The Work and the Glory series by Gerald Lund was written as a historical fiction series. They are wonderful in the sense that they teach you a whole lot about the history of the church while making it entertaining to read by inserting a fictional family for you to follow. I have read the books and highly recommend them. The movies, however, got increasingly frustrating. The first movie I actually thought was very good. The second movie was a little disappointing. The third was plain out frustrating. Frustrating in the fact that it had so much potential and was almost epic, but missed the mark. The acting was great. And it was well casted. The whole Steed family was done almost exactly as I portrayed them in my mind. The problem in the movie was the script. Now I know that the books were really long and I'm not one to complain at every little detail left out, but the movie totally hashed it. It was poorly transferred from book to movie. If the movie were done exactly word for word to the book, it would've been at least a 5 or 6 hour movie, but in that situation I think its fair to at least make the movie 2 hours or 2 1/2 hours long. But no, this movie was only 90 minutes. And of that 90 minutes about half of it was a story line that was not in the book at all. That means they took a huge book and turned it into 45 or 50 minutes, thus leaving out 3/4 of the book. Thus the story line with the Steed family is only loosely followed and the historical aspect that makes the series so perfect is portrayed only half-heartedly at best. Extremely disappointing. But I'm giving this a 5 out of 10 because the acting is great. The actors do an amazing job with what they were given. And its still a touching message of family unity and brotherhood in the trying times of the early Saints. But overall, I would suggest you to read the books and skip the movies. I normally like a movie franchise based on a book series to finish the series and turn all the books into movies, but after this poorly done third movie, I am so glad that they stopped there and didn't continue to make all 9 books into movies.
