What's all the fuss about? (The Passion of the Christ (DVD))

Member Name: l-m-n-o-p

Product:	The Passion of the Christ (DVD)
Date:	07/08/07 (91 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Powerful story, looks great

Disadvantages: Why would you want to watch that much sadistic violence?

I watched Mel Gibson’s controversial The Passion of the Christ when it was on TV on Easter Sunday (yes, I have that much of a backlog of reviews!). I’m not religious at all, but I figured this would be the most fitting time to watch it, it there is such a time.

Obviously, it tells the story of the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, from his betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, to his final crucifixion. Along the way we see flashbacks of Jesus’s life, including the last supper and his teaching on the mountain, and we follow Mary Magdalene, somebody and somebody as they follow Jesus’s torturous final moments.

That’s probably the shortest plot summary I’ve ever done, because firstly everybody knows the story already, and secondly this film is more about the experience than the story.

I must say, before I go on to talk about Mel Gibson’s sadistic violence and such, that this film is undeniably powerful. It will surely be more resonant to Christians than to non-Christians, but anybody watching this will be shocked and saddened, and probably emotionally drained, by the film. It’s made in such a way that it squeezes out all the emotion and feeing possible, and there are lots of heart-string-pulling scenes. Most notably for me was when Jesus stumbles, and Mary runs to him, and we’re shown a flashback of a similar incident when he was a child. In slow motion, and with emotional music, this is a real tear-jerker.

It’s also a very well-made and good looking film, although it feels sort of sacrilegious to look at such a religious film on a purely aesthetic level. All the costumes looked excellent, and the special effects were pretty good, whether it’s showing Satan and its demon-child thing, or indeed the bloody scenes of violence.

It is this violence which the Passion of the Christ will be most remembered for. If you’re simply looking at how gory it is, it’s pretty disgusting, and justifiably 18-rated, but no worse than you’d get in an average horror movie of the same rating. It’s the way Mel Gibson lingers over this violence, and draws it out so much, that I didn’t like. Jesus’s walk through the street with the cross on his back goes on for far too long, and watching him fall over countless times doesn’t make you feel for him any more than if he’d just fallen over a couple of times.

The film is about two hours long, and much of that running time is simply watching Jesus getting whipped, tortured and beaten to a bloody pulp, mostly shown in slow motion and leaving nothing to the imagination. Yes, it’s powerful, but it’s also unnecessary to rub it in the audience’s faces constantly. The scene where he is nailed to the cross is extremely unpleasant, mostly because there is no need to show the blood squirting out in slow motion.

There were claims that the Pope watched a special screening of this film, and said something along the lines of “it is as it was”, which caused a fair bit of uproar. I can’t help thinking that unless he was there at the time, it seems like a slightly presumptuous thing to say.

The performances are very good, especially Jim Caviezel as Jesus, although like the fact that it’s a good-looking film, this seems beside the point. The whole film is spoken in Aramaic, with subtitles at the bottom, and I think this was a very good idea since it makes it more realistic and somehow more powerful. It also makes it more pretentious and self-important, but I can forgive this.

The Passion of the Christ was exactly what I’d imagined, and I think you will already know whether or not you’ll like the film before you watch it. It’s overly brutal and extremely difficult to watch, but it does make you feel, even if that feeling is disgust rather than empathy. Any film that makes me feel this strongly is probably an achievement, and so for that reason I’d say it’s worth watching. Whether you’re Christian or not, this is a universal message of love and sacrifice, made in a striking way.

It’s a film of extremes, but the extremely good and extremely bad aspects cancel each other out, so rather than loving or hating it, I’d say it’s OK.
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The Passion of the Christ can be bought from www.hmv.co.uk for £6.99.

Directed by: Mel Gibson

Starring:

Jim Caviezel … Jesus
Maia Morgenstern … Mary
Monica Bellucci … Mary Magdalen
Christo Jivkov … John
Francesco De Vito … Peter

Classification: 18 (sequences of graphic violence)

Running time: 127 minutes

Production year: 2004

My rating: 6/10

Summary: Unforgettable, but not always in a good way