Angel Studios has the 3 star movie down at this point. The faith based studio has slowly been raising their quality of filmmaking over the past couple years, to the point where there’s definitely a relatively high floor when you watch one of their movies. Years ago, Sight would have been overly preachy messaging masquerading as a movie, but years of moviemaking practice ironed out all the really bad stuff, leading us to the film they released today. Now Angel just has to figure out how to make a masterpiece: which I think is closer to a reality than I thought possible in 2021.
Sight is about the work of Dr. Ming Wang (Terry Chen), an eye surgeon who lives in Nashville Tennessee. Ming and his partner Misha Bartnovsky (Greg Kinnear) are struggling to help little Kajal (Mia SwamiNathan), flown in from India after her stepmother blinded her eyes to help get more money street peddling in a horrifying opening sequence. Ming takes this case personally, as it keeps drawing him back to his own upbringing (younger Ming is played by Jayden Tianyi Zhang then Ben Wang) in rural China in the 1970s and 80s, where his mother (Leanne Wang) and father (Donald Heng) and best friend Lili (Sara Ye) encouraged Ming to become the educated doctor that has lead him to where he is today. Due to the severity of Kajal’s injuries, Ming has to dig deep to find a new type of solution that will help the girl and keep his medical practice at the cutting edge of optometry.
The big growth I’ve seen in Angel Studios is how it approaches its storytelling. Instead of looking to build a story around it’s big message of God and Faith, it has found stories of faithful followers of Jesus and just tells their stories, sprinkling in the faith here and there. Like Francesca Cabrini before, you’ll be completely onboard with Ming Wang: Biopic Subject by the time Sight ends. Ming’s personal story is dovetailed nicely into his present day research for Kajal, thematically tying the two of them together. You almost could have cut Wang’s entire doctor career: his immigrant tale from a harrowing upbringing could have been worth a whole movie unto itself. In a refreshing spin for a faith based movie, Ming’s educational pursuits get him out of his tough situation, using that brilliant mind of his to get into a good Chinese university, then eventually MIT and Harvard, graduating at the top of his class. Sight gives 20/20 vision with its thematic ties to the past and present, but with a story as compelling as Ming Wang and Kajal’s, you can’t help but be happy more people will get to know these amazing people.
There’s still some room for improvement though. The actors overemote a bit too much to oversell the material, which doesn’t need to be oversold. Also, the pious screenwriters need a more vain comedian to read through their scripts and rewrite their “jokes,” which are only funny ironically because they’re so bad. The present day supporting cast needs more to do as well; even Greg Kinnear has no character traits other than “married, and Ming’s devoted #2.” I wish the present day story had studied the Chinese story, because those characters are much more interesting than anyone in Nashville. I liken these issues to growing pains of a movie studio on the rise. We’re past the really big issues now, and need just a few more tweaks to make movies like Sight real quality players come awards time at some point.
That last sentence might draw a laugh or two from the major Hollywood Studios. But let me ask them this: when was the last time a studio made a bold storytelling choice like having a mass release be mostly in Chinese, or having your opening sequence be a girl getting acid poured into her eyes? There’s so much sameness to a big studio movie that films like Sight are welcome differences to the standard summer movie fare. Keep em coming, Angel: I hope that floor keeps rising, and the ceiling starts getting higher and higher.