ADORATION

ADORATION is a wooden, somber, gloomy movie that evokes a wooden, somber, gloomy experience. Ultimately, the movie argues that people should create their own reality, their own world, and not be constrained by their family’s past history or even religious traditions. Even worse, the movie turns the protagonist’s Christian grandfather into the villain.

The story, such as it is, focuses on Simon, a teenage orphan in Canada living with his older brother, Tom, a tow-truck driver. Because his parents died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Simon’s French teacher, a Lebanese woman named Sabine, encourages him to pretend to be the son of a real-life terrorist who tried to sneak a bomb on board a plane through his pregnant girlfriend. Simon and Sabine’s game generates a lot of discussion in class. Unknown to Sabine, Simon posts the phony story on the Internet. This generates even more discussion and even gets Sabine fired.

Meanwhile, viewers learn that Simon’s mean grandfather, a Christian who has since died, told Simon and Tom that Simon’s Arab father, Sammi, intentionally crashed the car that killed him and Simon’s mother. Later, viewers learn that the accident occurred after Sammi had an intense argument with the grandfather about Arab/Muslim terrorism and bigotry one evening. To escape the angry argument, Tom took young Simon for a ride in his truck.

Eventually, Sabine, Simon’s teacher, reveals a secret about herself. Then, the truth about Simon’s family and his grandfather emerges, Simon and Tom forge new family bonds, and Simon burns the beautiful Christian nativity decorations his grandfather handed down to them.

ADORATION is a movie based more on ideas rather than story and plot. This is a fatal mistake, even when the ideas are interesting. The movie also seems to have only one mood – somber and serious.

Even worse, the movie’s humanist worldview makes both an implied and overt, but not preachy, attack on Christianity. It also suggests truth is subjective, so people should construct their own reality, their own world, apart from the history and traditions of their family and without God or any religious text, much less the Bible.

ADORATION also contains plenty of strong foul language. Almost all the characters are disturbing, but especially the deceitful actions of the teenage protagonist, his teacher and his grandfather.

Of course, you don’t have to be a Christian to know that truth is objective and absolute, not subjective. Human beings are dependent on objective truth, not the other way around. Thus, truth and logic are independent of individual human beings and what they personally may or may not believe. And, one’s beliefs should correspond and conform to actual reality and truth as well as the laws of logic, which stem from God’s character and which are reflected in our hearts and minds, created by God in His own image.