds really simple, but I feel the film did a great job at portraying it. And didn’t at the same time.

Normally, when I review movies, I do it immediately after watching them. If you noticed, I said I watched this one a couple days ago. Yeah, I wasn’t going to review this one at all. Didn’t even cross my mind until an hour or two ago. But this movie has kind of stuck with me. There’s alot I liked about it, but also alot I didn’t like about it. So I thought I’d use this post as a chance to sort it out.

It starts off with Sorbo’s character, Sol Hawkins, debating a creationist. I’ve seen countless evolution vs creation debates and know how wild those can get. While in a way, Sorbo nails how arrogant and mocking the evolutionists tend to be, he overexaggerated a bit, almost to comical levels. But it was still a pretty decent scene. It established the character, his anger towards God, the fact that he had a son, Davy, pass away from cancer, etc.

The next scene introduces us to Sol’s ex-wife, Kate (played by Kevin Sorbo’s real life wife, Sam Sorbo), and two sons (played by their real world sons, Braeden and Shane Sorbo). There’s clearly tension between them, as Sol and Kate argue about the fact that he uses the death of their son to push his atheistic arguments. There’s also a scene after of he and his oldest son spending time together. His son clearly has some resentment against him.

The film continues and he’s drinking heavily at a party in his honour, celebrating the release of his new book, titled Aborting God. After drinking throughout the scene, and being clearly drunk, he drives and gets into a wreck.

Sol dies for four minutes and sees his dead son, Davy, who tells him, “Let there be light”. Sol is called back to Earth.

While I was expecting Sol to immediately convert to Christianity, he did not. Which is good, because that’d be a little cheesy and cliché. Instead, initially he tries to ignore it. His manager keeps telling him that he hallucinated the whole thing, so he just goes along with that. But eventually, while giving a speech, he publicly in front of an audience tells Kate he saw Davy.

Even then, he doesn’t convert right away. He still has questions and gets drunk trying to push them away. Eventually, he talks to Kate’s pastor, which is when the conversion happens.

This is where the film should have ended.

The reason I have been struggling with my thoughts on this film is that while the first half up to the third act was really good, at the beginning of the third act, they do something that just feels unnecessary. Kate randomly has a seizure, and in the next scene a doctor tells her that she has stage four brain cancer. Through most of the rest of the film, it’s mostly background. I assumed that they’d just do like an extra miracle, like she’d go, “Oh, I’ve been cured! It’s a miracle!”. Which would have been really corny.

Instead, the last shot of the film is her dying in Sol’s arms. It just…it just feels completely unneeded. They could have just had him convert to Christianity and ended the film there. Instead, they tried to make the film sad. But it didn’t have that effect. She dies and I’m left wondering what the point of that was. They randomly killed her off for no reason. I don’t know, maybe they were trying to have a message about cancer needlessly killing people?

It just felt unearned. Especially since she got the cancer so late in the film. If you’re introduced to her and she has it that’d be one thing. But it’s like they were trying to do whatever they could to pad out the runtime so they slapped on an extra half hour so they could do this.

But, as I always do in each of these reviews, none of that matters as long as the Christian message is good. For that I have to say…eh? Kind of? The pastor talks about Jesus and he baptised Sol (though admittedly he baptizes him by pouring water on his head, which is…not exactly how you baptize someone).

When he’s dead for four minutes, he only sees his son. I think they should have had Jesus there, just so Sol could actually see him. Several times in the film, he’s described as the world’s biggest atheist. I honestly think realistically he’d need more than just seeing his son to believe. There’s little things like that which have been bothering me.

But overall I think it was a great film! Kevin Sorbo is obviously amazing! In fact, I only found this movie because I searched his name on Prime Video. I’ll literally watch anything with Kevin Sorbo. He’s great in anything he’s in.

I give this movie a 7 out of 10.

If you have Prime Video (the streaming service which is part of Amazon Prime…you’d be surprised how many people don’t realise that it’s not just two day shipping), you can watch Let There Be Light here.