Wondering if you should skip a movie altogether? Sometimes stories are just stories. Sure, some stories and experiences shouldn’t be shared with everyone… or anyone. Some stories are appropriate for children to hear, some aren’t. Others are uplifting to hear, some leave you walking away feeling heavy and dark. Some stories can make you laugh, while others make you cry. Some stories should be shared over the pulpit, and some shouldn’t even be whispered about on a girl’s night.
Movies are another way to share stories. So if you’re deciding on a movie to watch, here are 9 reasons you might not want to watch a show. And if any of these are dealbreakers for you, maybe it’s a movie you should skip altogether. And sometimes when getting to the moral of the story, people do it with not a singular moral in sight. We can’t give a movie morals, but we can give it filters. Anyhoo, here’s the list.
The plot doesn’t align with your morals.
Let’s use witchcraft as an example. If a movie is about witches, and you still take out every nude scene, bad word, and f-bomb under the sun… you’re still watching a movie about witches. If you don’t like/disagree with themes around witchcraft, you might want to skip the movie altogether.
You don’t want certain characters or behaviors to influence your children
Take zombies, for example. You don’t want your children to get the idea or become obsessed with walking around with their arms stretched out, waddling around, impersonating a zombie trying to bite people. That would be weird. You can take out the part where the zombie attacks a human or where the human shoots the zombie, and it’s still a movie about zombies. This doesn’t just work for zombies, this works for every theme and character.
There’s an entire person or theme that you want to omit from the movie.
As much as we might wish we could take out an entire person or character, that’s not what our service offers. Listen, if we could prevent ourselves from watching Claire Fraser running away AGAIN, we WOULD. We would LOVE to never have to see Tammy #1 or Tammy #2 ruining Ron Swanson’s life AGAIN, but alas, that’s not in the cards for us. While Tammy #1 and Tammy #2 seem unnecessary to us, they are a crucial part of Ron Swanson’s story development. We aren’t in the business of creating storylines, we’re here to help you enjoy the natural flow of the movie, while skipping over certain parts that are unnecessary to the plot line.
[insert famous person here i.e. Will Ferrell, Taylor Swift, Tom Cruise] is in it.
Similar to the point above, but different. While we jokingly had the option to remove Jar Jar Binks from a show, it was nothing more than a harmless joke. We will not remove an entire character or relationship from a movie. Top Gun just wouldn’t be the same without Tom Cruise in it. And if you don’t like Tom Cruise, we wouldn’t recommend Top Gun for you. Might we suggest Mission Impossible? No, wait… maybe A Family Affair instead?
You want the movie/cinematic entertainment to be a guide for your real life.
We get it. If you are who you hang out with, you are what you consume. You don’t want to be a period drama aristocrat fighting for their lives romantically, we get it. We LOVE that you stay true to your convictions, and we want to be a tool to help you do that. To be frank, there are movies we wouldn’t even recommend to a vampire, and their moral compass is dismal.
You’re watching a movie with children and the premise of the movie has adult themes.
You have a movie night with the whole family, but the movie is rated R. Sometimes, you can take as much as you want out of the movie, but it might still be a movie for adults. We’re not even old enough to watch Wolf of Wall Street.
You had to read a Reddit thread to figure out context clues of what was happening in the show.
There are very few movies that have crucial parts to the plot that are in filterable parts of the movie. If after all the filters have been applied to a raunchy show, you find yourself going, “Wait a minute…what just happened” and that bugs you, you should probably pass.
You want to watch this with your congregation.
Unless it’s The Chosen, don’t.
Something to keep in mind: We’re not Pure Flix.
We strive to provide filters for popular and good entertainment that you can curate to the needs and morals within your own home. That means something different for everyone. Please remember that VidAngel is only a tool, and you are meant to be the guardians of what enters your home. Pure Flix, and other similar companies, provide wonderful content that’s good and pure (pun intended) start-to-finish. That’s their job, and they’re pretty freaking good at it.
