For as much as the '80s are remembered as a decade of excess and selfishness, there's a real earnestness in much of the media. I added One in a Million to IMDB as I find these earlier faith-based films much more compelling than the slicker and more cynical products of the last decade or two.
Once you get past the black opening credits (complete with heavy breathing which made me wonder what a Christian-themed encounter with the Sea Devils and the Silurians might be like), you're bathed in sunshine at the swim meet of Bobby (Trevor Wallace). Bobby is disabled, leaving him feeling worthless as he vents to his girlfriend Julie (Lyssa Williams) that any praise he gets is from pity. However, he soon shows just how important he is when he saves a baby that a kid pushed into the road, unknowingly in the path of an oncoming truck.
Up to this point OiaM comes across as one of those well-produced, inspirational Church of Latter-Day Saints PSAs that were a staple of TV at this time. And it would have been a very effective message if the film had stopped at this point. Instead, after a hero's breakfast made by his mother (Elizabeth Sinclair), he follows her request to go clean out the attic. While there, he reads through her diary (Sinclair narrating the entries) and realizes he had been aborted. After he convulses (in a scene I imagine will become a meme someday now that this is available on Youtube), he ceases to exist, and the baby is never saved. Julie, tears streaming down her face, breaks the news to the now childless Mrs. Johnson, who reacts in unnecessary slo-mo before we get more heavy breathing in the closing credits.
I'm not going to criticize the abortion aspect of the short, as there's no real point, but I will criticize the execution of the twist. I initially thought Bobby would learn he was aborted because of his disability, which is (or was) something of a rallying cry in the movement. Instead, the diary entries just have his mother saying she was unsure about having a baby after having moved too fast in her relationship. You end up wondering if this was not the original plan for the film.
The scene of him jerking and jerking and then being unborn doesn't work either - a more effective choice would have been him reading the diary, counting down the months to when he would have been born, then we see the diary drop and realize he's gone.
I still think the first half of this is worthwhile, but the rest never quite meshes. Still, I'd take this over the world of Kirk Cameron or Kevin Sorbo any day.
Once you get past the black opening credits (complete with heavy breathing which made me wonder what a Christian-themed encounter with the Sea Devils and the Silurians might be like), you're bathed in sunshine at the swim meet of Bobby (Trevor Wallace). Bobby is disabled, leaving him feeling worthless as he vents to his girlfriend Julie (Lyssa Williams) that any praise he gets is from pity. However, he soon shows just how important he is when he saves a baby that a kid pushed into the road, unknowingly in the path of an oncoming truck.
Up to this point OiaM comes across as one of those well-produced, inspirational Church of Latter-Day Saints PSAs that were a staple of TV at this time. And it would have been a very effective message if the film had stopped at this point. Instead, after a hero's breakfast made by his mother (Elizabeth Sinclair), he follows her request to go clean out the attic. While there, he reads through her diary (Sinclair narrating the entries) and realizes he had been aborted. After he convulses (in a scene I imagine will become a meme someday now that this is available on Youtube), he ceases to exist, and the baby is never saved. Julie, tears streaming down her face, breaks the news to the now childless Mrs. Johnson, who reacts in unnecessary slo-mo before we get more heavy breathing in the closing credits.
I'm not going to criticize the abortion aspect of the short, as there's no real point, but I will criticize the execution of the twist. I initially thought Bobby would learn he was aborted because of his disability, which is (or was) something of a rallying cry in the movement. Instead, the diary entries just have his mother saying she was unsure about having a baby after having moved too fast in her relationship. You end up wondering if this was not the original plan for the film.
The scene of him jerking and jerking and then being unborn doesn't work either - a more effective choice would have been him reading the diary, counting down the months to when he would have been born, then we see the diary drop and realize he's gone.
I still think the first half of this is worthwhile, but the rest never quite meshes. Still, I'd take this over the world of Kirk Cameron or Kevin Sorbo any day.