So my friend Michelle Moore invited me to the premiere of “The Carpenter”. I knew about it, it played at the Zions Indie Film Fest, but never got to see it. They had their premiere last week and after watching it, I was thrilled by the prospect of the shift in the faith-based genre.
So the best way to describe this is a film during the time of Christ, mixed with cage fighting and a soundtrack from Metallica. Crazy, I know,
The film opened with an awesome drone shot that was impressive. We follow a character who is a cage fighter, and a really good one at that. He eventually meets a man named Jesus who is a carpenter and he finds himself being his apprentice.
Without giving too much away, we see his growth as a person between his cage fighting and learning carpentry through Jesus giving him lessons of life.
The cage fighting scenes are awesome, interesting choice to use metal music to act as the background. But it worked for me!
I spoke to director Garrett Batty (“Saratov Approach”, “Faith of Angels”) after the showing and asked about the accuracy of cage fighting during the time of Jesus. He simply said “maybe it did, maybe it didn’t”. Which said to me throw the historical accuracy out the window and focus on the story of a person growing and changing. It was definitely a different take on the story of Jesus (which I am sure there are a million of them). But much like the film “A Knights Tale”, it was a refreshing take on the life of Jesus.
I highly suggest looking for this film in the theaters asap.
Kels Goodman 