Godly Dragon Reviews: White Snake

Last Winter during the Christmas season, I went out of my way to a farther away theater to go see a movie. Not just any movie, but a foreign movie from China called White Snake. When I first saw this movie, I was impressed. Or so I thought. I watched it a couple more times when it was released digitally and it wasn't as good as I remember. I found that it was all spectacle and not much substance. When I looked into it even more, I was right. Not only that, there are a ton of unbiblical ideas, bad morality, and poor execution that went into this movie. Let me explain.

Now the good stuff as already mentioned is the visuals. This movie looks pretty good and I like all the action scenes. It's almost as good as a Disney movie I'd say in terms of visuals. Also, it tried to have a message of sacrificial love, the most godly love of all. But here's the problem. The morality of the story is just so muddy. The problem with this movie is the pagan worldview of reincarnation and enlightenment. It's about a human snake spirit named Blanca who falls in love with a snake hunter named Xuan, and she lives several lives to be with him, but can't remember what happened previously whenever she enters a new body. Xuan doesn't care that Blanca is a snake demon that knows dark magic. Dark magic is the driving force of the conflict in the movie. At the end of the movie, he sells his soul to become a snake demon too, so he can be with Blanca forever. Not only is it unbiblical, it's just confusing. It makes the story hard to follow. 

Now, this leads to the question, if I don't like this movie with pagan elements, then why do I like other things with pagan elements like Spirited Away? Spirited Away is the movie I will use for comparison since it too uses stuff from other religions and is an asian film, albeit it being Japanese and not Chinese. This is a film I grew up with. In this movie, a ten year girl ends up in a world of spirits and pagan gods after she visits what looked like an abandoned theme park and after her parents get turned into pigs. But the antagonist of the movie is a witch named Yubaba who rules the bathhouse and she makes Chihiro her slave so she won't be turned into a pig too. From here on out, the film is about how she is trying to get out of the spirit world and get her parents back. In her journey to do so, she learns a lot about overcoming fear and growing up into a mature young lady. Now, I didn't say that Spirited Away is perfect. There is a good witch that tries to curb the evil of her twin sister, but the bible says all witchcraft is bad, so that is a flaw with Spirited Away other than it with being based in pagan religion from Japan. But if you ignore the pagan stuff, what's left is a great story of a young lady's coming of age. It was deep, it was gripping, it had substance, it had good messages. Such is not the case with White Snake. You can't ignore the pagan stuff and be left with a good story because of how it's so integral to the plot, and what you're left with is a bad message. There was nothing in White Snake I really wanted to come back to, unlike Spirited Away which is a film from childhood that I adore and have seen many times. 

So, at the end of the day, I can't recommend that you watch this film. In fact, I think listening to the band Whitesnake is more wholesome than watching this movie. yes, I went there. If you do watch this film to form your own opinion, just keep in mind what I've said about this movie. It's not a good thing to be desensitized. It's important to keep our minds in the Word of God at all times and be careful about the kind of media we consume daily. God bless.