The Passion of the Christ (Widescreen Edition) | James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci

The Passion of the Christ (Widescreen Edition) | James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci | Not Quite the Religious Experience I was Expecting ...

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The Passion of the...

	The Passion of the Christ (Widescreen Edition) James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci 20th Century Fox, 2004 average customer review:based on 1997 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Very engaging

An excellent movie. No more can really be said. I thought having to read the English subtitles would be distracting, but the fact that the original languages are spoken only lends more credibility to the storytelling. One of my favorites!

Not Quite the Religious Experience I was Expecting ...

A couple of thoughts:

First of all, the fact that the movie was in Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew drove me crazy. I really dislike subtitles, I (personally anyway) find them distracting and they tend to force me away from paying attention to other parts of a film that I like to look at.

There was no story-telling at all. Now granted, since it made money hand-over-fist, this may be a moot-point in a lot of ways. However, if you were coming from a family that wasn't particularly religious, I couldn't help but think that you'd have no idea who the characters were or what was going on.

I had heard people mention that they had thought that `Braveheart' was a warm-up for what Gibson did on TPOTC. I disagree with that on every possible level. `Braveheart' was a better film, and not by a small margin.

I had also heard mentioning of "The Media's" over-hyping the violence in the film. I didn't think this was at all overstated. If anything, it was more violent then I expected. Now, being such a fan of horror, action, and science-fiction movies, I'm the LAST person in the world to complain about a movie being violent or bloody. I do think though, that it hit a point where the brutality in the movie ceased to have a point in forwarding the story. It almost seemed to be violent, just for the hell of it. Yeah, I know, and then I get to hear the argument "Well, that was what he really went through." Well there's a difference between conveying the point that he was tortured and seeing every minute of Christ BEING tortured. I felt (in several instances) that Gibson had made his point and just continued to, visually, beat-up his audience. With a running time of over two hours, you probably very easily could have trimmed about five or ten minutes off and given your audience a little bit more of a mental break. Although admittedly, is edition of the film does make some of these scenes a little easier ...

Monica Bellucci is an OUTSTANDING Italian actress that's given virtually nothing to do.

I LOVED the scenes with Mary reflecting back on her life with Christ as a child and a young man, but there aren't NEARLY enough of them. For me, they were the only points where I felt emotionally invested in the movie. Other then that I felt like I was watching a one-legged man in an a$$-kicking contest.

I honestly didn't see where the film was anti-Semitic. I thought it was clear that the Jewish hierarchy simply felt that its authority was being usurped and that it was the actions of several individuals in power that started "the conspiracy against Christ" (for lack of a better term) and not an indictment of the ENTIRE Jewish faith. To be fair though, I'm not Jewish. I might very well feel completely different if my upbringing was that of another faith.

As far as being a "traditionalist" movie, I didn't think there was enough script to make a judgment. It didn't appear to shoot off in any bizarre directions, and I never found myself saying "Hey ... that didn't happen like that." What exactly would a "non-traditionalist" film look like?

So on the whole maybe two and a half or three stars out of five. It will certainly give people something to talk about (which in of itself probably isn't such a bad thing) but I didn't find myself the least bit moved or fulfilled on a religious level.

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Some Thoughts on Violence and Experimental Theatre

I'd like to begin my thoughts on this film by briefly discussing another film made over 20 years ago.

If anyone has ever seen the movie _My Dinner with Andre,_ he or she might recall how Andre goes on for some time about his disillusionment with the then-current state of theatre. Andre begins to talk about "experimental theatre."

Specifically, Andre reveals (to the nebbish-y Wallace Shawn) that he had considered giving a bloody, severed head to an audience so attendees could pass it around during a performance he directed.

Yes, at first doing this seems absurdly ridculous and flip, but Andre goes on to give his reasons for doing so.

Andre believed that people had become desensitized and ultimately removed from real human suffering, through viewing, in a superficial way, the many violent acts on television and in the movies. If my memory of the movie serves me well, Andre said people have become "robots," viewing "robot entertainment," eating "robot" food, etc. ...detached from real, organic "human"-ness.

And so we come to the _The Passion of the Christ._ Many reviewers say they don't like the graphic suffering in it, and that's certainly their prerogative. I don't like the graphic violence in a movie I reviewed on Amazon [_Kill Bill_].

However, it is my opinion that "body count" violence is gratuitous and tarted up to look like the sort of "art" that the Hollywood crowd loves to prattle on about at cocktail parties.

Conversely, there is evidence that the violence portrayed in _Passion_ probably DID happen. Read ancient Roman history. Bloodlust was commonplace. "Criminals" were crucified; archaelogical evidence confirms it. (e.g., try to get ahold of the book, _The Bible as History,_ and read the section on crucifixion and flagellation). Read Tacitus's _Annals_: there is a reference to Jesus Christ's crucifixion. It is not a cruci-"fiction," as some might dismissively say.

Moreover, the _Passion_ is *supposed* to evoke pathos, one of the noble aims of drama since ancient Greek theatre. And if you stay with the film, the experience should ultimately lead to catharsis. If it didn't for you, then that's a legitimate complaint.

This is not a "snuff film," as some might say. (Just because one of the cartoon characters on _South Park_ says it is, doesn't make it true.) If a lie gets told enough times, it becomes the truth. No actual murder is committed to film for the purposes of "entertainment" any more than the violence in _Schindler's List_ or _Saving Private Ryan_ is "real" here in any sense other than theatrically.

Further, I believe that dismissing _The Passion of the Christ_ as a "snuff film" is a form of denial, indicating an inability to face reality.

It's also a sign of immaturity. No one who has seen death or violence up close comes to _The Passion of the Christ_ with wide-eyed naivete.

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