Saturday Night at the Movies...

Saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ last night and had a few thoughts...


Things I liked...

Pilate being shown as a man who made a hard choice, and was conflicted about what he had to do to keep the political climate sturdy.

The portrayal of Peter was very well done, and I liked the scene where Jesus heals the ear that Peter cut off, how the soldier was simply awestruck by what happened was done very well.

Judas wasn't portrayed as a completely evil person, he was just weak. Somebody had to betray Jesus to fulfill the prediction, it just happened to be him.

However...

While I do agree that it does show a lot about sacrifice and devotion, I thought the Satan angle was played up a bit much...I don't really think Satan had all that much to do with the killing of Jesus, I think us humans are given the free will to be good and evil and in that particular case we chose evil. I've always though the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan in the desert was more for Jesus to understand what he could do, but to confirm to himself that he shouldn't do it the way Lucifer said. There is an interesting interpretation of this in Anne Rice's Book, Memnoch, The Devil, In which the story is told from the other side of the coin.

Lucifer, as a fallen angel, was simply jealous of God's love for man. After he was cast down, he could have argued for forgiveness but I tend to believe that he was asked to stay in Hell in order to help people's souls forgive themselves for their sins before they can ask God for forgiveness. Not your conventional Catholic belief, I guess.

Also, where was Joseph in the movie? Maybe I am missing something, but I could have sworn that Joseph was also there when Jesus died. It would have been nice to include a flashback with him as well, perhaps, showing him carpentry skills or something. I always thought he got the short end of the stick, He did help raise Jesus, so he had to have an impact on the man he became.

(I have been informed that since I posted this, that Joseph, Jesus' stepdad, was dead at this time...the Joseph I was thinking of was Joeseph of Aramatheia, who gave Jesus' his tomb to be buried in.)

Also, they never named the guy who carried the cross for Jesus, I think he is named in the Bible, but I can't remember.

(His name is Simon.)

The other interesting thing is I saw this with a good friend of mine, someone who barely believes in a god, let alone Catholic. I was curious to his reaction to the whole thing. I had to answer a lot of questions about certain points of the story and fill in a lot of the gaps for him. I wonder if they had started the movie earlier in Jesus' life instead of starting with his arrest it would have been clearer to him. I also wish they had showed more of what happened after he rose, even though I thought the last shot in the film was effective, I think there could have been more to resolve the story.

The other thing that he said which was interesting, was that if you completely remove all of the religion element from the story, this is pretty much a movie saying that torture and crucifixion is a pretty nasty way to die. I agree with him on that. There didn't seem to be much in the way of hope, and I think the flashbacks were intended to convey that, but there were not enough of them or they were not done effectively enough in some places to convey the proper message.

Overall, I did think it was worth seeing and if you can stomach the gallons and gallons of bloodiness (think Braveheart in Jerusalem), I would recommend it, but I think it probably wouldn't hurt to reread the gospel before doing so.