YMMV / Joshua and the Promised Land

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Chris takes Joshua on a forty year nightmare of a trip that entails killing people, implies that a no sometimes means yes, dope slaps Joshua at one point, and when Joshua questions the morality of genociding a city, smooth talks him into doing it anyway. He even sounds like an oily mob hitman. The reanimators had a field day with this one.
• Angst? What Angst?: By the end of the movie, Joshua never shows any sign of being mentally scarred or fatigued, even though by this point he ought to mentally be a war veteran in his late forties or early fifties, who spent most of his life trapped in biblical times, either fighting for his life in a war or struggling to survive in a harsh desert.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The satanic presence that apparently emerges from a brick in the rubble of Jericho, and follows Joshua back to his own time. It's never explained in the slightest, it has no real bearing on the plot, and it apparently only appears to give Joshua one last bit of conflict to confirm how brave he's become.
• Cult Classic: It may be So Bad, It's Good or it may be Bile Fascination, but regardless the movie, thanks to online reviewers, has garnered a sizeable fanbase to the point that the movie got the Reanimated treatment.
• Designated Hero: Chris doesn't really come off as the helpful "Best Friend" he paints himself as. His attempt to give Joshua courage entails forty years of hardship including killing people and wandering the desert with no food, and culminates in convincing him to commit genocide with questionable justifications that even Joshua seems reluctant about. And he breaks his promise to have Joshua home before dinner.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Moses, mainly due to his memetic potential and to a lesser extent for being one of the few people in the movie that isn't a complete asshole.
  • Chris, for his interesting character potential and voice. Quite a few of the reanimator participants leaned into how creepy he is, making him into a kind of furry Bill Cipher.
• Genius Bonus: it's probably not a coincidence that Joshua is a lion, considering that the Lion of Judah is a Jewish national symbol.
• Memetic Molester: Chris has been jokingly compared to a ghostly pedophile several times by YouTube reviewers. It doesn't help that he first appears watching Joshua sleep.
  Chris: Sometimes a "no" means "maybe", I'll grant you that.
• Memetic Mutation: Moses shouting "No... NNOOOO!", thanks to Saberspark.
• Narm: Most of the movie. Examples include:
  • The hilariously flat delivery of "Pick up your stuff, Joshua".
  • When Joshua's mom annoys her husband, for a moment it seems as though he's about to commit domestic abuse as extremely Disproportionate Retribution, before he storms off in a huff.
  • Joshua free-falling, bouncing off empty air and then free-falling again.
  • Joshua shouting "I SAID I UNDERSTAND!" at Chris, in a super bratty fashion.
  • Joshua awkwardly trying (and failing) to catch quail.
  • "Joshua, I want you to pitch your tent next to mine from now on".
  • "All right everybody..." (awkwardly long pause) "Um..." (Another awkward pause) "... let's beat these guys!" Yeah, Joshua's Rousing Speech probably could've been made more inspiring.
  • The desert battle is already hard to get invested in due to the animation, but the bit where a guy uses a hammer to smack mooks into each other pushes it into hilarity.
  • Moses' "No... NOOOOO!!" when he discovers the Jews' blasphemy, which manages to be overacted and underacted at the same time.
  • Joshua remarking "They killed a baby" with a nonplussed face and an extremely ill-fitting soundtrack.
  • The sheer sight of giant angels, who look like Chris, smashing Jericho with mallets. It resembles big kids smashing up toy cities, except with hundreds of people dying.
  • Chris and Joshua's awkward, drawn-out goodbye hug.
• The Scrappy: The Narrator, for being a pitch-perfect example of Mr. Exposition who never shuts up and talks down to the audience.
• So Bad, It's Good: It's essentially an animated retelling of stories from The Bible with anthropomorphic animals rendered in eye-searingly bad animation with voice acting that rarely goes above Dull Surprise. On the other hand, the ineptitude of the animation becomes hilarious after a while, there's just enough unintentionally hilarious dialogue to prevent it from being a complete snoozefest, and there's a certain bizarre charm to it.
• Spiritual Successor: Joking referred to as one to The Prince of Egypt. Helps that the story starts where The Prince of Egypt ends — the Hebrews fleeing into the desert as Moses parts the Red Sea with the power of God while the Pharaoh is pursuing them.
• Tear Jerker: For all that the movie is narmful and not good, Moses' death scene is surprisingly, genuinely sad; it helps that he was one of the few characters in this movie that wasn't a total asshole. He loved God and he gave most of his life to the cause, and he ultimately has little to show for it, due to his and the Hebrews' disobedience. God lets him gaze one last time on the region he will never be a part of, to receive some sort of cruel closure, before he passes away of old age and passes along his duties as leader to Joshua.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Most, if not all, of the characters in this movie are assholes. Joshua's parents are mean to him and each other. Chris persuades young Joshua to come with him on a hellish journey that rips him away from his family and lasts for decades. The former slaves are total ingrates. The slavers, naturally, are cruel. Seemingly everyone else the party encounters is barbaric. Even God gets in on the dickwolfery, by giving people freedom and then utterly damning them if they displease him in the slightest (despite everything good he did, Moses never gets to see the Promised Land, because he beat a rock with a stick). Joshua's party ultimately reaches the Promised Land by seizing it and killing everyone else who previously lived there.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Let's just say that animal heads on naked, but fully humanoid bodies plus low-budget CGI make for a very poor viewing experience.
• Values Dissonance: The movie gets a bit too eager about justifying genocide against local peoples (see for example Chris' pep talk by the fire). Granted, it's based on the Bible, but there's a reason stories like this are usually not adapted.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?:
  • Joshua's parents have a fallout and it's implied that Joshua's father was going to beat Joshua's mother.
  • This movie has a lot of brutal violence, or at least references to it.
  • In a deleted scene, two of Moses' spies infiltrate the city of Jericho and make a deal with a prostitute named Rahab, with Joshua and Chris overseeing the whole affair. Considering the film's target demographic, it's easy to see why this scene never made the final cut.

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