sendscottmailnow
Stumbled across this movie on Amazon and thought it sounded interesting. I am a member of the LDS church and know well the story of the 16 stones touched by the finger of God from the BoM account. This movie is pure fiction as there is no known account or belief amongst church members that these stones still exist or could be found today. I found the fictional story line interesting, but the character development and plot line were both a bit weak. This is common among many films made by/for Mormons. They are still getting it together in terms of good quality movie production. The film is probably better suited for teens and young adults (I am 54), but it was an OK Saturday evening watch after the yard work.
mj.Jernigan
"The following account is fictional but the trials of faith portrayed herein resonate within the experiences of early members of the Church."Account? Fictional? Then it is not an account, it is a story. What early members of the Church were asked about this story to claim such resonance?The writing and plot don't get any more intelligent after that opening statement. This is not just Mormon fiction, it is historical fiction, upon historical fiction, upon historical fiction, upon historical fiction, to the point that you end up asking yourself about once a minute: What?, How?, or, simply, Huh? It is as if a child wrote it. That would be the only reasonable explanation of such abuse of history and such astoundingly ignorant plot holes (too many to name and it's hard to pick a favorite bad example without listing several). National Treasure could not hope to be so clueless and naive. It's as if ANY attempts at believability and accuracy were purposely avoided. Any mature viewer is guaranteed no chance of suspending disbelief in this film.This film embarrasses me. I try to give leeway to low-budget films and rate them on their own merit, but there is no excuse for writing this bad. It makes me wonder how this film ever got made. Someone clearly has too much money and no idea what to do with it. I give very few one-star ratings and this is one of those rare films that solidly earned it. Reptilicus was better than this. This is on par with Santa Clause Conquers the Martians.
blumdeluxe
"16 Stones" is a movie centered around the Mormon belief. It tells the story of three young folks, traveling the country in search for a sacred artifact, learning that faith is more important than what you can see or touch.Unfortunately, the movie is clearly not even close to neutral or critical storytelling. Rather it is a big advertisement for the Mormon belief. While of course everyone has the right to produce such movies, I always have my difficulties when believes are hidden behind fictional movie plots because especially for younger audiences this always tastes a bit like infiltration.To make this clear, my rating has nothing to do with the religion itself, I just in general feel like religious blockbusters are not the way to carry on a message.This is especially sad because if you let go the tons of "meaningful" dialogues and some questionable assumptions like the one that native Americans are really bible-days Christian ancestors, "16 Stones" is actually quite a nice film, a classical treasure-hunt that keeps you entertained and cheering for the heroes.However, I propose to choose one: Make an entertaining treasure-hunt for kids or produce a film for your community to strengthen their faith. I give one extra-star for the statement that no-one should be persecuted due to his religion though.
davidhickenbotham
It has been a while since I've seen this movie, but a friend and I were talking about it, and I was curious to see what kind of rating it had on IMDb. I generally consider this the worst movie I've ever seen in a theater--not content-wise but for acting and directing and plot and everything else that makes you want to watch a movie.I'm pretty forgiving of locally made LDS-themed movies, but this one was pretty bad. At first the premise seemed pretty good--National Treasure set in an LDS setting. Sadly, it totally failed at being that. And it wasn't anything to do with the authentic clothing, good sets, and decent editing. I couldn't in good conscience give it a 1 because at least someone on the set did try to do something right.I wasn't the only one who couldn't believe how bad this movie was. There were three couples in the movie theater to start off with. The other two couple walked out at various points during the movie because it was so bad. We talked about doing the same, only deciding to sit through to the end because we didn't want to go home just yet to put our kids to bed.I love to support local movies, but they've got to do much better than this.
AD
