YMMV / Saving Christmas

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Leon Thomas of Renegade Cut reads the film as an endorsement of the Prosperity Gospel (that God rewards the righteous with money, power, and status).
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Sarah Gobble of Midnight Screenings once suggested that Kirk's character fully understands the absurdity of what he's spouting, and is just trolling his buddies off of his back so he can buy some presents for his kids in peace.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Cameron's "material wealth is good" idea may sound like Insane Troll Logic made for the film, but is an actual belief promoted by many American televangelists.
• Anvilicious: While most religious-themed and even secular Christmas movies aim to demonize the over-commercialization of the holiday, this film sees it as a good thing and rattles the moral off with the subtlety of a ten-story neon sign.
• Bile Fascination: Nowadays, people are more likely to watch it to see how it ended up as IMDb's lowest-rated movie ever, than for its intended reason.
• Director Displacement: A minor example - while Darren Doane was actually the director and co-writer of the film, Kirk Cameron served as executive producer and was the main driving force behind much of the production.
• Narm Charm: The film is ridiculous, stupid, and filled with bizarre messages… which is exactly why people love it so much.
• Padding: Despite the movie being 79 minutes long, Christian breaks out of his Heroic BSoD at around the 55-minute mark. Everything from this point onwards is essentially just a Random Events Plot of the Cameron family celebrating Christmas, with the dance sequence in particular eating up a lot of screentime to little effect.
• Presumed Flop: The film was widely disliked, with even Christians criticizing its quality and pro-materialism messages about Christmas and Christianity. Regardless, it made a profit. Not a large one, but even in a limited theatrical release, it made $2.8M on a $500,000 budget.
• So Bad, It's Good: It's entirely possible to enjoy the movie based on how bad it is. It helps that despite promoting itself as a Christian-centric movie, Cameron doesn't make any direct attacks on people and the logic is too obviously flawed to spread harmful messages, unlike with War Room and God's Not Dead. Brad Jones, as part of Midnight Screenings, not only saw it himself, he also sent five of his friends to see it as well and then review it themselves, and actively encouraged people to go see this film, just to prove to everyone that it was really as bat-shit insane as they all said it was. While none of them could say it was a good film, they all thoroughly enjoyed themselves too much to really be mad at it.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The shot where the theorist was talking behind a cup. It's jarring as you see that not only is he not actually moving his mouth, but the voice dub used to fill in his lines in that scene also sounds jarringly different from his voice in the rest of the movie.
  • Anytime somebody in the movie drinks a mug of hot cocoa, the cup very clearly has no weight inside of it.
• Strawman Has a Point: Christian is depressed that Christmas is getting too materialistic. Kirk shoots down all his points and we're supposed to take his side, but Christian's not wrong and Kirk's misinformation about Christmas just makes his brother-in-law's points even more valid.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: As the AV Club review notes, the idea of a film that analyses and reconciles the idea of how Christmas iconography has shifted and evolved and why it can still have cultural and religious value isn't necessarily a terrible one. The execution of it, however...
• Uncertain Audience: This film's jabs at common stereotypes of fundamentalist Christians (such as those who believe there's a "War on Christmas") didn't seem to win this movie any love from the atheists, while the unexpectedly pro-materialist message was a huge turnoff to Christian viewers.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Not only do most viewers tend to side with Christian's anti-materialism stance on Christmas, but many have interpreted his character as suffering from some form of depression. The fact that he's critiqued by both Kirk and his own wife for supposedly being a self-centered killjoy hits a little too close to home for people with mental illness.

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