If you served your mission anywhere in or near the Bible belt in the early-aughts, you heard all about Bruce Almighty. Contacts and investigators would bring up the latest Jim Carrey vehicle to us spontaneously and unprompted just while we were out knocking doors. Although some folks found the entire premise of an everyman endowed with the literal powers of God to be heretical and distasteful, the majority of evangelicals we encountered–especially the younger ones–talked excitedly about it as this fascinating meditation on the nature of God, profound even in its irreverence, and of our relationship with our Creator.

Of course, when I finally saw the film after my mission, I quickly found it was nothing of the sort–just another 100 minutes of Jim Carrey mugging away in a simplistic morality tale and easy boob jokes. It was irreverent, but not in any particularly illuminating or inventive ways.

I suspect all that really happened to explain the hype is that evangelicals–always openly contemptuous of Hollywood while secretly envious of its cultural influence–got overly excited that a major studio film had at last acknowledged the sheer existence of God. Between Bruce Almighty and Mel Gibson’s monster-hit The Passion of the Christ the following year (another film I heard all about), many Evangelicals perhaps got briefly and overly excited that they were regaining their cultural supremacy.

However, I personally found the film frustrating–not due to any sort of irreverence, but to its lack of imagination. There is, for example, the total lack of imagination in making the supposed “Everyman” a TV celebrity news anchor (does Hollywood not even know what an “average” worker looks like anymore?); and then there’s the utter lack of imagination in having a man endowed with the literal powers of God using them to…improve his career? Give his girlfriend bigger boobs? That’s it?

If you squint, you could possibly argue that the film is criticizing protagonist Bruce Nolan’s lack of imagination too (his entire redemption arc is that he must learn to be less short-sighted and self-centered himself). But that is likely giving the film–which always lays out its moralizing overtly and obviously–entirely too much credit.

But as one essaying to be a Latter-day Saint, the most glaring lack of imagination of all is its utter failure to pull the trigger on its premise.

For if Bruce Nolan proves himself incapable at present of handling the powers of God Himself, does that not imply that eventually, in the distant eternities…he might?

I’ve discussed this before–on Pixar’s Soul and NBC’s The Good Place–and Bruce Almighty is easily the dumbest example in this pseudo-trilogy, but it’s still same fact in each: they flirt with the idea of humanity’s ultimate destiny to become “as God is now,” to grow up to become as our Heavenly Father, to become “heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ,” to continue to grow and progress throughout the eternities till we become deities ourselves–but then they balk at the finish line. And in each case, they apparently turn back from the logical conclusion of their premise not out of any sense of propriety or fear of offending religious sensibilities, but simply because the idea never honestly occurred to them.

As I’ve noted before, Joseph Smith was 3 months short of his assassination when he dared to articulate it himself, and frankly, I don’t think the idea had honestly occurred to him on his own, either. I’ve lately come to reject the idea of Joseph Smith as the Great Religious Genius, because it’s just such a cop-out–he was borderline illiterate, never learned to spell, nearly bankrupted the Church in a cockamamie “Kirtland Anti-Banking scheme,” had zero business sense (that is per Brigham Young), and when he said in Nauvoo that “I do not want anyone to think that I am a righteous man, because I am not,” he was not being modestly self-deprecating but brutally self-honest (to say the least). But I say all this not to dismiss him or his frankly impressive achievements, rather quite the opposite: this poor man, the least of God’s creatures, had help. He couldn’t have come up with these ideas, but neither could have anyone else. These are ideas that don’t occur to anyone; you can mock or deride them once you hear them, but it is the rare person who can even imagine them in the first place. They can only come by revelation.