God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness

The third film in the series. The church at the edge of a university campus is badly damaged in a night fire, and a young man dies in it. The university wants the church demolished and the land back. Reverend Dave decides to fight it in court and calls his brother Pearce, a lawyer he has not spoken to in years. Michael Mason directs. David A. R. White plays Dave and John Corbett plays Pearce. What differs from the first two is the register. Those films drew their Christian characters as plainly right and their atheists as plainly bad, and were criticised hard for it. This one deliberately softens that. The point of the story is not winning but reconciliation, and Dave comes to see that his own anger is damaging him. The commercial outcome differed too. The series had made a small budget go a very long way with the first film; the third fell far below both predecessors. Reviews stayed negative. Its defenders argued that this entry finally steps outside the oppositional habit of the first two. Who it is for: audiences who follow American faith based drama and the series itself. Who it is not for: the story does not stand alone if you have not seen the others, and the conflict resolves too neatly and too fast.