I didn't want to see this movie. I'd avoided it when it first came out and patently refused to watch it otherwise. Then the book included it. Damned book. But I put it pretty far down on the Netflix queue and kept moving other things up thinking I would never get through 1001 anyway so this may as well be one that I missed. Well, with the packing and moving and the post office forwarding my mail much earlier than I asked them to, I failed to pay attention to the queue and the damned thing showed up in Los Angeles to await my arrival. Yick. Joel wanted to watch it because he's working on a new movie about an exorcism and thought it might help. So we watched it.
It's terrible. Worse than terrible really. It may be the worst movie I've ever seen.
First, there is the Aramaic. Just absurd. And it's mixed in with Hebrew, Latin, and something closely resembling Italian. Just odd. And it fails to translate all of the lines. At several points, people say things and they're not subtitled. Why did the actor learn that line and say it if I don't need to know what the guy is saying?
Second, there is this strange devil type androgynous character--who IMDB tells me is a woman--who just appears all over the place, only talks the first time, had a creeeeeeeeeppy baby another time, pitches a fit in hell when Jesus dies . . . . The character is just odd and never explained or given any sort of recognition.
Third, Mary Magdalene and John are never identified by name--I managed to figure out the former while watching but just now figured out the latter with IMDB. And I have no clue who some of the other characters are. That's largely a lack in my religious knowledge, but I shouldn't have to have read any book in order to know a character's name in a movie.
Fourth, Jim Caviezel is not that good. And he creeped me out in the last supper scenes.
Fifth, it's unnecessarily violent and gruesome. I did not need to see Jesus' skin ripped from his body at all much less a few dozen times, I did not need to see the nails being hammered in, I did not need to see a crow rip an eye from another crucified man. And I covered my face for most of these scenes so I didn't even see the most violent parts--Joel exclaimed audibly several times.
Sixth, it's reductive as well as historically and scripturally inaccurate in parts. Mary Magdalene is still portrayed as a whore. And the film claims that Jesus was the one to invent the table with chairs. Right.
Seventh, I didn't care about Jesus in the film. It's horrible that a person was tortured and etc but nothing was done to make me care about the man in the film.
Eighth, it relied waaaaaay too much on its audience having an intimate (if inaccurate) knowledge of scripture--ex. not identifying characters, too little background info, etc.
Ninth, despite what anyone may say, the movie is terribly anti-Semitic. It's really terrible anti-anyone who isn't Christian (in the way that Mel Gibson and his cronies are Christian, of course).
Tenth, it played only to it's own crazy Christian wacko audience--"Hey let's celebrate how wonderful we think this guy is and how terrible everyone who doubted what we would have never doubted are and let's just have this little inside story that chastises any and everyone else"--instead of sharing a message in a, oh, let's call it "Christian" way.
Eleventh, it's even incredibly condemning of it's audience. When Jesus dies, Mary looks straight at the camera while holding her son as if to say, "see what you did."
Twelfth, it's terrible in it's "portrayal" of God/pathetic fallacy. Throughout the movie, Jesus and other characters look to the sky in a Halle Berry/Oprah ruining Their Eyes Were Watching God way. At the Crucifixion, one of the other two nailed up pledges himself to Jesus and Jesus blesses him. The other says "no way you're the son of God, you're still nailed on a cross and you're going to die"--he then promptly gets his eye pecked out by a crow (despite the fact that Jesus is the bloodier and closer to death of the three by a long shot). Then what really stuck in my craw is when Jesus is dying, the heavens start to cloud over. And, at the moment of his death, the camera suddenly shows us the scene from above, from God's supposed p.o.v, an angle from which none of the rest of the movie has been shot, and a single massive raindrop falls. Yick. Just YICK. That's right before Mary looks at you accusingly.
The movie is about 4 hours too long and it's only 2 hours 7 minutes.
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