Soul Surfer

In the 1960s, the term “soul surfer” was used to describe a surfer who surfed for the pure pleasure of surfing. Though they may enter competitions, a soul surfer is more so motivated by a spiritual, compassionate, peaceful way of life.

The movie, Soul Surfer is a film adaptation based on the 2004 autobiography Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on Board by American professional surfer, Bethany Hamilton.
The main characters at the heart of the story are Bethany Hamilton who lives in Kauai, Hawaii with her parents Tom and Cheri, and two brothers, Noah and Timmy, who all happen to be surfers as well. But Bethany, along with her best friend, Alana Blanchard has a passion for the sport and work to become competitive professional surfers. Another character that plays a major role in Bethany’s life is her youth ministry leader, Sarah Hill.
In the film, Bethany narrates and retells her story of how as young teenage girl, she lived and breathed surfing and being in the water and her dreams and goals of becoming a professional surfer. It’s an account of her life on how after losing her arm in a shark attack she had to adjust to life as a handicap and had to decide whether it was going to define her as handicap. Throughout the film, Bethany tries to find a way to recover her “soul” by looking to her Christian faiths and beliefs that somehow she felt were being tested. Media attention was brought to the family resulting of the shark attack and had made life for the Hamilton’s publicly uncomfortable. Ultimately, she finds the courage and strength to follow her passion and her way back into the waves.

After watching this film in my opinion, I saw very little to none where there was much conflict with areas of diversity. I think that much of the conflict came from Bethany’s own intrapersonal perspective. I feel that I can touch more on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences rather than cultural diversities and conflicts. There were a couple examples of not to extreme barriers in the movie though where the family realizes that the media invades their privacy by constantly showing up at their place of residence or anywhere Bethany would make a public appearance. Another incident is when she was in the supermarket parking lot and a young child asks her mother, where is her other arm. Most people felt empathy and compassion for her and didn’t look at her as an oddity or freak. After Bethany’s first attempt back to competition since the shark attack and not doing as well as she hoped, she feels hopeless and decides to quit the sport even though right before she decides to quit, a group of young girls approach her and ask her for her autograph and tells her that she’s an inspiration. It was upon this decision that she decides to join her youth group’s pilgrimage to Thailand to aid and assist people in need who were devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It was in Phuket, Thailand after seeing what the tsunami had taken away from the Thai people that she rediscovers who she is and her calling in life.

Obviously I feel the plot is realistic since it is based on a true story. Again though, I personally don’t feel that this movie displayed any representations of extreme cultural diversity related tension or obvious conflict. I saw compassion in cultural diversity for other people when Bethany and her youth group provided relief to the Thai people.

The message conveyed in the movie and by its director was to bring to light the power and the strength from within especially when you put your faith and hope in Jesus Christ. Personally, I felt empathy as well as victory after watching this movie. The message, although very common and very typical in these teenage genre movies that even through tragedy, we all have it somewhere to come out of the dark.

On a scale from 1 to 5 I would give this film a 2 ½. It was a good film but it really didn’t hard hit extreme cultural diversity, discrimination, or ethnocentrism.