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Rating:  -
If one can accept the distortions of Herod and Pilate, and the depiction of the masses as bloodthirsty, sinister Jews willing to go against their own tradition of never supporting the execution a Rabbi then you have a compelling film, conveying the message that the ultimate Love is sacrifice and Jesus Of Nazareth willingly endured unimaginable pain so as to overcome it and cleanse and Save the Souls of all of those who believe in Him. Was his last days as, in today's lexicon, a "hybrid" Diety-Human more of an exhibition, even to the extent of asking his Father, "Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?". As God's Son, would he have the Power to miraculously avoid the suffering? A big question for this Reviewer.
To the actual film: I think it would have worked better as a Play, even a Ballet. Has a very, staged, mechanical look to it. If Gibson really did reference Anne Emerich's writing (and possibly his own Father's insensitive comments about Jews today), then perhaps he was trying to teach or at least share with Christians *and* Jews, his personal take, albeit awkward, on the events of two thousand years ago.
"Tough Love" perhaps? The bludgeoning of the viewers senses with continuous corporeal beating of the man who represented Peace?
But good intentions cannot surmount biased historical perspective: I submit that there were enough Jewish-Christians in the supposed angry masses to suppress the desires of a small minority who didn't understand the situation as a whole and *and* their own Peaceful tradition.
Mel, "The Year Of Living Dangerously", "Lethal Weapon(s)", and "Braveheart" are your celluloid domain. Put this film on the same shelf as "Signs".
Rating:  -
I don't remember when they first started calling Good Friday, "Good Friday," or why. The Pharisees, okay, for THEM it was a good Friday, an excellent Friday, one of their favourites; but for Jesus it was not really such a good Friday, and if you have seen Mel Gibson's 5-star movie, The PASSION OF THE CHRIST, you will know exactly what I'm talking about.
(If you have not yet seen the film, but have only heard the word, "passion," then you may suspect that "the Passion" of Christ had something to do with tender feelings for Mary Magdalene, which would be a mistake: "passion" is a word that used to mean "suffering," as in the sense, "I have no control over what that Roman centurion [or that foxy lady] does to me." The second kind of passion is something that Jesus never experienced all that much.)
On 30 March, 31 CE, all Jerusalem turned out to watch Christ's Passion - all but the Twelve disciples, eleven of whom (until the dust settled) were lying low in Bethany, at Mary's Place (which was the only house around that had both a Jesus-friendly owner and plenty of beds); and the twelfth of whom (Judas Iscariot) was out shopping for real estate. The Eleven good disciples had been up late the night before. On Friday morning they were pretty tired, and somewhat drained emotionally, so they slept in (Matt. 26:56). The apostle John finally showed up, at two o'clock, but he arrived too late to carry the cross, so the soldiers made this fellow, Simon of Cyrene, a Libyan tourist, carry it instead.
Mel Gibson's film is accurate for the most part, except that the Jews get blamed for the whole fiasco; when in point of fact, the event went down pretty much as your heavenly Father planned. The sado-masochistic violence, okay, some people don't know when to quit, and Mel Gibson is one of them. Also, the Roman soldiers--like in that scene where they smashed the guy's legs as he hung on the cross next to Jesus. For some Roman soldiers, that was their favourite part of a crucifixion, when they took turns smashing the victim's shins and knees with a wooden bat, to finish him off. If those men had been born a thousand years earlier, and Jewish, they could have been Old Testament heroes. Seriously: these Roman soldiers were not just tough on crime: these guys were LAPD material.)
But as I was saying, God the Father planned the event, including the 3-hour solar blackout (which gets short shrift in Gibson's film), and the earthquake. Caiaphas, Chief Priest of the Jews, was actually pretty annoyed with Yahveh for sending the solar eclipse, because it seemed to him like Yahweh was taking sides. "First the healed ear of Malchus," said Caiaphas, "and now this!" But it wasn't like the Chief Priest could change his mind. It wasn't like he could say, "Whoops, sorry Jesus, we Jewish leaders and priests of Yahweh made a mistake! Let's get you down from up there." He couldn't do that because, for one thing, it was way too dark.
When the sun got switched back on again at 3:00 p.m., Caiaphas just shrugged his shoulders as if there were no connection between Golgotha and the solar event. So God gave him another hint. At 3:01, just as folks were getting off work, a shaker hit, a violent earthquake, about 7.2 on the Richter scale: "The ground shook, and the rocks split, and the curtain of the Temple was torn in two." Walls tumbled, roofs collapsed. Stone tombs all over the holy land snapped open like walnuts (Matt. 28:45-52).
That earthquake sent a powerful message to Caiaphas. Many favourite dishes and clay pots at the Chief Priest's mansion were destroyed; plus, a section of roof over the rear portico collapsed, and fell into the wading pool, and damaged a lovely tile-mosaic of Aphrodite on the half shell.
Unfortunately, the earthquake also sent a powerful message to Jesus. It cannot feel good to be jiggled when you are being crucified. But this was no jiggle. Eyewitnesses said that the earthquake rocked Jesus' cross like a sailboat-mast in a high wind. Then it waved the cross about like a kid with a burning brand. Worst of all, I think, was when the earthquake pounded that cross up and down like a jackhammer (Matt. 27:54).
Jesus always knew that the Crucifixion would be no picnic. He knew it would be violent. In his divine foreknowledge, he probably even knew that someone, someday, would make a graphic, sadistic movie about his suffering, to entertain a decadent Western society. But I think he also thought, at this particular moment, that a teeth-rattling, jaw-banging earthquake was a little much, a little over the top. "My God! My God!" he said, "Why have You forsaken me?" Well, he probably didn't mean to say it aloud, but it just slipped out (Matt. 27:46).
Jesus, to this very day, may harbor some feelings about that Good Friday Earthquake. Couldn't his heavenly Father have waited until they took him down first? Did Yahveh have no clue how that would feel, when His only begotten Son was bouncing up and down like that? Really, it was uncalled for. And I do think that God the Father owes Jesus an apology.
Unfortunately, Yahveh's vocabulary has never included the phrase, "I'm sorry."
- L.
Rating: -
When this film came out, I chose not to see it.
The reports about shocking violence, and about this movie being about not much more than it, persuaded me that this was just another case of Hollywood using violence to sell, as in this case sex would clearly not work.
Besides, I wondered what Gibson could have added to what I already pretty well knew.
Nevertheless, with the time I got accustomed to the idea of giving it a try, and last year I bought the DVD.
It was then that I discovered how wrong I had been.
This is a shocking, but powerful film. It made me, literally, cry like a child, but the message really hit home. No Gospel reading and no meditation had ever brought the reality, the brutal physicality of what happened in those twelve hours so vividly close to me.
One reads about suffering, and violence, and humiliation, and builds a picture of it within himself which is forcibly limited to the experiences of violence and suffering that he could himself observe, or imagine.
But this film is different. This is "being there". This is the violence of the nailing, or the unbearable brutality of the scourging, as vividly represented as I could never have imagined it myself, because of the lack of the most elementary experiential frame. Not even with my imagination had I been able to correctly understand the sheer atrocity of the events.
I discovered that I had been able to read about, to vaguely imagine, but not to really feel what does it mean to be scourged, or to be nailed to a cross.
Therefore, the violence is not useless; on the contrary, it is an indispensable instrument to the true understanding of those events, the more so because our society is, thankfully, so far away from such levels of violence. It is not a Hollywood gimmick, but a learning instrument. It is not there to awaken your worst instincts, but your best ones.
I cannot know, and it is difficult for me to judge, what effect this movie might have on a non-Christian, though I can well imagine that for some of them, this film might be life-changing.
But I feel pretty sure that the impact on sincere believers will continue to be very powerful in the decades to come.
Rating:  -
This is a good film all in all, and I've not seen it before till this year. I had heard bad things about it, that it was intenitonally anti-Semitic or that it was nothing more than a bloody Jesus snuff film, but I dediceded to watch this film just to be fair.
It is definitely views the Crucifiction from a more Catholic viewpoint, complete with extra-biblical imagery (crows eating the eye of a thief after he mocks Jesus, Mary Magdalene being equated with the sinful woman that Jesus rescues from stoning, which may or may not be nothing more than medieval stories).
Unlike alot of other movies depicting the Crucifiction, the imagery used here is horrific and shocking, but never gratuitous as in a slasher film. The banality of evil is not glossed over, just as in Gibson's other film Apocalypto. The evil is not redeemed not by cheap moralism, but by Jesus character as a figure that actually believed in what he said, in his life and in his death. Gibson's cleverly interposes pictures of Jesus teachings in with scenes of the crucifiction. A cut to less bloody times with birds chirping on a sunny, grassy hill, and Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount, with his teaching to love your enemies, is juxtaposed with Jesus bloody and dying, and praying to God to forgive his executioners because of their ignorance: the teaching has been fulfilled.
Also, I can somewhat understand the appeal of Maran devotion. Throughout the film, Mary's story is weaved with the story of Jesus to reveal the early Christian community participating in the life of Jesus and his suffering, not something in an isolated manner that they sit back and watch. After Peter's denial, he has a mental breakdown, the women-disciples try to comfort him. It is a deeply human appreciation that I don't think alot of Protestants would initially understand, the "Communion of Saints" is more than a sunday-morning soundbite in a creed.
My only critique is that it portrays Pontius Pilate as being a rather sympathetic character- at most he is a moral coward faced with two difficult choices. Honestly the biblical accounts dont' give alot of evidence either way, although historically Pontius Pilate wasn't know for being very humane. On the other hand, it doesn't gloss over the cruelty of the Romans. The Romans are portrayed as mostly savage thugs, with a few sympathetic characters. Likewise, not every Jew in the Sanhedrin is portrayed as being hopelessly wicked, although they are generally portrayed as pompous religious fanatics. King Herod is portrayed as being a demented man-child, which seems to be accurate to the biblical account as well.
Rating: -
The Passion of the Christ has got to be one of the most contraversial films I have ever seen since the beginning of my very existance on this planet!
WARNING SPOLIERS AHEAD!
It all starts out with Jesus (Jim Caviezel whom I give major credit to for playing the doomed Jesus Christ)in some garden with his followers, and while Jesus is talking with the Devil, Judas goes to the Jewish officials and turns Jesus over to them. Jesus is arrested, not long after that, his mother Mary, tells his wife Mary Magdalene that her instint senses something wrong.
Later they find out that Jesus has been arrested, and the Jews are now surrounding Jesus, they yell at him for claiming that he was the son of God or the Messiah. Then Judas starts feeling very guilty and even has the devil stocking him, the next day Judas hangs himself in shame. Also that day the Jews turn Jesus over to the Romans, and they for some stupid reason choose to relase a sadistic, ugly, cycloptic murder over the gentil handsome Jesus.
Later on, Jesus is getting the crap beat out of him, then he's whipped so many times, then he has to carry his own cross on his back. And the Roman solders are pretty drunk from what I could see. Oh and it gets much more worst from here on, while Jesus is carrying his cross on his back, the Romans are whipping him even more, and he trips. Then they order a common man to help him carry the cross. At first he refuses, but then ends up feeling sorry for him in the end, just like a lot of other people.
Then Jesus is nailed to the cross and just sits up there asking God to forgive the Jews and the Romans for killing him, and just when he thinks that God has abadoned him, he dies.
SPOLIERS END HERE
I would like to say that watching this movie has made me feel very confused inside. But there are some obvious things to point out though.
1. When it came to Jesus getting tortured, of course I felt sorry for him, regardless of weither or not he was just a common man or the Son of God. And you can see how hard it was for Mary his mother to see her son suffer, and how hard it was for her to lose him. That could be said of anyone who has ever lost a child. But let's put it to you this way, if you don't want to see Jesus Christ get tortured, then don't watch this film. When watching a typical film, I could probably only stand to see someone get torchered for a half an hour, but not two hours, espically if it's Jesus. That poor guy didn't even shout a single insult at anyone, even when everyone chose the murder to be let go over him.
2. It didn't just show Jesus getting tortured, it also showed flashbacks of him helping people and asking them to forgive and love their enemies. I'm glad that Mel Gibson did put those flashbacks in there.
3. Now for the most contraverasial point I would like to bring up. First off I don't think that anyone should just go pointing fingers at the Jews, it not only sounds anti-Semetic, but you also left out an important detail, that the Romans were the ones who ordered the execution of Jesus Christ. Think about the time that this happeend, back then if anyone claimed to be the Son of God then yes he's very likely to die, it was as risky as Joan of Arc claiming that she could talk to God. Plus don't forget that the Romans were in charge of Israel at the time this happened, and don't also forget that the Romans believed in many Gods, so they probably would have put Jesus to death anyways.
4. And not all the Jews were against Jesus either, most of his followers were Jewish, and I can only recall one of them that betrayed Jesus, that was Judas. Paul may have looked like he betrayed Jesus, but in the end Jesus forgave him, because he knew that if Paul would have backed him up, then he too would have died. And I don't think that Jesus wanted to put his followers in jepordy, otherwize, who would be left to preach Jesus's teachings? Also Mary Jesus's mother was a Jew, and his so-called wife Mary Magdalene was a Jew, so were they against him? I also saw that some of the Jews actually felt sorry for him when he was walking with his cross on his back.
5. One last important detail, Jesus was a Jew, so anyone who hates Jews probably hates Jesus too.
That's all I have to say, and with all that said and done, I have nothing else to say, except, if you want to watch a very powerful film like The Passion of the Christ then do so.
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