Letters to God does have a lot a going for it. It lovingly tells the story of a young boy who bounces back from brain-tumor surgery for a time and inspires friends and family with his titular prayer-letters to God; it thankfully doesn’t drag us through tragedy-of-the-week territory, instead jumping right into Tyler’s attempts to reintroduce himself to life; it features a strong and appealing central performance from Robyn Lively as Tyler’s mom, Maddy; and nowhere do you feel like the producers are trying to sneak by with second-best. Even for its target audience, though, Letters might feel a little too much like a fantasy—as if the filmmakers themselves live on film sets rather than in the real world, and can no longer tell the difference.

“Well, the rewards are greater than the risks,” says mountaineer Conrad Anker about returning to the mountains that nearly claimed his life and killed his climbing partner on Shishapangma. “I just think that there are certain people who are hard-wired in their DNA to go out and take on more risk than their fellows. Look at Homer’s Odyssey: these great tales of leaving behind the family and going off into the unknown—and great risk of death or disfigurement. And then they come home and are heralded as heroes. It goes back into when we were hunter-gatherers. The men would have to go out and do this, and it is sort of the basis of how we have created society.”