This is a Christian morality tale movie that avoids sugar-coating the fundamental reality of prairie life during the Wild West. Don't expect a rugged, nails and bullets realistic portrayal of that time, but neither expect a shmaltzy paper-thin polemic on happy-clappy everybody-lives-happily-ever-after. It's somewhere in the middle, an easily digestible banquet fine-balanced between harsh reality and happy endings. As such, it makes for a satisfying story that reinforces the idea of personal victory despite tragedy.
This movie travels along at a reasonable pace without becoming bogged down in too much detail. The trade-off to make this happen is that it suffers with the same ailment as all made-for-TV movies, namely that the story feels sectionalised into separate mini-tales each lasting several minutes that end with big broad-sweep fades. Even so, don't let this spoil it for you.
The locations are as much characters as the human players, and so they convey beauty alongside vast openness and independence and struggle. As such, they help to carry along the general sense that the protagonists were living in an environment that was both exquisitely beautiful yet harsh, and on which a person's fortunes could reverse in a moment, and that the only way to get through it was with dependable and loyal relationships and an enduring faith in God.
The story is beautiful both in its scope and meaning. Even so, it doesn't mean there is a shortage of cliches - of course, while these help propel the story without wasting time on explaining details they remain cliches nevertheless.
Overall, the story is compelling, if somewhat predictable - audiences are less enticed into watching movies like this for their dramatic twists as they are for the affirmation that faith, uprightness and frontier grit conquer adversity. The effect is that the movie ends on a high note of hope, which is something that everybody desires, after all. The talent was that the producers were able to align a fairly orthodox tale of frontier life with our instinct to expect for the best, transforming it into something affirming and extraordinary, and an uplifting slice of what is so rare in today's movies, caricatures and cliches aside.
This movie travels along at a reasonable pace without becoming bogged down in too much detail. The trade-off to make this happen is that it suffers with the same ailment as all made-for-TV movies, namely that the story feels sectionalised into separate mini-tales each lasting several minutes that end with big broad-sweep fades. Even so, don't let this spoil it for you.
The locations are as much characters as the human players, and so they convey beauty alongside vast openness and independence and struggle. As such, they help to carry along the general sense that the protagonists were living in an environment that was both exquisitely beautiful yet harsh, and on which a person's fortunes could reverse in a moment, and that the only way to get through it was with dependable and loyal relationships and an enduring faith in God.
The story is beautiful both in its scope and meaning. Even so, it doesn't mean there is a shortage of cliches - of course, while these help propel the story without wasting time on explaining details they remain cliches nevertheless.
Overall, the story is compelling, if somewhat predictable - audiences are less enticed into watching movies like this for their dramatic twists as they are for the affirmation that faith, uprightness and frontier grit conquer adversity. The effect is that the movie ends on a high note of hope, which is something that everybody desires, after all. The talent was that the producers were able to align a fairly orthodox tale of frontier life with our instinct to expect for the best, transforming it into something affirming and extraordinary, and an uplifting slice of what is so rare in today's movies, caricatures and cliches aside.