Extremely disappointing -- on multiple levels.

Rating: 2/10 (25 October 2018)

Every so often a movie tries to be GRAND, to tackle MEANING. And this pretty much never turns out well. The skills of a prophet, or even a great novelist, are not the skills required to make movies, and even if the original script has some hope, that's dead by the time the endless compromises of actually shipping the movie are made.
And so we have here a movie that tries to tackle theodicy. Lord knows, zero theologians have done so successfully, but the people behind this movie thought they could achieve the impossible. And of course they fail, fail miserably and pathetically. Their story is exactly what you'd expect from comfortable modern Americans, with absolutely zero of the grandeur that we recognize (regardless of our beliefs) in true investigations of theodicy. We don't get serious hard choices, rather we get speeches about the importance of hard choices. We don't get an honest consideration of the tradeoffs between the needs of the many and the needs of the few; instead we get the comforting claim that we, each and every one of us, is the center of the universe and should live our lives in a way that's purely best for us (or at best ourselves and one other person). We don't even get an honest investigation of the tensions of theodicy, just a shrug of "I dunno; that's just the way it is".
So that's the large scale disappointment. The small scale disappointment is that you can rely on a Hollywood movie to imbue even the grandest discovery with idiotic and childish emotion -- there are even fewer rational people in movies than in real life. So, for example, our hero learns that the entire world operates totally differently from what he's been led to expect. And is his response awe and wonder, or asking how this larger world works? Of course not; what he's upset about is how this affects his relationship. Does he re-evaluate anything about humanity or the universe? Not at all.
Now, maybe that's realistic; after all the response to monotheism throughout history (again, regardless of whether you are a believer or not, this is just history) is for people to say "OK, God; rules the universe, master of everything, got it. So what can he do for me right now? Like maybe roll these dice a certain way?"
But I don't think this is at all deliberate, a knowing nod to the realities of how most people live monotheism; rather I think it's the product of the same simple-mindedness that came up with this conceit, ie an inability to truly imagine any sort of grandeur, or even any sort of appropriate response to grandeur.