Make sure that your children and your unsaved friends see Spider-man 3. I took three very solid Christian young men to see it yesterday, and the critical messages of the film were subtle enough that they didn't get it until I pointed it out. But it was indeed a sermon.
The basic storyline from the beginning has been that we humans, with or without super powers, are a complex bag of good and evil. We are faced with choices all the time where we are forced to choose the expedient or the right thing to do. We commonly choose the expedient.
At another level the writers clearly want us to know that there is a kind of evil which exists outside of nature and our own human nature which can influence our decisions in a major way. As with most movies in this genre, one of the ways the evil is used to create inappropriate behavior is to incite us to revenge. And not just any revenge, but taking God's judgment into our own hands.
As this part of the storyline plays out, we see character after character asking for or giving forgiveness, and we see that in so giving or granting, there is a blessing to both the giver and the receiver. At one point, Peter (Spider-man) is even encouraged to forgive himself.
Even the love story has a serious Christian message with regard to the relationship with husband and wife. Peter's Grandmother tells him that he should only marry when he is confident that he can put his wife's needs ahead of his own. This subtheme is not some hidden subplot, but a repeated admonition that would be impossible to miss.
Oh! How was the movie? The action? The story? Best of the three in my opinion. Two of the three of my young charges agreed. Personally, I "liked" the bad guys better.
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