The Passion Of The Christ
Directed by Mel Gibson
Review by Jim Eadon
2004 18/R
Lo! Behold the genesis of a brand new genre
of cinema: the Christspoitation movie is nigh!
Ozzie director and ex Mad Max savior figure
Mel Gibson obviously relishes violent executions,
(hang/drawn/quartering high jinxes in braveheart
for example) and is merciless in his treatment
of the holy protagonist of
The passion
Of The Christ. What terrible sins
did the putative Son Of God commit to deserve
such a bloodthirsty humiliation-by-movie at
the hands of Gibbo? Yes Mel,
MAKE HIM
SUFFER!!!
Before we deal with Jesus Christ, let's discuss
the already-imfamous treatment of our friends
the Jews in
The Passion Of The Christ.
Most of the rabbis are snarling,
dog in
the manger sadists in this movie. Naturally
a fair few Jews are up in arms about this rather
unpicturesque portrait of their ancestors. Is
this accusation of antisemitism just? Now the Jews have produced some wonderful
classical music and science to name but a couple
of their cultural and intellectual triumphs.
However it must be noted that the Jews founded
and control Hollywood and have a habit of portraying
blue-eyed Germans as evil/stupid (revenge for
the injustices of WW2?). Yet more frequently,
the Hollywood Jews portray their saviours in
WW2, the Brits, as the bad guys too. Most Hollywood
villains have English accents. The American
Jews excel themselves at painting caucasian
Europeans in a rather bad light, so it seems
rather hypocritical of some of them to howl
with such anguish when they taste their own
medicine dished out by a catholic Aussie.
In case I am mistaken for an apologist for the
ugly terrorist antics of the current enemies
of the Jews - the Palestinians/arabs - I hasten
to point out that of all religions, Islam is
the one behind the most wars; terrorism; brutal
and educationally backwards societies; and the
majority of the most authoritarian and evil
governments in modern times (and that's saying
something). Forget multiculturalism, the world
would be a safer place without religion in general
and Islam in particular. It is only fair to
point out that in medieval times Christianity
was responsible for the same ugly species of
atrocities as Islam is today. Even today, in
their ignorance some Christians, Jews and most
Muslims still mindlessly deny the scientific
fact of evolution, which says a lot about the
ability of the human mind to be made irrational
by the worship of gods and the propaganda of
scientifically illiterate priests, rabbis and
mullahs.
Back to Gibson, the director of
The Passion Of Christ himself has not only portrayed Jewish religious
leaders as sadistic idiots but the limeys too emerge badly from his distorted lens.
Gibson has consistently portrayed the English as
brutes in several of his own
daft, unhelpful movie propagandist rewrites of history, and Hollywood
cheerfully produced these pieces of propaganda with its own love of cash and dodgy
agendas in mind. And so the world gets its "history lessons".
Interesting too is that Hollywood execs dismissed
The Passion Of The Christ as a Gibson ego project (Gibson funded the movie himself), which is
probably true, but, to the amazement of the Hollywood
execs, the movie has made hundreds of millions already. God vs Mammon, who wins?
So it's a bit of a shame that the backdrop of these juicy
political shenanigans is more intriguing than the movie
that inducted them. With the wacky material of the gospels to play with,
it was hard for
The Passion Of The Christ
not to be effective dramatically,
but unfortunately the saga is geared towards cheap kicks rather than spiritual insight.
That's not to say this
The Passion
Of The Christ is a bad, the film
executes many of its scenes and themes with
aplomb. To have the characters speak in ancient
languages, chiefly Aramaic and Latin was wise.
That stratagem infused the movie with an air
of awe that would have been trivialised by modern
accents. (The Aramaic was dodgy, the Latin not
so bad, apparently). However the dialogue itself
was rather crude and uninspiring, but then again
Biblical dialogue itself is a literary dud.
Jesus was one of the most boring famous speakers
that ever existed.
If he existed. And
I am being unfair again, for even
if
the historic Jesus
did exist (the evidence
for this is Christian propaganda rather than
archaeological fact) we certainly do not know
what he really said.
The most noteworthy aspect of
The
Passion Of The Christ is the relentlessness
of the torture scenes, not just the crucifixion,
but the beatings leading up to it.
Hit me, hit me HIT MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Amen.
This indulgence
backfired, for the effect of diminishing returns
kicked in: agony fatigue.
Spoilers
ahead, but you know probably know the story
anyway. Any human would have been dead, or at
the least barely able to function on any level
having received such body-breaking thrashings
from the Roman guards. Would he have been able
to haul a hefty wooden load even part way up
a steep hill in the blazing sun under ongoing
lashings? So the mind begins to speculate. Christ
wasn't really human, was he, maybe he could
have endured the savaging with a supernatural
stiff upper lip? Yet he still expired (even
if temporarily) from being nailed to a cross!
Did he have a super human ability to withstand
damage or didn't he? The extremity of the punishments
lessened their own impact by being implausible.
We ended up not in a world of pain, but of cartoon
movie violence.
Nevertheless
The Passion Of The
Christ is rather distasteful and
voyeuristic. There seemed to be more than a
note of perversion to the doting of the camera
on all the viscous cruelty. It's a bit much,
perhaps, to surmise the rummy director indulged
in some kind of Catholic guilt-driven latent
homosexual sadist fantasy, but such thoughts
do spring merrily to mind when wincing at the
loving portrayal of violence in
The
Passion Of The Christ.
Finally, caution is required when watching this
movie. It is just a movie, albeit one adapted
from The Gospels fairly literally in places.
The Gospels are
not regarded by most
non-theologian scholars as reliable historical
documents, being largely allegorical; derivative
of earlier myths; written non-contemporaneously
with the putative events they describe; and
being creeds rather than objective representations
of reality. So
The Passion Of The
Christ is doubtless one of fiction
rather than truth (or
veritas, as Pontius
Pilate would know it). This supposition is infinitely
magnified by the total bullshit in Gibson-directed
movies passim that
are supposedly based
on historical events we *do* know a lot about.
I suppose being an atheist doesn't help, but
I failed to find much of spiritual value in
this movie, not even compared to other movies,
or other media for that matter. When
I hear Bach's "St Matthew's Passion" I am deeply
moved, it is an uplifting experience. To use
a tortured analogy,
The Passion
Of The Christ is more like a pop
song in comparison, albeit an album of
pop rock crammed with screaming and hideously
distorted guitars, shallow but exciting in places.
The thing that struck me the most about this
movie is that it tries to dump the blame squarely
upon our collective shoulders. There is one
simple question about the idea of Christ paying
for our sins that has always troubled me. Why
doesn't God
Himself take responsibility?
I mean, as an adult (in a loose sense of that
word), if I create a mess, I accept responsibility
and sort it out, I clean up the chaos or pay
someone else to do so. So, in Christianity and
its ilk we have a God that creates everything,
the Universe, Earth and humans etc and sees
that the whole thing has gone pear shaped. OK,
so mankind is in the soup. So what does our
God do? Instead of sorting it all out, he sends
his son to be nailed to a cross and makes everyone
feel guilty about it. Hey, says God, its YOUR
fault! That would be like me giving a toddler
a model of the Eiffel Tower made of match sticks
to play with, telling the toddler not to break
it, watching until the child eventually breaks
the model, then nailing myself to a door as
a tactic to stop the child doing it again by
informing the alarmed creature that my pain
is all
his fault. It may be just me,
but popular religions really do seem that
insane.
In in many cases more so.
All in all, The Passion is a slice of shameless
Christspoitation. I imagine that if Jesus Christ
of Nazareth were a real bloke, he would be rather
embarrassed by
The Passion Of The
Christ.
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spoilers corner
Spoilers!!!!
Warning: this box contains a movie post-mortem analysis that freely gives away
important plot twists and details. If you have not yet seen this movie and intend
seeing it, avoid this spoilers box until afterwards. Bookmark the page, see the
movie, see if you agree with my review then write an arsy comment saying I am talking total b*ll*cks :-)
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Strange how Christ says he forgives
all, yet he was pretty ungenerous to poor Judas,
- he mocked his betrayer in a most un-Christian
fashion. Very peculiar.
Christ exchanges
some prosaic banter with his criminal
companions, one of whom proclaims that, unlike Christ, he deserves
his fate on the cross as rightful punishment for his criminal activities. Er, yeah, that came over
as very naturalistic dialogue from a tormented villain. The other gets his eyes pecked out by
a crow as punishment for mocking our mate Jesus. Love thine enemies?! What opiates are these filmmakers smoking?
Incidentally, I am curious as to
why the sadistic guards scared the crow away, is this a reference to a biblical passage or some kind of parable?
It was a decent crucifixion scene, but
Monty Python did it better.
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There are no more spoilers below this
point, except maybe in any user talkback
comments.
End of spoilers corner
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More God: For Eadon's satirical blasphemy, see
cartoons.
For Eadon's religion articles and other links,
see the bottom of this page:
Religion
Links
A song, Life Of Brian style! "...when you're
chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble - give a whistle"
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