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Home / Thoughts / Other's Thoughts / Sophie's Thoughts / Saved! - The movie

Saved! - The movie

Written by Sophie on Thursday, May 4, 2006

Today I watched the movie Saved! because one of the characters was in a wheelchair.  The character, Brian, used a Quickie TNT wheelchair (not being made anymore, see the review on the wheelchair zone).  For those of you who have never seen this movie before, it is based in a Christian community, specifically at “American Eagle Christian College”.  Imagine a roomful of over excited “yea lets convert the world” teenage Christians, and that is the school.  I won’t focus too much on the actual movie; I’d prefer to discuss the wheelchair things in the movie. 

Brian’s sister, Hillary-Fay, had the opportunity to buy a flash sports car over the summer holidays, instead she bought a flash van with a lift etc and made sure everyone knew how thoughtful she was with her brother.  One of the themes that came out in the movie was how Hillary-Fay was fake and did not really mean any of the good things she did.  How can we compare this to normal wheelers?  People say that us transabled people must be in it for the attention, but what about the people who insist on helping wheelers then let everyone else know about it?  Like a member on Paradevo said, I’d rather be in my chair at home, alone, than have everybody paying all that attention to me.  Sometimes it is more helpful to be left alone, and this would have been the case for Brian.

There were a few attitudes that irritated me in this movie.  The first one was how the other characters described Brian.  They would generally address him as a cripple or handicapped, and at the beginning of the movie, Hillary-Fay says to her friend “honestly, sometimes I think he’s mentally retarded as well”. 

I know that this was only a movie, but is this how people think of wheelers, even if it is in privacy?

I know to a certain point we need to stop worrying about political correctness, but there are some things I would never want to be called.

Another thing that irritated me at the start was how Brian was always being pushed around, he would never push himself.  This was one thing that he was challenged with through the course of the movie as a personal struggle as well, but even at the end, I did not feel he was portrayed realistically as a wheeler, but then you have to take into account he was living in a Christian environment with an attention craving sister.

This movie doesn’t spend too much time focussing on Brian, he isn’t the main character.  But these things I discussed are some of the little things I noticed in the movie.  If you want to rent the movie purely to watch Brian wheeling you won’t get much out of it.  I am thankful they didn’t put him in an ugly folding chair, but he was just as useless as if he was in a folding chair.  This movie focuses on other subjects, like Christians and their reaction to Gays, pre marital sex, smoking etc.  American Eagle Christian College was your stereotypical portrayal of what many people perceive Christians to be.  I felt that it wasn’t a very good representation.  Overall, it wasn’t the best of movies to watch.