CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of The Passion of the Christ

Saturday, December 16, 2006

this entry brought to you by kaiser chiefs, "i predict a riot"

yes, i'm aware this is a two year old movie, and i'm aware that any of you who wanted to see if have probably already seen it, and the rest couldn't care less. but when i sat down to write this for a polarity review, turns out i had a lot to say, so a full review it gets.





I went into The Passion of the Christ with hesitance. For one, it had been well publicized that the movie depicts Jesus' flogging clocking in at over twelve minutes of gory brutality, and I thought that seemed unnecessary. For another, I was worried about the reports that the movie was anti-Semitic, as was also much publicized at the time of the movie's release (Mel Gibson's drunken, anti-Semitic tirade two years after the movie's released didn't exactly help matters). I'm not Jewish, but I had no interest in watching a movie that empowered one person's religion while disparaging another. Then there was the fact that the zealous moviegoers of the country feverishly enjoyed the movie almost to fetishism. The Pope himself was quoted after seeing the movie as saying, "It is as it was." Well, fine praise indeed, but to a person who is virulently anti-religious, this is the kind of thing that makes someone like me question whether it can possibly live up to that. People were reacting to this movie as if it were the gospel itself, and while that's not necessarily the movie's fault, a movie's hype can definitely turn a person off.

Although I am personally very anti-religious, I find the story of Christ, from a historical as well as a mythological point of view, fascinating (similarly, I don't believe in the ancient Greek gods, but the mythology is still as interesting as it is entertaining). I've seen several movies about Christ, among them Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, which was not perfect, but was really thought provoking and overall a great film. I mention this because I want to establish that my views on religion itself didn't affect what I thought of the movie. In fact, though I think I could see how someone could interpret it that way, I didn't find Mel Gibson's interpretation of Jesus Christ's crucifixion anti-Semitic at all. Furthermore, about an hour into the movie, after Jesus' horrifically detailed flogging, I was still willing to say that The Passion of the Christ was a good movie. It's grippingly well directed, and while most characters (including Christ himself) aren't given any depth in terms of the script, all of the actors dig deep and come up with intense, believable performances, particularly Maia Morgenstern as Mary, whose caring, horrified eyes could only belong to a mother.

I did have little problems from the get-go. For a movie so exhaustively researched Jesus is beat down to the very amount of strikes the Romans would've used for any prisoner, one would think that it would be as realistic in all other aspects as possible, but it isn't. It is filled with unnecessary artistic flourishes, such as Jesus being repeatedly haunted by a taunting devil, and Judas being chased out of town by child-like demons. Casting is still questionable, as Gibson falls victim to casting Italians as Jews like many a director before him. The movie even makes notable departures from the gospels themselves to fit Gibson's vision of Christ. Ultimately these aren't so much of a fault of the movie as it is a fault of the hype-- for being so exhaustively researched, The Passion turns out to be as much one man's interpretation of Christ as, say The Last Temptation, and there really isn't anything wrong with that. Still, so much for "it is as it was."

The Passion of the Christ does seem to lose all sense of meaning after Jesus' flogging, though. Up until that point, even watching a man's flesh being ripped off in chunks as barbed rope tears into his flesh, it all made sense. Here we had a man on his knees in pain, and right when the torturers are about to relent, Jesus, seeing his mother's eyes, knows that this is something he must do, and stands back up on his feet for another round of inhuman suffering. It was gruesome, but it had a meaning. But post flogging, Gibson doesn't stop. Jesus is forced to carry his cross to the place of his crucifixion, and is relentlessly beaten along the way. Jesus takes a spill and falls on the ground in gut-wrenching slow motion. Then he gets up, walks for a few more minutes while being beaten into oblivion, and then falls to the ground in slow motion again. This repeats several times. Again and again. Then, once he's strapped to the cross, one soldier chastises another that he's doing it wrong, and drops Jesus, strapped to the cross, into the dirt face first. Then repeats it on his back. This sort of bizarre, sadistic action goes on and on and on and completely replaces any sort of story, any sort of acting, any sort of legitimacy as a movie.

Imagine if you were watching Schindler's List, and about twelve minutes in, a Jew gets his head shot off. Then a crowd of Jews is taken into the ovens and burned to death. Then some Jews were raped. Then some blown up. Then some starved to death. Then some used for medical experiments. And imagine this kept on for two grueling hours without any deviation, without Oscar Schindler ever making his infamous list. Or imagine you were watching Saving Private Ryan, and once the boats hit shore, soldiers were exploded, shot up, limbs were blown off-- and that continued throughout the duration of the movie, without Captain Miller ever making it off the beach, finding Ryan, and telling him he needs to earn his way back home. The message of either of these movies would still be resoundingly clear, that war sucks, but after a while, you'd begin to wonder why exactly you were watching such a movie. This is The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson seems to have misunderstood the definition of the term "Passion" and has decided it must mean "Torture". We see one man mutilated and tortured for so long any sort of meaning the movie might have had at any point other than that Jesus probably suffered a lot is completely lost. Worse, the redemption of Christ's pain and suffering, his subsequent resurrection and ascension to heaven, which most would agree is the entire point of the religion, is treated as a tacked on, one-minute afterthought at the very end of the movie; it is so brief and treated so insignificantly it may as well have been shown after the ending credits.

As an interpretation of strictly the crucifixion of Jesus the Christ, what is here is very well done. The sets are gorgeous, the acting is completely believably despite the limited motivation of the characters (Jesus' entire role seems to alternate between being passive aggressive when questioned, to being in ungodly amounts of pain; everyone else's motivation is to be horrified at what is going on), and the directing is so intense the movie honestly should've been called The Passion of Mel Gibson, because while Christ never shows so much as a hint of passion, only god forsaken pain, it is obvious this was a project of passion for its director, whatever the meaning of the movie for him was supposed to be. What makes The Passion of the Christ a bad movie is that the concept is thematically flawed. It's as if the movie starts off in the middle of one chapter-- just after Judas has tipped off the high priests of Jesus's whereabouts-- and ends in the middle of another chapter-- Jesus is crucified, but is interrupted before ascending to heaven. This isn't good entertainment, it has absolutely no deeper message beyond "Look how much pain Jesus potentially went through", and it's not even good as religious validation. The Last Temptation of Christ, for as much controversy as it got was much better at displaying Christ's passion and at actually having a message. In that movie, the devil tempts Christ with a vision of a genuinely good life, one where he doesn't have to be responsible for the sins of all mankind, one where he can live the happy, simple life of a carpenter, complete with a loving family. But Christ decides that he can't do that, he must do what he was put here on Earth to do, he must be the Messiah. The concept that Jesus would give up a normal life to be what he must be is one of the most thought provoking, not to mention uplifting interpretations of Jesus ever seen in film; that is passion. Gibson's movie, though, if you remove Christ out of the picture, is merely sadistic; an utterly unreasonable experience for any viewer to go through, and almost entirely ignores his resurrection-- a mere five more minutes of the movie, showing Christ going to his apostles to reassert his message and break bread (which is how the story rightfully ends in the bible) would have entirely redeemed Passion, and made its namesake much less of a joke. Without such an ending, it's difficult to understand exactly who this movie is supposed to be for-- why people would clamor for it en masse is even more of a mystery.
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with love from CRS @ 11:10 PM 

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